Artificial Intelligence

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In this riveting episode of our podcast, we delve into the fascinating world of AI in the legal industry with our esteemed guests, Nathan Walter and Bridget Albiero. Walter, a former attorney and founder of BriefPoint.ai, has leveraged his legal expertise and passion for technology to automate the manual processes that often bog down law firms. Bridget Albiero, a User Experience (UX) and User Design (UD) expert, underscores the significance of intuitive design in making these AI tools not just effective, but user-friendly.

Nathan Walter has been instrumental in creating BriefPoint.ai, a tool designed specifically for lawyers to eliminate the mundane and time-consuming aspects of law practice. With the goals of automating the litigation process from response to appeal, Walter and Albeiro are focused on removing the mundane tasks, such as typing, from the process and allowing the attorneys to focus more on their legal experience and expertise over the grunt work that takes up too much of their time already.

However, the success of such tools is not solely dependent on their technical capabilities. Bridget Albiero’s role in UX and UD ensures that these AI systems are designed with the end user in mind. With the mission to make legal professionals’ lives much easier. Bridget’s work is critical in crafting an interface that enables lawyers to accomplish more work in less time, truly maximizing the benefits of AI integration.

Nathan and Bridget’s collaboration epitomizes the intersection of law and technology. They argue that the advent of AI tools, such as BriefPoint.ai, will invariably put pressure on law firms to rethink their traditional billing models. Nathan anticipates a shift towards contingency fee-based and flat fee billings, spurred on by the increased efficiency AI brings to the table. In addition, the ability for the plaintiff’s lawyers to reduce the overall amount of work that they need to put into each case, there will be more incentives to take on work that they might otherwise not consider. This has a multitude of effects ranging from flooding courts with more and more cases, to overwhelming defense firms and corporations with a much higher litigation matters, to making working at plaintiff’s firms more attractive to associates who don’t want to work the number of hours they would need to do in BigLaw firms.

Bridget also emphasizes the importance of approaching AI with a balanced perspective. While there are a number of positives when it comes to AI in the legal process, there are also downsides that need to be considered as well. Bridget and Nathan run through some of those issues as well. This thoughtful conversation with Nathan and Bridget offers a unique insight into the future of the legal industry, where AI and human ingenuity work hand in hand. Listen in to learn more about how these changes might soon be reshaping the legal landscape.

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

Transcript

Continue Reading Lawyer vs. AI or Lawyers + AI: Embracing the Future of Legal Practice with BriefPoint.ai’s Nathan Walter and Bridget Albiero (TGIR Ep. 202)

In this episode of “The Geek in Review,” hosts Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer engage in a fascinating conversation with legal technology experts ⁠Pablo Arredondo⁠, ⁠Evan Shenkman⁠, and ⁠Darth Vaughn⁠. They discuss their proactive approach to incorporating AI technology, specifically ⁠CaseText’s CoCounsel⁠, into their legal practice and business operations.

Pablo shares, “I think the law is such a fascinating space for this kind of AI because it really brings together two things that are really deep in the human experience, which is language and rules.” The guests discuss their experiences in using CoCounsel and its features, such as the ChatGPT feature, which enables them to draft and review documents more efficiently. Evan emphasizes, “The tools are there, and the more that we can sort of get folks up to speed on this stuff, and really help them understand how to use the tools, the better we’re all going to be.”

They explain how the integration of AI in their work has led to improved legal outcomes, happier clients, and better work-life balance for attorneys. Darth notes, “The legal industry tends to be a bit of a slow adopter of technology. It’s not because we’re not smart or we’re not hardworking. I think it’s because we’re risk-averse.”

Pablo, Evan, and Darth emphasize the importance of being passionate about leading the way in legal technology advancements. Pablo encourages listeners to embrace this technology with joy, rather than fear, to truly make a difference in their practice and industry. This positive approach helps them excel and bring others along on this transformative journey.

The discussion also touches on access to justice issues and how tools like CoCounsel can potentially help bridge the justice gap. By being intentional in utilizing AI technology to assist in pro bono cases, they believe it is possible to make a significant impact on improving access to legal services for those in need. Overall, this episode of “The Geek in Review” offers valuable insights into how AI and CaseText’s CoCounsel can revolutionize the legal industry. The guests’ passion and joy for embracing cutting-edge technology serve as an inspiration for others to follow suit and lead the way in transforming the legal landscape.

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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 Revolutionizing Legal Practice: The Impact of CaseText’s CoCounsel on Law and Technology with Pablo Arredondo, Evan Shenkman, and Darth Vaughn (TGIR Ep. 199)

AI is now a significant part of the legal industry, and technology companies such as LexisNexis are at the forefront of this technology shift. We sat down and talked with ⁠Jeff Reihl⁠, the Executive Vice President, and Chief Technology Officer at LexisNexis, and discussed the current state of AI and its relevance to the legal and research sector. The recent survey conducted by Lexis uncovered that 39% of lawyers, 46% of law students, and 45% of consumers agreed that generative AI tools will significantly transform the practice of law. During Reihl’s sixteen years at LexisNexis he witnessed many innovations such as the nearly universal adoption of iPhone and other mobile products, cloud computing, and document automation, but the speed a acceleration around Generative AI tool like GPT 4.0, Bing, Bard, and others is causing even the big players in the legal industry to quickly adjust to the demands of the market. Jeff highlighted the flexibility and benefits of LexisNexis’ technology, which can provide valuable insights and information to its users on-demand. The organization generates and applies AI-enabled insights that assist users in finding, evaluating, and curating content more quickly and effectively. Jeff went on to explain how AI technology is helping lawyers reduce research time and increase accuracy in creating legal documents. In conclusion, Jeff explained that LexisNexis is committed to promoting innovation in the legal field by utilizing innovative technology solutions to advance research and meet the growing research demand, thereby improving legal professionals’ efficiency and accuracy.

Of course, Lexis is not a new player in the AI field for the legal industry. They began using tools like Google’s BERT AI as early as 2018 and included AI functionality in many of their products on the backend of the resources. With the popularity of chatbot-like AI and the interaction that users are now demanding, it will require a shift in Lexis’ approach going forward. One focus that Reihl stresses, however, is that unlike the public AI chat tools, Lexis’ approach will take in the issues of privacy, security, citation of sources, and the ability to understand how their tools get to the results its users see. Less “black boxes” and more transparency is the goal.

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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 The Future of AI within LexisNexis and the Legal Industry with Lexis CTO Jeff Reihl – TGIR Ep. 197

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

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

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
Transcript

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

We hope that you like your Geek in Review with a little extra geekiness this week because we dive in with CaseText’s Chief Product Officer Pablo Arredondo on their innovative search tool, WeSearch.  This completely unique method of indexing texts into what Arredondo calls a “sublimely complex, 768-dimensional vector space”  creates a truly beautiful, and useful method of searching not just the words in the documents, but the concepts and meanings of those documents. Unlike the Artificial Intelligence tools many of us in the legal industry currently use, there’s no need to spend weeks or months training the system to understand the documents. The Neural Net techniques developed by the likes of Jacob Devlin, Google Researcher, and BERT author, allows the system to train itself, and the folks at CaseText have turned it loose to learn American case law.

While this new method of research opens many potential usages (and we brainstorm a few in the interview), but it also opens up some issues that aren’t unique to the legal industry, but are common in this industry. Issues such as acceptance of cloud-based utilities, what can and what cannot be accessed by the neural net tool, and perhaps the biggest issue we discuss, and that is the black box issue. Traditionally, when vendors provide search tools with AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), there are Intellectual Property issues of the “Black Box” of the tool. While the methodology of how the system works is known by the vendor, just like the formula for Coke, it isn’t something they are willing to share. When it comes to this tool, the neural net and vectors work in ways that can be explained on a basic level, but after the system is trained, it begins functioning in a way that can’t be explained. This will be an issue that law librarians and academics may need to dive into in the not-so-distant future.

The WeSearch tool is available to test out. Let us know what you think.

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Information Inspirations

We’d all like to know what “The Future of the Law Firm Office” is going to be after we begin entering a post-pandemic workplace. Texas Lawbook’s Brooks Igo is hosting an upcoming webinar on May 11th which tackles that very topic.

Jae Um gives us ten questions we need to ask ourselves on how resilient our law firms are as we come out of COVID. Resiliency was a key factor in 2008, and it will be in 2021 as well.

Law firms might be different than corporations, but our clients have a Customer Experience (CX) with us whether we think about it or not. In a new podcast launched by Accenture called Built for Change, the inaugural episode discusses the importance of CX, and how some companies have successfully pivoted how their customers interact with them, and make that experience better.

Law firms have an issue with the “NONs”… only this time it is non-equity partners.

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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

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 114: Pablo Arredondo on CaseText’s New WeSearch Tool and How the Neural Net Is Making Its Way Into Legal Information

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.

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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

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

In order to measure what matters, it is important to have the data available to help. Sarah Lin is the Information Architect & Digital Librarian at RStudio, PBC, and is also a law librarian. RStudio wanted someone to help them manage their digital morass and to Marie Kondo their digital information. Is there anyone better than a law librarian with some tech skills to do just that?
Sarah discusses what the R Programming language does, and how she got interested in the profession of statistical computing. While some may not see a direct link between being a law librarian and an R programmer, there are actually a number of skills librarians possess which make them well suited for data analytics. One skill is our ability to understand, clean, and organize information. For RStudios, the Chief Scientist, Hadley Wickam created Tidyverse which helps in handling the clean data tasks. And there are also resources like Shinyapps.io to help organize. Throw in a law librarian to have it all make sense and tell a story and you have a fantastic combination of skills and tools. And we should mention that it is free open-source software.

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To learn more about the R language check out:
 
Information Inspirations
Roy Sexton from Clark Hill lays out what law firm marketing does as opposed to what law firm business development does in the latest episode of Steve Fretzin’s Be That Lawyer. Roy’s advice of the “Rule of Three” when it comes to promoting yourself and your marketing products makes this a must-listen episode.
Adam Smith, Esq. covers the new initiative by our friend Phil Flora and Leopard Solutions on ranking law firms by their vitality and resilience, not just once a year, but in real-time.
Feeling the effects of COVID, the election, the environment, or the hundred other stressors in your life? Maybe take Prof. Eric Janssen’s advice and put down your phone and go for a walk.
Did you know there was a Pirate who was a 17th Century Anthony Bourdain? Marlene teaches Greg about this culinary outlaw and also teaches him about breadfruit.

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 90 – Using Data Analytics to Tell Your Story with RStudio’s Sarah Lin

[Ed. Note: Please welcome guest blogger, Colin Lachance, CEO of Compass/vLex Canada. – GL]

At no fewer than four conferences this lovely month of May, I will be speaking about artificial intelligence in law. Each event has a different focus (regulation, impact, libraries, family law), but as my comments in each will spring from my personal framework for considering issues, opportunities and implications, I thought it might help me to advance that framework for your feedback.Continue Reading Le Joli M.ai