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It is pretty apparent that we are in a super Hype Cycle when it comes to AI tools like ChatGPT, but for many of us in the legal profession, we’re not used to reaching this point of the cycle at the same time as the rest of the world. Because things are happening so fast, we wanted to bring in someone like Colin Lachance from Jurisage to talk about how they are integrating Generative AI tools into their products.
Greg was going down an AI rabbit hole on Twitter this week when Colin mentioned his own project he was launching. Jurisage’s tool, MyJr (pronounced “My Junior”) is part of a joint venture between Jurisage and AltaML, and is designed to change how researchers access information by allowing the AI tool to synthesis and read cases as the researchers search and analyze the information. Rather than opening up web browser tab after tab and scanning cited cases for relevant information, the idea behind MyJr is to have it quickly answer that information for you. If you need to know what the relevant arguments are from each side in Smith v. Jones, as MyJr to pass that along to you. Ask it a plain language question, get a quick and plain language answer.
Lachance is working to use the GPT 3.5 tool to pass along cases and create what he calls “guardrails” with the cases so that the prompt and the results limit themselves to the case itself. This protects the researcher from the AI “creating” the answer from all the non-relevant information it has collected in its large language model of machine learning. Lachance has additional goals for using AI within Jurisage’s data, but he’s focused tools like MyJr establishing trust with those using it for researching Canadian, and soon US caselaw.
The MyJr product works as a browser extension and identifies Canadian and US case law citations on any web page. It delivers a preview into key details about the cited case, and a link to a free full-text version, in a popup when the user hovers over the citation. Clicking through to a “more insights” dashboard reveals additional detail as well as access to the upcoming “Chat with a case” feature (Feb 20th for Canadian case, a month later for US). While the paid version of the dashboard won’t officially launch until late March, user can get unlimited pre-sale access today as well as secure a future 50% discount option for a one-time payment of $7.

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More information on Jurisage and MyJr can be found here:
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Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript

Continue Reading Colin Lachance on Jurisage’s MyJr and How He’s Looking at AI to Assist in the Synthesis and Reading of Legal Cases (TGIR Ep. 190)

This week we have Damien Riehl, VP, Litigation Workflow and Analytics Content at FastCase, and one of the drivers behind SALI (Standards Advancement for   for the Legal Industry.) Damien is definitely a “big thinker” when it comes to the benefits of creating and using standards for the legal industry. SALI is a system of tagging legal information to allow for better filtering and analysis. It works like Amazon’s product tags, where a user can search for a specific area of law, such as patent law, and then choose between various services such as advice, registration, transactional, dispute, or bankruptcy services. The tags cover everything from the substance of law to the business of law, with over 13,000 tags in the latest version. SALI is being adopted by major legal information providers such as Thomson Reuters, Lexis, Bloomberg, NetDocuments, and iManage, with each provider using the same standardized identifiers for legal work. With this standardization, it will be possible to perform the same API query across different providers and receive consistent results. Imagine the potential of being able to ask one question that is understood by all your database and external systems?
In that same vein, we expand our discussion to include how Artificial Intelligence tools like Large Language Models (i.e., ChatGPT, Google BARD, Meta’s LLM) could assist legal professionals in their quest to find information, create documents, and help outline legal processes and practices.
He proposed three ways of thinking about the work being done by these models, which are largely analogous to traditional methods. The first way is what Riehl refers to as a “bullshitter,” where a model generates information without providing citations for the information. The second way is called a “searcher,” where a model generates a legal brief, but does not provide citations, forcing the user to search for support. The third way is called a “researcher,” where the model finds relevant cases and statutes, extracts relevant propositions, and crafts a brief based on them.
Riehl believes that option three, being a researcher, is the most likely to win in the future, as it provides “ground truth” from the start. He cites Fastcase’s acquisition of Judicata as an example of how AI can be used to help with research by providing unique identifiers for every proposition and citation, enabling users to evaluate the credibility of the information. In conclusion, Riehl sees a future where AI is used to help researchers by providing a pick list of the most common propositions and citations, which can then be further evaluated by the researcher.
One thing is very clear, we are just at the beginning of a shift in how the legal industry processes information. Riehl’s one-two combination of SALI Standards combined with additional AI and human capabilities will create a divide amongst the bullshitters, the searchers, and the researchers.

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Contact Us:
Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
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Continue Reading The Bullshitter, The Searcher, and The Researcher – Damien Riehl on the Dynamic Shift in How the Legal Profession Will Leverage Standards and Artificial Intelligence

“Whether you like it or not, everybody’s searching for us online. And everybody is looking at your LinkedIn profile, whether you’re on LinkedIn every day, or once a year, so you might as well make it work for you.” – Stefanie Marrone
Stefanie Marrone is an Outsource Marketer who advises legal professionals on improving their social media presence. Even legal professionals in large law firms can benefit from a strong social media presence because clients and potential clients relate to the individual more than they do the firm. Marrone’s experience in firms like Proskauer and MoFo helped shaped her understanding of how important it is to have a strategy when it comes to branding. LinkedIn is her suggested primary platform for lawyers and legal professionals because that is the most likely platform where you’ll find your peers and clients.
One of the most effective forms of content, even on LinkedIn, is short-form video. In addition, list posts, infographics, carousel images, and finding ways to bring even firm posts to life helps draw attention to social media posts. For lawyers who have a marketing team, Stefanie suggests establishing a social media training program, especially for LinkedIn.
While we would all love to have some metric that identifies the return on investment of social media, it is not as easy as the number of likes a post receives. Success on social media is a combination of brand awareness, influence on decision making, and information dissemination. However, Marrone points out that many firms have thousands, or even tens of thousands of followers, and if the only engagement you are receiving is minimal, or from a few people, then it is clear that your social media strategy is not working.
Marrone also points out that lawyers and legal professionals should stick to one or two platforms and not spread yourselves too thin. LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter are probably the safest bets, but it depends on the message you are trying to convey.

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To learn more from Stefanie, check out:
Contact Us:
Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript

Continue Reading Successful Brand Awareness for Legal Professionals – Tips from Stefanie Marrone (TGIR Ep. 188)

This week we are joined by Shayne Phillips, Director of Analytics Solutions at Anaqua/Acclaim IP. Shayne talks about the value that Patent Agents bring to the legal industry. She explains how Patent Agents can use data to uncover insights about competitors and potential markets, and how they can go beyond the typical patent search to provide competitive intelligence and business intelligence.
She emphasizes how Patent Agents can help R&D teams use the patent literature to their advantage, such as looking for references to answer an office action from an examiner or to conduct a freedom to operate opinion piece. Additionally, Patent Agents can look for trends in what patents a competitor has let die before their statutory term, and what countries they are now filing in where they maybe hadn’t before with that particular technology. This can help uncover potential markets and provide insight into what the competitor may or may not know about a particular geographical region.
Many law firms realize the value that Patent Agents can bring to making existing clients more profitable by understanding their patent portfolio as well as uncovering the strategic directions that potential clients may be headed in their patent and overall business goals.
As with many industries, Shayne recognizes that there is a giant role that technology and AI tools will play in the immediate future of the profession. With millions upon millions of patents to parse through, there is definitely value in leveraging the technology to enhance the role she plays in finding the hidden jewels that are buried in patent information.
Join us as we talk with Shayne about her career growth, her move to Texas, and her involvement in the Licensing Executive Society to mentor and connect with the newer generation of LES members.
Shayne’s Twitter – @ShaynePhillip15

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Contact Us:
Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
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Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript

Continue Reading The Secret Weapon: Leveraging Patent Agents to Gain a Competitive Edge – Shayne Phillips (TGIR Ep. 186)

AI Generated Librarian as a machine editing a podcast.

This is going to be something that all of you will find “interesting,” but maybe not something that you will like. Last week on 3 Geeks, I posted a blog that talked about how to use AI to generate summaries of legal articles. This week, I wanted to expand on that project a little and see if I could turn the summaries into a podcast. The goal was to try to get it completely automated, and completely AI generated. Well… as you can see from the title of this episode, it was almost completely automated, and AI generated. But not 100%.

Here’s the process I created, and I attached the mp3 of the output.
  • RSS Feed that tracks new BigLaw Podcast Episodes.
  • Use a Python script to pull the episode information.
  • Use GPT to create a description of the episode.
  • Use Descript to translate the text summaries into voice output. (I did lightly edit these with an intro and outro as well as tweak the transitions between each review.)
  • Use Soundraw to create an intro/outro music.
  • Combine in Audacity.
  • Output in mp3.
All of these tools are actually free, except for GPT, which is about $0.01 or less per article.
This is far from perfect, but it is kind of cool, and I think there are some uses for these tools.
Whether you love this, hate this, or don’t really care, I’d like to hear what you think!!
(The AI Generated part starts at the 6:50 mark.)

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Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
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Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript

Continue Reading The (ALMOST) Completely AI Generated Podcast (TGIR Ep. 186)

DALL-E drawing of a librarian looking over lots of documents.

There is obviously a ton of hype and buzz going on right now with ChatGPT and other AI tools, including this week’s Geek in Review podcast. I wanted to see if there’s something that I could do that was a practical use of GPT in my job as a law librarian. I think I’ve found something that might fit that bill. Summarizing text.

Law Librarians are great at finding good information and getting that quickly into the hands of lawyers, legal professionals, judges, pro se representatives, etc. However, we don’t always have a lot of time to read all of that information and create a summary for the person we are working with. It’s not uncommon for a firm to have 100 – 300 attorneys for each librarian. Any tool that would help librarians synthesize information in a useful way is a welcome tool for us all. I put GPT 3.5 (the paid version) to the test to see how it could be that electronic assistant in summarizing information quickly.

It is early in my experiment, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

The Current Process

I wanted to try something that I personally set up for myself that is “good” but not “great.” And that is tracking BigLaw Podcasts as they come out. What I have now is an RSS feed (yes, that is still a thing!) that follows AmLaw 100/200 firms’ websites and lets me know when a new episode comes out. I have that RSS feed set up in my MS Outlook folders. I’m using LexisNexis’ NewsDesk to set this up.

Right now, it looks like this:

This works fine, but it really doesn’t give me a lot of information on the podcast. I’d really like to see more of a summary of the podcast before I make a decision to click through and listen.

The Idea

I’ve got the basic information from the RSS feed, but now I want to expand that information. I’m a former programmer from “back in the day” but I haven’t done any serious programming in a long time. But, I know that Python is a great tool for processing text, so my top-of-the-head idea was to have Python look at my RSS output and see if it could get me more information. Actually, I wanted to see if Python might be able to summarize the RSS information directly. This is where the ChatGPT tool came in handy.
Continue Reading What a Law Librarian Does with AI Tools like ChatGPT – Organize and Summarize

There is a lot of buzz around ChatGPT and GPT 3.5, but is it really the next Tesla, or is it the next IBM Watson? We talk with HyperDraft’s Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle about OpenAI’s popular tool and why, lawyers at least, shouldn’t be ready to go all in on this specific technology. While there are great examples of how GPT 3.5 impressively handled things like Bar Exam questions, there are still a lot of unknowns from this resource from a company that started out as Open Source and non-profit, but has released a product that is neither.
While the conversation focused a lot on the short comings of ChatGPT, there is a lot of promise in the technology, even if it may be years before it can handle the complex issues that lawyers and the legal community handle on behalf of their clients. Are we going to reach The Singularity in 2023, or is it decades away? Can AI plug the Access to Justice gap, or will it cause more issues than it solves? Will this specific AI tool continue to improve as it devours more data and leverages millions of users, or will it become corrupted by bad actors who discover how it inputs its data?
Can society use this to better ourselves, or will it become another way to play upon our short attention spans?
We cover all of this and more in a roundtable discussion. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what value you see in ChatGPT and GPT 3.5 in the legal industry. So reach out to us on Twitter or give us a call!

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Contact Us:
Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript 

Continue Reading ChatGPT – If It Sounds Too Good To Be True… – Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle (TGIR Ep. 185)

Mollie Nichols is the CEO of Redgrave Data, a company that uses data analytics and technology to assist the legal industry. After leaving Hogan Lovells, Mollie launched Redgrave Data in January of 2022 and has seen a strong demand for their services in data analytics, regulation, compliance, and internal investigations. Companies often seek the expert assistance of Redgrave Data in order to improve efficiency among the law firms, eDiscovery services, ALSPs, and internal legal operations. She is working to move legal departments away from being seen as a “black hole for money” and focused more on the unique and valuable in achieving the strategic goals of the company. One of the hidden gems in these legal departments is the insights that the legal team can uncover through visualization and analysis of the data within the department. 
One area that Mollie things the legal industry needs to change is how it processes and analyzes the data we collect and create. You cannot look at data simply as a commodity. Where your data tools or your outsourced data analytics teams take unique batches of data and then send it through a one-sized fits all process. Data has to be analyzed through the lens of the current legal issue or toward the goals of the company. This is one of the areas that she says Redgrave Data stands apart from others in the field.
In her Crystal Ball projection, Mollie Nichols sees the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the legal field is likely to increase, but some lawyers and judges may not fully understand or accept it. AI can help with the growing volume and complexity of data in legal cases, but there may be challenges in accessing and using this data effectively. Overall, she thinks that AI is going to have a significant impact on the legal field.

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New Logo!!
We are SUPER GEEKED about our new logo design. Shoutout to logo designer @ChangoATX who did a wonderful job and got our new logo completed just in time for the holidays!! Let us know what you think.
Contact Us:
Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript

Continue Reading Redgrave Data’s Mollie Nichols on the De-Commoditizing of Data in the Legal Industry (TGIR Ep. 184)

This week, we have a jam-packed episode featuring five of our colleagues from a 2022 American Association of Law Libraries panel on APIs.
  • Emily Rushing, Director of Competitive Intelligence, Haynes and Boone, LLP
  • Pam Noyd, Information Resources Manager at Foley & Lardner LLP
  • Erik Adams, Manager of Library Digital Initiatives Manager of Library Digital Initiatives at Sidley Austin LLP, and Chief of Technology at Golden Arrow Publishing LLC
  • Keli Whitnell, Director of Firm Intelligence at Troutman Pepper
  • Christopher O’Connor, Senior Director, Product Management at LexisNexis
APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, have become an increasingly important tool in the legal industry. The panel included members with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, including both librarians and non-librarians. This diversity provided a holistic view of the topic, covering everything from the technical aspects of using APIs to the importance of data quality and vetting vendors.
APIs are like building blocks for legal solutions (think: LEGO Blocks), allowing for the flexible sharing of data between different computer environments. This enables more creative solutions than vendors could create on their own and has led to a range of innovative legal solutions.
Overall, the panel provided valuable insights into the use of APIs in the legal industry and highlighted their potential for facilitating more efficient and effective legal work. As the use of API’s continues to grow, it will be important for legal professionals to stay up to date on the latest developments and best practices in this area.

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Links Mentioned:
Crystal Ball Question:
Brad Blickstein discusses the potential for a recession and its effects on the legal industry. He speculates that Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) will benefit from the downturn, as law departments will be unable to increase headcount. He also discusses the question of where the work done by ALSPs will go once the recession ends and whether law firms will be able to regain the work.
Contact Us:
Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert Voicemail: 713-487-7821 Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript

Continue Reading APIs are the LEGO Building Blocks of Data – API Panel Discussion with Emily Rushing, Pam Noyd, Chris O’Connor, Keli Whitnell, and Erik Adams (TGIR Ep. 183)