The latest episode of The Geek in Review finds Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer back from Dallas with a sharp, grounded recap of the Texas Trailblazers conference, an event that stayed close to the daily realities of legal work instead of drifting into glossy predictions. Their conversation centers on a legal industry trying to sort out what AI means right now, in billing, workflow, training, pricing, governance, and client expectations. What stands out most is the hosts’ focus on the practical tension between what the tools are capable of and what law firms and legal departments are structurally ready to absorb.
A major thread in the discussion is the risk of what one speaker called “cognitive surrender,” the habit of trusting AI output too quickly and handing off too much human judgment in the process. Greg and Marlene treat this as less of a software issue and more of a workflow and education issue. The point is not whether AI produces polished work. The point is whether organizations are building systems where review, judgment, and accountability still sit with people. Their conversation ties this concern to legal practice, education, and even K-12 learning, showing how widespread the temptation has become to accept fluent output without enough friction or scrutiny.
The episode also takes a hard look at the pressure AI is putting on the billable hour. Marlene frames the issue well when she notes that AI does not kill the billable hour so much as expose its weaknesses. Across the conference, the hosts heard repeated concern about the mismatch between efficiency gains and the financial structures law firms still rely on. If AI reduces the time needed for many tasks, then firms, associates, pricing teams, and clients all have new incentives to sort through. Greg and Marlene highlight the awkward moment the industry is in, where firms want to talk about value while clients are also eyeing the chance to pay less for faster work. The result is a growing need for honest conversations about pricing, outcomes, and what legal value should mean when time is no longer the cleanest measure.
What gives the episode its energy is the number of concrete examples pulled from the conference. The hosts discuss lower-cost multi-state surveys, large-scale analysis of rights-of-way documents, and internal workflow improvements built with existing tools like SharePoint and Copilot on little or no budget. These stories show AI not as abstract promise, but as a way to get work done that used to be too expensive, too tedious, or too slow to tackle at all. At the same time, Greg and Marlene stay skeptical in the right places, especially when the conversation turns to legal research, citation accuracy, and the idea that technology vendors have somehow solved problems that law librarians and researchers know are stubbornly difficult.
By the end of the episode, the biggest takeaway is not that the legal industry has a clear answer, but that waiting for certainty is no longer a serious option. Greg and Marlene come away from Texas Trailblazers with a sense that real progress is happening through testing, discussion, and repeated adjustment, not through perfect plans. Their recap captures an industry in transition, one where law firms, legal ops teams, vendors, and clients are all feeling the strain between old business models and new technical possibilities. The message is simple and urgent: start the conversations now, use the tools now, and get honest about what must change before the gap between what is possible and what is workable gets even wider.
Listen on mobile platforms: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Substack
[Special Thanks to Legal Technology Hub for their sponsoring this episode.]
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript:
Marlene Gebauer (00:00)
Hi, I’m Marlene Gebauer from The Geek in Review and I have Nikki Shaver for Legal Technology Hub here. And Nikki, you’re going to tell us a little bit about some events ⁓ in London, right?
Nikki (00:10)
That’s exactly right. So all of your many listeners, I’m sure Marlene and Greg in London town have a delight coming to them. We are bringing our LTH Velocity and Horizons conferences over the pond. We held our flagship Horizons event there last year as well, and it was really successful and sold out. And we’re bringing that one back and also adding in Velocity, which is our conference for vendors. This, as you know, is a time when people are still learning
And there’s so much happening every single day. It seems like there’s a lot to figure out. And that’s as much on the vendor side as it is on the law firm side. Often vendors don’t really have a sense of community. There are not events that cater specifically for vendors, but Velocity is exactly that. It is an event for any legal tech vendor to enable them to come along for free to a day of very high quality content put on by Legal Tech Hub
and a range of speakers from the London region talking about things like how to prepare your company for exit, ⁓ hearing from investors on what they’re looking for in the market, what the impact was of the anthropic entry or perceived market entry on the legal market, and what buyers want to see from vendors, how you can sell better to law firms. So highly recommend that one. And the following day on April 24th, we are having
our Horizons event, is an event for predominantly by side law firms and corporate legal departments on all of the major topics that are of particular interest for us today around things like increasing complexity around agentic systems and orchestration layers and how to handle again the anthropic market entry and what that might mean and whether vibe coding is actually the future of legal AI. So we are really excited again, those dates.
dates are April 23rd for Velocity, April 24th for Horizons. We welcome anyone who lives in and about London, but also anyone visiting in the area. is still time to sign up. Velocity is free. Horizons is kept deliberately low because we really want to have these high quality discussions and we’d love for you to be able to bring your team. So go to legaltechnologyhub.com, drop down on our top menu for events.
take you to the LTH events page and you can find out more and sign up for our events there. Thanks Marlene.
Marlene Gebauer (02:47)
welcome. That sounds like a great couple of events.
Nikki (02:50)
should be.
Marlene Gebauer (03:01)
and review the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal profession. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
Greg Lambert (03:07)
And I’m Greg Lambert and this week Marlene and I got back from Dallas and we wanted to do a kind of a recap on an event organized by Cosmonauts and LegalOps.com. Joy Heathrush from ILTA chaired day one and it really focused mostly on private practice and then Connie Brinton came in on day two from LegalOps.com and talked about the in-house community.
Marlene Gebauer (03:35)
And I mean, I feel this conference stood out, ⁓ Texas trailblazers because, know, it stayed really close to the work. So you didn’t have a lot of, know, future gazing and, and, know, what’s next. It was more about sort of the day to day soup of legal practice, you know, where AI is actually helping and, and, you where the economics are being impacted.
Greg Lambert (03:55)
Yeah. it’s, ⁓ it’s hard enough right now just to figure out where we are now without having to go, well, where are we going to be in six to 12 months? So I thought, I thought it was really good to kind of focus in on, where we are. And, ⁓ you know, day one with the, with the law firm focus, it kicked off with a, well, one, ⁓ Joy Heath Russia, ⁓ talked about.
Marlene Gebauer (04:02)
you
Greg Lambert (04:21)
where she was seeing the industry currently. And then Ron McNamee from Mary Technology introduced us to the term which I’ve seen floating around now called cognitive surrender.
Marlene Gebauer (04:34)
not to be confused
with cheap tricks, cheap tricks surrender. That’s a whole different surrender.
Greg Lambert (04:37)
Yeah, that’s a whole different cognitive surrender
song there. But it’s basically where you are over trusting the AI and you’re offloading that cognitive load to the AI. And I know that we talk about, well, just review what the AI puts out, but…
you know, if everyone’s being honest with themselves, there’s a lot of times where we just kind of take what the AI hands us and say, ⁓ that looks great. So I like that. Let’s talk about that. Marlene, do you see, looking back at that keynote, that it’s not so much the firms have a technology problem as much as we’ve got a workflow design problem that
Marlene Gebauer (05:03)
You
Greg Lambert (05:22)
kind of makes the attorneys and others not offload that work completely to the AI.
Marlene Gebauer (05:32)
Exactly. Like this is exactly where we talk about, you know, making sure there’s a human in the loop and sort of building that in to, know, any type of workflow or review that, know, is happening using, using AI. Cause again, it’s, you know, it sounds so good. It’s just really easy to just kind of say, yeah, you know, just, just, just use it. But, I think the, the smart organizations, you know, are basically incorporating this kind of education.
into their education programs for people who are using this. They incorporate it into their governance plans that there is always human review. Everything is AI assisted, not AI done completely. People just sort of build in and even bring in the people who are responsible to say, if you’re building a workflow, where does this make sense? Where will…
Where is there their need for human review at which points of this, you know, of this action and just making sure that that everybody who does that is aware of it.
Greg Lambert (06:31)
Yeah, I was talking about this with my ⁓ wife on the way in to work, and she’s an elementary school librarian. And she kind of had that thousand yard stare in her eye. And I was like, well, what’s going on? She’s like, my god, we’re having the same problem with teaching the children not to completely rely upon the.
the AI and it’s really changing the way that we’re educating. I I always tease to her that, you know, there’s a lot of similarities between law firm lawyers and elementary and middle school children. But I think this is something that, you know, as we’re developing the systems,
that we have to be careful that it doesn’t look like we’re just giving them the answer and that’s gonna be really, really hard to do, especially as the tools get better and better.
Marlene Gebauer (07:21)
It’s a, it’s, it’s a lift. It’s, it’s not,
it’s not a complete, you know, solution. ⁓ you know, it helps a little bit, but it’s not the, the, the end solution. And I think there’s also a, a similarity, just, you know, the population in general and, and you know, what, you know, what you’re saying is that you have some folks that are just like, no, no, no, like, I don’t want to use this. I don’t trust it. And then you have other people who are just sort of jumping into the deep end of the pool before learning how to swim. ⁓ you know, I know like.
You know, my son is, and one son is in high school and he is, it’s, it’s quite interesting conversations at home because he is adamant like it should not be used. And I’m like, this is my job, man. So, yeah, I think that, that there’s a lot of kind of similarities across the board and what they were talking about.
Greg Lambert (08:08)
Yeah, yeah, well, we thought, you know, filing hallucinated cases was a problem. I think that we’ve got other problems that are coming down the All right, well, the.
Marlene Gebauer (08:14)
Over 800 now. Over 100 in the US now. Every day.
Greg Lambert (08:20)
Another panel which had Kelly Lugo from BCLP and and then there was another one with Chad Barton from Holland and night and we you know, kind of mentioned the Associate problem and this incentives of using the AI and whether or not, you know things things are really inverted And so on the there was an automation in action panel
where they’re asking, firms really finally kind of getting honest about how partner compensation and associated billing targets either accelerate or kill AI adoption? it’s an honest, I thought it was a great conversation that everyone was having about how do you convince an associate that they need to learn the AI?
if you’re also hearing things about, the associate, this can take 50 % of the associate’s work away, what’s the incentive for them to do this?
Marlene Gebauer (09:26)
Yeah, it’s funny. It’s like one of the things I said on the panel I was on was like, know, AI doesn’t kill the billable hour, but it does expose its limits. And I think this is, this is one of those, those times. I think we’re, really kind of at a, a crossroads where the smart firms are really going to have to start looking closely at, you know, where AI is impacting and, know, get with their pricing teams and.
figure out how they’re going to do this because, you know, again, you know, AI is, is, something that makes you efficient and you know, the billable hour is, you know, it’s, it’s kind of in direct opposition to the billable hour. so, you know, while there may remain things that make sense, you know, for hourly billing, you know, the smart firms really have to start looking at this and pricing and talking to their clients about, you know,
what’s valuable, what’s value worth, because, know, other, otherwise, you you, you come up against this type of brick wall that we’ve, we’ve had for, many years where any type, anything that’s making, um, work efficient, you know, nobody wants to, know, no one wants to adopt it because it’s just going to, you know, hurt their pocketbook in the end. And I mean, things like, oh, sorry, things like innovation, you know, innovation hours and things are great and they count, but you know,
Greg Lambert (10:44)
Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (10:53)
In the end, know, you’re still, you’re still kind of at, you know, at odds.
Greg Lambert (10:58)
Yeah, the one thing that I heard on both days was a reference to the, hopefully I say this right, the Javits paradox where it talked about the more efficient and cheaper something gets.
that actually the more people use it, and I think people are looking at legal services this way that if, there’s a lot of pent up demand that I think clients would love for law firms to do more work for them, but the cost and time is prohibitive. if you can get the.
know, cost and time down, does that kick in the Javits paradox to say there would just be more demand? And I think the thing that even if that happens, I think the idea that we really start needing or thought process that we need to start doing is, okay, well, how do we deal with that? Because right now I actually had someone ask me, you know, was like, are you…
looking at reducing the number of associates that you hire over the next few years. and so I don’t, obviously I think the industry’s gonna change. think the ability to just purely build by time and set your value by time is obviously gonna change. I just don’t know that law firms are making a serious thought
Marlene Gebauer (12:05)
Yeah, that was a question that was put out there. Yeah.
Greg Lambert (12:28)
about what does that really mean and how do we kind of prepare ourselves for what’s coming.
Marlene Gebauer (12:36)
And I think it needs to be quick. mean, what, you know, what we were hearing like this, this needs to be quick. ⁓ there wasn’t really discussion about like what type of work we’re going to sort of bring back in in-house, but you know, I know those conversations are happening and I know, you know, in-house groups are looking at tools that they can take some of this work back in. So, you know, firms are, are
really poised, think it’s like, it’s, it’s a really important moment right now for firms to really kind of jump on this and be able to sort of sell the fact that, you know, we’ve invested in all of these things and we can do these things for you. and, and sort of take the load off of you.
Greg Lambert (13:22)
Yeah, yeah, and kind of in that same vein, Kyle Poe from Legora, he gave both a standalone presentation and he was on the panel with me. And he talked about this, you know, that the conversation in 2026 going forward is, you know, shifts from
how fast is this tool, how fast can it get me to an answer to the question of, okay, now how do we price this new value that we’re setting up? And it’s definitely a very difficult question that law firms and pricing professionals in in-house are having to face. Because Kyle, the same, I think in the same,
instance also talked about, well, law firms now would love to go to flat fee rates that work for them so that we can really kind of focus in on the efficiency. And now he’s hearing clients saying, whoa, if it’s going to be less hours, maybe I just want to pay by the hour and I just pay you less. it’s interesting to see where
These two competing factors are going to meet in the next couple of years.
Marlene Gebauer (14:41)
Yeah, a couple things like, mean, he’s saying how fast is, know, moving from how fast is the tool to how do we price the new value? So, you know, we’re moving, you know, it’s clearly we’re starting to move from like, you know, how, how do we experiment with this thing? How does it work to, okay, you know, what, how is it truly impacting work and how is it impacting the price of work? The other question is,
And it kind of goes to his point about, maybe we’ll just, you know, pay hourly and just pay less hourly. But, you know, one of the things that came up was, was that the value is still there. It’s just the time that’s spent is less. So how do we figure out what value actually means? And, you know, is it just the time spent? Is it the outcome?
Greg Lambert (15:23)
Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (15:33)
You know, is it the fact that, that, you know, you, you know, you get insights faster, you resolve things faster and, know, everyone gets, everyone gets back to normal work. you know, all of those things have a price point. So, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s an opportune time, I think for, for clients and firms to really, it’s really talk about it, like have an honest conversation about it, you know,
You know, no more, no more like Arlene discount. Let’s, let’s, let’s really talk about like, what is important to you? You know, what do we need? yeah.
Greg Lambert (16:05)
Well, it was interesting because we moved from day one focused on the way law firms are viewing this. And then we moved to day two. And I will say one thing that was talked about a lot and I think Joy mentioned this on day one and I think it was mentioned as well on day two with Connie.
was that there’s a lot of power in the hands of the in-house lawyers and general counsel of the clients. And it wasn’t until I was reviewing my notes and drafting the recap on the Substack page that I realized there were a lot of…
There were not a lot of in-house attorneys that showed up for day two. It was a large crowd, but there were lots of legal ops people. I think there were still a number of law firm people that were there, but at least on the panels and the discussion that was coming from the stage.
It was a noticeable absence of the in-house attorneys on day two. And so you’ve got this belief that ⁓ there’s a lot of power in the hands of the people and they weren’t there. It was kind of weird.
Marlene Gebauer (17:28)
You know, I hear mixed things and it’s like, you know, I hear like, Oh, know, clients are, you know, very far ahead in this area. And then I hear clients are not far ahead in this area. So I think it would have been really, really helpful to me to be able to sort of talk to some of these people and be like, Hey, you know, so where are you guys in your journey? Um, and, know, get some, some, you know, actual feedback on that.
Greg Lambert (17:53)
Yeah, well, if you are an in-house attorney and you’re listening to this, yeah, come to the table. Come on. People are begging to hear from you. They want, really want direction. So it was good to see Connie on day two, kick things off, and she had a really good opening.
Marlene Gebauer (17:59)
Come talk to us. We want to hear from you.
You really are.
Greg Lambert (18:21)
discussion where she really kind of did put the impetus on, you know, it is time for people to stop talking and time for some real transformations to go. And it kicked off John LeBare, who’s general counsel at Harvey, and he had an interesting talk. He also brought up the Jeavitt’s paradox and kind of where Harvey
you know, where Harvey is and how he’s using AI tools in his day to day. Now there was something and to his credit, he did say he was going to test this out on a non Silicon Valley audience. And I for one, I didn’t get a chance because he immediately took off back to California after his talk, but he compared
⁓ lawyers to software engineers. And ⁓ he said he did want to see how this went over with this group. So John, hopefully you’re listening ⁓ and let me give you my opinion. And I thought, and I talked with Joy Heathrush afterwards as well, and she did too that he got.
to the point, but the way that he got to the point didn’t really land. that was, exactly. So he was saying that essentially that lawyers and computer software engineers essentially do the same type of work. They get to an output.
Marlene Gebauer (19:43)
Agreed with the end result, but didn’t agree with the analysis. Yes.
Greg Lambert (20:05)
⁓ and, you know, and, and I really kind of thought it was a good try, but the, the outputs that computer engineers have and the outputs that lawyers have, one can be independently validated for ⁓ correctness. Software code either works or it doesn’t work. Whereas, yeah, it’s a product.
Marlene Gebauer (20:12)
tell lawyers that.
It’s a product. ⁓ You’re
making something work or not work.
Greg Lambert (20:31)
Yeah. so, I thought, because I know what he was doing and you hear this a lot and it almost doesn’t matter what industry is that AI has solved for computer code. That seems to be an admission in the industry that you hear it from Anthropic that their coders don’t even look at the code anymore.
They look at the results and the results work, then there’s no need to edit the code. And so with engineers, they’re getting to this point now where their jobs have shifted more from the writing of the code to more the coordination of the events that are going on and making sure that everyone is on.
on track for what it is that they need to accomplish. And so the engineers’ jobs have changed. And it’s really interesting because product managers now see themselves almost as quasi-engineers and engineers now see themselves as quasi-product managers. there’s this kind of what I’ve heard, you hear T-shaped lawyer, right? Where you’re broad across the board on multiple skills and then you could dive deep.
you know, in one skill. And I’ve heard it, you know, the kind of sideways E or F where, you you’re still broad in multiple areas and then you’re like deep in one or two or three areas. And that’s going to be kind of the new normal. And I think that part is going to transfer over to legal as well to where, yeah, you can be really a really good
Marlene Gebauer (21:45)
to the legal analysis,
There’s the T, there’s the D, yeah.
Greg Lambert (22:12)
a corporate lawyer, but you’re also gonna have to be knowledgeable in one or two more areas, especially in using the technology that you have.
Marlene Gebauer (22:22)
just being a legally good expert from, you know, from basically legal advice. we are already seeing that that is not enough. mean, you, you have to know your client’s business. You have to understand the technology you’re using, all of those things. mean, I agree with him that, and you know, we talked to Joy about this, that, that, that they’re both problem engineers and lawyers are both problem solvers. They’re both critical thinkers.
But, you know, as you said before, you’re trying to doing code, you’re trying to make something work. Now, you know, your client can come to you and say, you know, I want this result, but a lot of that is out of your hands. you know, it’s like, I want a deal to come out like this. It’s like, well, there’s a negotiation process. that’s that takes place and.
or, I want a specific outcome in litigation. It’s like, well, you know, that, that there’s a million factors that, could impact that, you know, your jurisdiction, your judge, your, if you have a jury, um, you know, how, how, um, you know, how, how impressive your argument is, how strong your argument is. So there’s just a lot of things that, that I think, you know, when you’re offering a service, uh, are, are a little different.
Greg Lambert (23:31)
Yeah, I agree. So we’ll just ask John to sharpen his pencil and then come back with another analogy, at least outside of Silicon Valley. So one of the things from day two that was really interesting that I thought, and there were some in-house lawyers on this, but it was more on operations than it was on actual practice.
Marlene Gebauer (23:40)
Yeah.
Greg Lambert (23:56)
was the practical use cases. ⁓ And there were some really good actual use cases that were talked about. ⁓ Justin Schwartz from Eparoc, he talked about one of my favorite topics is the 50 state survey, or he referred to it as just the multiple state survey, and where he asked his outside counsel if…
Marlene Gebauer (24:11)
Ha
Greg Lambert (24:18)
if they used AI, what would a $10,000 multi-state survey cost? And he said, one, the outside counsel was surprised that they were allowing them to use the AI to do this because other clients refused to let them do it. And so they came back and he said, it went from a $10,000 cost to a $5,000 cost.
And I think both sides were very happy to do that. I think 50 state surveys are one of those things that clients want, that they need in order to, especially if they’re in regulatory, but they’re super expensive. And quite frankly, it’s not the favorite thing for lawyers to do. They don’t like pulling these things together either. So.
Marlene Gebauer (24:56)
regulatory, yeah. ⁓
I don’t think we liked
doing it when we had to do it in the library. lot of work.
Greg Lambert (25:12)
I do not.
So I thought that was really interesting to, again, they talked to each other. They said, OK, I want this, but I don’t want to pay that much for it. And you say, if you’re going to make us do it the old way, that’s what it costs. If you let us do it the new way, then we’re happy with
with half of that cost because it probably takes us half or less of that time to do it.
Marlene Gebauer (25:46)
That was what I liked about it too, the fact that they kind of had that conversation. I think it also opens up the opportunity to address work that just never got done because it just didn’t make economic sense. And so if this is a pain point for a client,
Like now you have an opportunity, like these 50 state surveys. mean, the time that it takes now is, know, compared to when we, when we used to do it, like we stick days. And I mean, that was a while ago, so it probably doesn’t, it didn’t take days, ⁓ you know, when they were comparing now, but still it took a lot more time. And now this is something that they can probably offer on a regular basis and an updated basis. Whereas, you know, maybe this wasn’t all the time.
before because it’s just the cost was in the way, but you know, any of these types of, of things where, we have, broadened our abilities based on, AI, you know, that’s definitely a conversation to have, you know, between clients and, and, and firms to just see it’s like, where can we, where can, where can we do more?
Greg Lambert (26:52)
Yeah, one other example that I wanted to highlight because I think this is something that it kind of expands a little bit from the multi-state surveys. Michael seen us from Phillips 66 shared how their company has all of these rights away and I think he was saying there was like
over 250,000 of these that they had documents that explain what the rights away were. And what was interesting, and I don’t know that, you if you weren’t listening closely, if you caught it, he was basically saying, this is work that, you know, that we would love to have done, but there’s no way we can do it. And so they actually took all of their…
Marlene Gebauer (27:20)
can get to the gas, get to the pumps and stuff, right?
Greg Lambert (27:43)
documents that showed the rights of way and uploaded them into the AI system and extracted all of that information. And he said it saved them well over a million dollars in cost to do that. But the key thing was they probably didn’t even do it beforehand because the cost was so high. So now they at least know what their risks are.
And we’re able to get to that in an easy way. So this is work that wasn’t getting done because of cost and now it is getting done. So I think it just shows an example of if it’s cheap enough, what all you can do.
Marlene Gebauer (28:24)
either, you know, not getting done or getting done piecemeal on an as need basis. And, you know, what a wonderful example of being able to kind of extract, you know, information like, you know, trends or, or, know, different types of language and, know, what’s happening over time and being able to, you know, to see, okay, you know, what should we be paying attention to? You know, what are the, what are the risk factors here or what do need to change? And then being able to sort of change that on mass.
Greg Lambert (28:52)
Yeah, yeah. And the last one I wanted to highlight was Elizabeth Poole from Boomi.
And I like, she had some really good examples, but the one, and this one was close to my heart, and that was ⁓ she developed a way of taking the intake system and revamping it using a combination of SharePoint and Co-Pilot, and she said her budget to do this,
was zero. you know, that’s the ultimate, you know, this is the vibe coding ⁓ example. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. And when you got no budget, you got all kinds of necessity.
Marlene Gebauer (29:29)
That’s the ultimate incentivizer. It’s like, figure out something. I have no money.
Mm-hmm.
I,
and I love these types of examples where it’s like, you know, I had a, you know, I had a matchbox and, and, know, and a rubber band and like, you know, I made something amazing. And so you just basically use what you have. And it’s just a real example of, of, know, the, creative abilities of, of people and organizations, you know, when they’re.
You know, when they’re kind of tech curious and saying, okay, we have what we have, like, how can we make this work to solve the problem?
Greg Lambert (30:12)
as long as they stay ⁓ tech curious and not tech furious. Sorry, little Scott Pilgrim. All right, there is nothing wrong with that. Our friend moving on to another panel, or actually this was a standalone presentation that…
Marlene Gebauer (30:16)
No Tech Furious,
Nothing wrong with referencing Scott Pilgrim.
Greg Lambert (30:33)
multi-guest on the Geek in Review, Christina Sikounis, talked about, so she got up and talked about the upcoming report that she’s putting out on the industry and pricing and how much customers are, or how much clients are paying from Council Link.
Marlene Gebauer (30:38)
I love that she was there.
Greg Lambert (30:56)
She talked, I had to feel sorry for her because she’s been on I think since about 2020. So maybe the past six years on and off. And I always see this like hope in her eye. And then I talk about ⁓ the flat rate and alternative fees. it’s like, Christina, where are we this year? And she’s like,
Marlene Gebauer (31:09)
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Someone’s gonna.
Greg Lambert (31:18)
I thought we were going to go up, but here we are again right at about 10 % for AFAs. Yeah, come on. Come on. She’s super nice. Make Chris happy. ⁓ But she was talking about the fact that while AI may be making production cheaper, there’s a new normal in fee rates.
Marlene Gebauer (31:18)
Sorry.
All right, guys, we got to make it work for Christina. Everybody, everybody chip in. We want to make her smile.
No.
Greg Lambert (31:43)
raising them. And she pointed out that before 2022 that on average the rates and this is a blended amount on how they measure it was around 3%. She said about 2022 and after that has jumped to 5%. And I know I looked around because people were like, that seems low because I think we were like at 10%.
So and she mentioned that, again, the way they measured it, came out to that, but it was still a huge increase from 3 % to 5 % is large. That’s a, I think if my math is right, that’s a 60 % increase year over year of what you were paying. And one of the things that an audience member had asked her is like, well,
you know, in two or three years, what’s your next prediction? And she said, well, if we could normalize 5%, you know, there’s gonna be a push to normalize 7 % or more, and it’s gonna be interesting.
Marlene Gebauer (32:34)
we do for another one.
It’s really
interesting based on what we were just talking about before. Okay, are we really going to have these heartfelt conversations about what value is and are we really going to try and adjust this model in a way that makes sense now? mean, the billable hour made sense years and years ago because it was a real easy way to measure. But AI has come and disrupted that.
You know, it’s not a good way to measure anymore, but yet everybody’s so invested in it. are we going to have those conversations? Are we going to make those adjustments to, really reflect, what, what, know, what the value is and what the cost should be, or are we just gonna like up rates and then just spend less time? You know, I don’t know.
Greg Lambert (33:33)
Yeah, yeah. Another panel which was really interesting because they had people from Google, AT &T, Striker, they brought up an issue that was really interesting about the challenge of being able to add AI into the process but not make it unnecessarily complex in the existing tech stacks.
And I think one of the things that a lot of us, especially on our side of things, Marlene, or on the legal ops side, is that if we start allowing individuals to create their own software to correct their one problem that they’re facing, how do you manage that? How do you govern that? I mean, you don’t want to…
You know, don’t want to tamp down the creativity, but man, it could get complex quick.
Marlene Gebauer (34:23)
real questions.
I mean, you we’re having we’re having enough trouble like with with governance, just like with all of the changes that are happening. And it’s like we’re finally, I think, at a fairly decent point where we have our arms around it a little bit. I mean, but there’s still questions to be answered. But can you imagine every time somebody builds some small solution that’s, know, for a small practice group or an individual, you know, OK, are we going to have to sort of go are they going to have to go through sort of an approval process like
like we have to do with just general use of these AI tools. And I’m 100 % unnecessary complexity. It’s like as long as it’s complex, people don’t adopt it. If it’s easy, people do. And it’s the same thing with your tech stacks. Like if it’s easy to bring in and maybe bring out, then there’s much more appetite for it.
You know, so I mean, maybe this is where you see the MCP coming in too.
Greg Lambert (35:28)
Yeah, it was kind of interesting because we kind of almost came full circle because Richard Gorlick from Chrono Tracer out of Austin had this kind of warning about the lawyer freak out of 2027. And he kind of brought the same issue
that John LeBeer from Harvey did with, okay, we’re seeing substantial changes in certain industries like computer programming and computer engineering. We know it’s going to happen in legal in some way that things are going to significantly change.
And so he was talking, and I think he even brought up like the five stages of grief that AI, and that was not the first time I had heard that, but it’s like denial and then you go through all the, and then finally acceptance at the end. But again, I think that talks more about the…
Marlene Gebauer (36:25)
Yeah, I’ve heard that too.
Sadness.
Greg Lambert (36:44)
and I can bring back my favorite saying is, you know, all problems are communication problems. And if you’re not having those conversations now to at least be prepared for things and not have that conversation when it’s too late.
I think that’s the advice that I think we kind of all walked away with. But if not, that’s the advice that I’m giving everybody now is like, if you’re not having those conversations now, when it is an emergency, it’s too late.
Marlene Gebauer (37:16)
Yeah, I mean, it is absolutely critical that, that, you know, internally we’re having these conversations with, you know, everybody who’s, who’s impacted. and, you know, it’s funny, I was on a, I was on a webinar this morning and it was talking about sort of training and education and, know, part of the discussion is about, well, it’s, you know, you just sort of training people how to use things.
But it goes much further than that. mean, we have to be very, very transparent. You know, we have to teach people about what it does and doesn’t do. we have to teach, you know, the governance aspects of it, and, and established guardrails. So people are, you know, comfortable with it. We have to be sharing use cases, you know, within departments and across departments, particularly the ones that, that, you know, have, you know, significant impact, scalable, repeatable, because.
You’re right. You know, it’s like, they’re, and he’s right. Like it’s, it’s coming. We all know it’s coming. And so we have to do the best we can. And that’s kind of what, you know, our jobs are is to sort of prepare people and, know, get them comfortable as, as much as we can with it. And it’s funny, like, you know, I will say that sometimes in my experience, like, you know, the ones who are grumbling about it are often the ones who use it pretty well. So, you know, they get it. so I, I, but I have, I have, I have.
good hope for that. think that again, you’re seeing the fact that we’re having the discussions right now, I think makes a lot of difference.
Greg Lambert (38:40)
Well, I want to do ⁓ just a ⁓ quick bonus topic here. that’s, there was a couple of presentations, ⁓ one from Harry St. John from Lagora.
Harry’s the VP of Revenue and then the one that probably came out of left field the most was John Rizner, who’s head of AI at Legal Drafting for Filevine and this one was like the dream for the librarian in me because one, Harry introduced in it, I think he was kind of like
Marlene Gebauer (38:59)
Ha ha.
Greg Lambert (39:16)
not going to introduce it, but my hand shot up immediately when I saw it. And that is, Lagora is introducing a legal research option on their platform, which is going to be very interesting because I think we’ve said this before. I think a lot of people think that…
AI is like a magic bullet for legal research. And I’m here to tell you, if you haven’t done legal research in a while, legal research is really, really hard to do. It’s complicated and it’s hard to get right. So it’s interesting to see that pop up on that because I actually had, I was talking with a venture capitalist and
Marlene Gebauer (39:47)
to get right.
Greg Lambert (39:59)
they were asking, well, do you think the Harveys and Lagoras are gonna go after legal research? And I was like, no, they may plug it in, but I don’t see them going. I guess I was wrong. So, but really the, good.
Marlene Gebauer (40:07)
Really? No, they are.
why,
just for one second, like, don’t know why, like, but, but research for the longest time has sort of been like the, like the Holy grail for, for all of these AI comes like, I don’t know why, like, why, like we’ve had this conversation, like, why are you going after the hardest thing? It’s like, go after the easy stuff first.
Greg Lambert (40:28)
Yeah, well, you
to their credit, know, ⁓ Harvey and LaGorra didn’t attack it first like, you know, Westlaw and Lexus did. But, you know, but also Westlaw and Lexus, was their, you know, that’s their bread and butter. So.
Marlene Gebauer (40:38)
Yeah, but that’s
There are
other, there are other companies that have, popped up the, smaller companies. mean, you know, mid page being one of them and Wexler I think is another one where it’s there. That’s what they’re focused on.
Greg Lambert (40:46)
yeah.
Yeah, well, if.
I will tell you this, if legal research could be solved by just having the case law, then we’d all be using Google Scholar for all of our work. And I’m here to tell you, unless you’re an academic and you just, you you need access to the core cases, it’s much more complicated than that if you’re actually doing real live legal research for real live clients.
Marlene Gebauer (40:58)
Yeah.
I agree. Agree.
Yeah.
Greg Lambert (41:17)
But I did want to point out John Risner from Filevine because this was a law librarian’s dream presentation. The rich. my goodness.
Marlene Gebauer (41:17)
It’ll be in…
The Riz presentation and it was good. It was really good. I know both of us were like,
where did this come from? Right? It just popped up. It was awesome.
Greg Lambert (41:35)
It was awesome that yeah, I think this one was
the most out of left field presentation because he had talked about, know, we laugh when we talk about these stories of lawyers who.
Marlene Gebauer (41:41)
Yes.
people are going to hate this when you tell them it’s like, going to hate to hear
this.
Greg Lambert (41:49)
have cited to
hallucinated cases that have bad citations in their documents. And I’m here to tell you that was happening before AI was a thing. ⁓ People were putting in wrong citations, bad citations, using the incorrect quotes and incorrect analysis. That is not an AI phenomenon.
Marlene Gebauer (41:53)
Yes. Awful stuff.
It was.
Companies had, didn’t have citations that they should have had, you know, it’s like, mismatch
citations. Yeah. It was always happening.
Greg Lambert (42:17)
But he had actually
gone through and did a really deep dive on American case law and just how much we, you know, it’s like how much Shepard’s and Keysight and B Law, the Cytator systems, you know, it’s like they don’t even agree with each other.
Marlene Gebauer (42:27)
citators.
The bad news is like they don’t agree and they have significant error and it’s like great. it plays well into like a conversation I’ve been having with librarians and I was having with you. It’s just like, okay, how, like, because again, it goes back to these hallucination cases. Like now everybody’s got their eyes on that. And so what is the appropriate way?
to check your citations because not only do have to check to make sure the citation is correct, you have to make sure that the content in the citation is correct. You know, and if it’s, it’s a, know, key number that is referring back to the right thing and you know, yes, and all of these, these tools, if they’re, know, if they’re grounded appropriately, you can go back and look at the actual document. But like we’ve been trying to get away from that for like years and years and years. so that’s what Shepard’s was for. That’s what West, you know, citation West check was for.
⁓ is well, you didn’t have to do that and now you find that they’re wrong and then this is also wrong. So it’s like, what are we supposed to do?
Greg Lambert (43:38)
Yeah.
Yeah, well,
you know, I think it’s one more thing that.
Marlene Gebauer (43:44)
Somebody tell me. No, this
is serious question. I want to know.
Greg Lambert (43:48)
Well, the death of the law librarian has been greatly over exaggerated over the years. think that’s one more example of ⁓ why it takes somebody really smart to keep on top of these vendors that think they’ve created the easy button for legal research. ⁓ Well, I thought it was a great conference.
Marlene Gebauer (44:08)
Exactly.
Greg Lambert (44:13)
What are your final thoughts on this one, Marlene?
Marlene Gebauer (44:18)
You know, I think, you know, if there’s, one common thread, you know, it’s nobody’s waiting for perfect clarity anymore. And that would be a mistake if you do, you know, people are building, they’re testing in real time. You know, they’re, they’re, they’re looking to find, solutions that are bringing true value.
Greg Lambert (44:36)
Yeah, well, and one, think, you know, they’re not waiting for it to be perfect before they start testing it. You’re seeing that in the vendors. you know, iteration is now the way. Used to laugh, you know, we used to go to AA, double L or Ilta to see what the big change was for the year. And now it’s like every week, there’s a big change. ⁓
Marlene Gebauer (44:43)
Yeah. Yeah.
And this is why horizon
scanning is so important nowadays, because again, you know, have to see kind of what’s, you know, what’s being out there, what’s being built and, and, know, what sort of new angle is there that, that maybe isn’t being addressed other places.
Greg Lambert (45:13)
Yeah, yeah. And my takeaway, it’s both with the conference and a lot of things that I’m hearing across not just our industry, but just across society, there’s lots of things that AI can do right now. But our culture and our businesses and just the way that we’re structured, there’s a huge gulf between what’s possible and what’s doable.
⁓ And it’s, we’re still trying to work out the doable while the possible just keeps going further and further away. So I think just like we said earlier, the key right here is having these conversations now, working with the tools now.
And even with all the, you know, the warts and all of getting in there and, you know, kind of at least trying to advance with the technology so that it doesn’t, you you don’t get just completely left.
left behind, but also so that it gives you that time to also ingest what this means for you as an individual and you within a profession and where that goes. you’re not talking about it, if you’re not working with the tools and experimenting and investigating, good luck to you.
Marlene Gebauer (46:32)
Well, I think Texas Trailblazers gave us a great snapshot of the transitions that are happening right now. So thanks for listening, everybody, and we’ll see you next week. And as always, the music here is from Jerry David DeCicca Bye, everybody.
Greg Lambert (46:47)
All right, thanks Jerry, bye.