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In a special episode of The Geek in Review podcast, we wanted to play a recent episode of the Future Ready Business (FRB) Podcast. FRB is a podcast that Greg Lambert produces and is hosted by ⁠Jackson Walker⁠ attorneys Art Cavazos and Erin Camp and is focused on how new ideas, regulations, laws, and overall societal changes affect the way businesses operate.

In this episode, ⁠Art Cavazos⁠ and ⁠Erin Camp⁠ host ⁠Courtney White⁠ and ⁠William Nilson⁠, attorneys from Jackson Walker’s Houston and Austin offices, and discuss the future of the fashion industry. The conversation touches on how the intersection of art and business has evolved, with topics such as sustainability, diversity, and social media influencers’ impact on the industry. The group also discusses the growing relationship between technology and fashion, including the role of artificial intelligence in streamlining production and enabling customization. Social media’s role in marketing and intellectual property concerns relating to the fashion industry round out the discussion. It is a great conversation, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Links:

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Contact Us:

Twitter: ⁠@gebauerm⁠, or ⁠@glambert⁠
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Music: ⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠

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Transcript

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Continue Reading The Future of Fashion and the Law (TGIR Ep. 194)

Benjamin Alarie and Abdi Aidid are legal experts who are heavily involved in the development of legal technology. They are releasing a new book, The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better later this year. 
Benjamin Alarie is a tax law professor at the University of Toronto and has been in the tax law profession since 2004. He became interested in the future of legal education and how artificial intelligence will affect the profession, which led him to co-found Blue J, a legal technology company in Toronto. On the other hand, Abdi Aidid practiced as a commercial litigator in New York before becoming the Vice President of Legal Research at Blue J. He led the team of lawyers and research analysts and helped develop AI-informed predictive tools, which predict how future courts are likely to rule on new legal situations. Abdi is now a full-time law professor at the University of Toronto, teaching subjects like torts and civil procedure.
Naming the book “The Legal Singularity” is a big claim by the authors, so we asked them to explain what they meant by it. According to Abdi Aidid, the legal singularity is the practical elimination of legal uncertainty and its impact on our institutions and society. It is a future state where the law is unknowable in real time and on demand, and we can start doing things that we were not previously able to do because the law was either difficult to ascertain or we did not have a normative consensus around what the law ought to be. The concept of the legal singularity is related to the idea of a technological singularity, but it is not a totalizing event like the technological singularity. Instead, it is an equally socially important concept that focuses on how technological improvements affect the law and related institutions.
Alarie and Aidid suggest that the legal market needs to address bias in AI tools by keeping humans in the loop in arbitration and judicial contexts for a significant period of time. They believe that even as the legal singularity approaches and people begin to have confidence in algorithmic decision making, humans should still be involved in the process to audit machine-generated decisions. They argue that this is necessary because the law deals with deeply human questions, and there is more at stake than just ones and zeros. They believe that humans have to contribute to the legal system’s notions of mercy, fairness, empathy, and procedural justice. They also suggest that involving humans in the process helps to inform the technology before disastrous consequences and helps to refine it. Therefore, they emphasize the need for human review of machine judgments, which will lead to accelerated learning in the law. Furthermore, they highlight that the legal market needs to distinguish between the kinds of problems that are a reflection of unaddressed social problems or those that are new technological problems. They stress that the legal market is still collectively responsible for resolving these issues.

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Transcript

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Continue Reading The Legal Singularity and the Future of Legal Research – Benjamin Alarie and Abdi Aidid (TGIR Ep. 193)

The promise of AI has been around for decades, but it is the last three months that has finally caused an awakening so forceful, that even the legal industry understands it needs to be ready for the upcoming Age of AI. This week’s guest has worked toward that goal of integrating AI and other technologies into the practice of law for more than forty years. Johannes (Jan) Scholtes is Chief Data Scientist for IPRO – ZyLAB, and Extraordinairy (Full) Professor Text Mining at Maastricht University in The Netherlands. He joins us this week to discuss the need for lawyers and law firms to use these tools to enhance the power of the practice of law. And he warns that if the traditional legal resources of lawyers and firms won’t step up, there are others who will step in to fill that void.
While the AI tools like GPT and other generative AI tools have finally begun to be true language tools, there is still a lot that these tools simply cannot do. Scholtes says that there is plenty of legal work to be done, and in fact perhaps more work now that the computers can do most of the heavy lifting and allow the lawyers to do the thinking and strategy.
Scholtes compares the relationship between the lawyer and the technology to be that of a pilot and co-pilot. A relationship in which the co-pilot cannot be completely trusted but can be trained to assist through the process of vertical training. This means that a law firm needs to work with the AI to have it better understand how to process legal information. Having the technology alongside the lawyers provides a stronger legal representation than just the lawyers or the technology alone. In addition to reducing risk and improving outcomes, Scholtes also projects that Lawyer + AI means higher rates and better profitability, while the clients receive better results.
It is exciting to be at the beginning of this change in the way law is practiced. It is important, however, that law firms, lawyers, and legal professionals understand how to teach and control the technology, and that there needs to be transparency in how the tools work and make decisions. His recommendation is that if all you are offered is and AI Black Box, then you should simply walk away. That lack of trust will come back to bite you.
For more insights from Jan Scholtes, visit his blog, Legal Tech Bridge.

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Contact Us:

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

Transcript:

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Continue Reading Johannes Scholtes: AI Is Finally Here. Now the Hard Work Begins for the Legal Industry (TGIR Ep. 191)

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.

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts LogoApple Podcasts |  Spotify LogoSpotify
Contact Us:
Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript

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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

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

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

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

Last Thursday, a group of some 400 legal knowledge management professionals came together for the Strategic Knowledge & Innovation Legal Leaders Summit (SKILLS) conference.  Oz Benamram asked me to pull together a 20 minute recap of all of the presentations that day, and share it with the 3 Geeks’ readers. So, here’s about a 20 minute recap of the 20 presentations for that day. Enjoy!!

Jason Barnwell – Keynote

There are two things that most of us know about Jason. First, he thinks there is always opportunities for improvement. Whether that is for himself, his team at Microsoft, and especially for law firms looking to better service their clients. His takeaway quote for me was when Kay Kim asked him what are law firms doing right and what are they doing wrong?

So the biggest challenge I see is, is structural, and as much as the business model works pretty well for about right now. But it doesn’t necessarily work great for where we’re going.

The other thing that we know about Jason is that if you are presenting on innovation in a law firm, he’s going to ask you specifically “is what you are doing benefitting the law firm only, or does it benefit the client?” So, expect to answer that question… at a minimum to yourself, even if Jason isn’t in the room.

Digital Transformation – Shark-TED-Talk-Tank (Part 1)

I loved all three sessions of our Shark-Ted-Talk-Tank presentations. We were just missing the three billionaires, and the large red carpet. But, the content was all there.
Continue Reading SKILLS 2022 – Recap

While lawyers probably hear every day how Artificial Intelligence is going to change the legal industry, many are still uncomfortable discussing it simply because they don’t understand what exactly AI is, and if it is going to be a good thing or a bad thing for them personally. Kira Systems’ Noah Waisberg and Dr. Alexander Hudek are releasing a book on February 3rd that addresses these issues. AI For Lawyers: How Artificial Intelligence is Adding Value, Amplifying Expertise, and Transforming Careers walks through the questions and gives some easy to understand explanations on how AI is being used in the legal industry. Whether it is document automation, e-discovery, legal research, or a myriad of other legal issues, AI is becoming normalized across practically every task a lawyer or legal professional does. As with most advanced technologies, AI may sound scary, but eventually, it becomes ubiquitous.

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Information Inspirations

The Strategic Knowledge and Innovation Legal Leaders Summit (SKILLS) went online this year using Shindig, and it was a great experience. The audience and presenters found ways to interact, and while LegalWeek may not have happened this year, it was nice to still be able to seek out our conference friends online. Speaking of friends, our fellow 3 Geeks contributor Ryan McClead from Sente Advisors, along with Nicole Bradick of Theory and Principle won the video presentation at SKILLS for their new Map Engine software.

Early podcast guest, Jae Um has a five-part series on what to expect in a post-pandemic era for the legal market. It is a must-read.

We thought that last year’s bar exam was a bit of a mess. Turns out it was more like a mean game of musical chairs. There were definitely winners and losers.

The University of Texas Center for Women in the Law is putting on a free CLE featuring Nina Totenberg and four former clerks of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to celebrate the beginning of their Ginsburg Initiative.

Listen, Subscribe, Comment

Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

Transcript

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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 103 – AI for Lawyers with Noah Waisberg and Dr. Alexander Hudek