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In this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer interview three guests from UK law firm Travers Smith about their work on AI: Chief Technology Officer Oliver Bethell, Director of Legal Technology Shawn Curran, and AI Manager Sam Lansley. They discuss Travers Smith’s approach to testing and applying AI tools like generative models.

A key focus is finding ways to safely leverage AI while mitigating risks like copyright issues and hallucination. Travers Smith built an internal chatbot called YCNbot to experiment with generative AI through secure enterprise APIs. They are being cautious on the generative side but see more revolutionary impact from reasoning applications like analyzing documents.

Travers Smith has open sourced tools like YCNbot to spur responsible AI adoption. Collaboration with 273 Ventures helped build in multi-model support. The team is working on reducing dependence on manual prompting and increasing document analysis capabilities. They aim to be model-agnostic to hedge against reliance on a single vendor.

On model safety, Travers Smith emphasizes training data legitimacy, multi-model flexibility, and probing hallucination risks. They co-authored a paper on subtle errors in legal AI. Dedicated roles like prompt engineers are emerging to interface between law and technology. Travers Smith is exploring AI for tasks like contract review but not yet for work product.

When asked about the crystal ball for legal AI, the guests predicted the need for equitable distribution of benefits, growth in reasoning applications vs. generative ones, and movement toward more autonomous agents over manual prompting. Info providers may gain power over intermediaries applying their data.

This wide-ranging discussion provides an inside look at how one forward-thinking firm is advancing legal AI in a prudent and ethical manner. With an open source mindset, Travers Smith is exploring boundaries and sharing solutions to propel the responsible use of emerging technologies in law.

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Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠TranscriptContinue Reading Deploying Cutting-Edge Legal AI: Travers Smith’s Cautious, But Open-source Approach. (TGIR Ep. 216)

For the Fourth of July week, we thought we’d do something fun and probably a little weird. Greg spoke with an AI guest named Justis for this episode. Justis, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, was able to have a natural conversation with Greg and provide insightful perspectives on the use of generative AI in the legal industry, specifically in law firms.

In the first part of their discussion, Justis gave an overview of the legal industry’s interest in and uncertainty around adopting generative AI. While many law firm leaders recognize its potential, some are unsure of how it fits into legal work or worry about risks. Justis pointed to examples of firms exploring AI and said letting lawyers experiment with the tools could help identify use cases.

Greg and Justis then discussed the challenges for the legal industry in using AI, like knowledge gaps, data issues, technology maturity, and managing change. They also talked about the upsides of using AI for tasks such as research, drafting, and review, including efficiency and cost benefits, as well as downsides like over-reliance on AI and ethical concerns.

The conversation turned to how AI could streamline law firm operations, with opportunities around scheduling, paperwork, billing, client insights, and more. However, Justis noted that human oversight is still critical. Justis and Greg also discussed how AI may impact legal jobs, creating demand for new skills and roles but aiming to augment human work rather than replace it.

Finally, Justis suggested innovations law firms could build with AI like research and drafting tools, analytics, dispute resolution systems, and project management. Justis emphasized that focusing on user needs, ethics, and change management will be key for successfully implementing AI. Looking ahead, Justis anticipated continuing progress in legal AI, regulatory changes, a focus on ethics, growing demand for AI skills, and AI becoming a competitive advantage for some firms.

While this was a “unique” episode for The Geek in Review, we hope it provided an insightful “conversation” about the current and future state of generative AI in the legal industry. There is significant promise but there are also challenges around managing change, addressing risks, and ensuring the responsible development of new AI tools. With the right focus and approach, law firms can start exploring ways to make the most of AI and gain a competitive edge. But they must make AI work for human professionals, not the other way around.

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Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠Transcript

Continue Reading A Literal Generative AI Discussion: How AI Could Reshape Law

We talk with ⁠Michael Bommarito⁠, CEO of 273 Ventures and well-known innovator and thinker in legal technology and education. Bommarito and his colleague, Daniel Katz were behind ⁠GPT-3 and GPT-4 taking the Bar Exam⁠. While he and Katz understand the hype in the media reaction, he states that most of the legal and technology experts who were following the advancements in generative AI, expected the results and had already moved on to the next phase in the use of AI in legal.

Michael Bommarito on his farm in Michigan, alongside his trusty friend Foggy.

While we talked to Michael a couple of days before the news broke about a lawyer in New York who submitted a brief to the court relying upon ChatGPT to write the brief and not understanding that AI tools can completely make up cases, fact pattern, and citations, he does talk about the fact that we are falling behind in educating law students and other in understanding how to use Large Language Models (LLMs) properly. In fact, if we don’t start teaching 1Ls and 2Ls in law school immediately, law schools will be doing a disservice for their students for many years to come.

Currently, Bommarito is following up his work at LexPredict, which was sold to Elevate Services in 2018, with 273 Ventures and ⁠Kelvin.Legal⁠. With these companies, he aims to bring more efficiency and reduce marginal costs in the legal industry through the application of AI. He sees the industry as one that primarily deals with information and knowledge, yet continues to struggle with high costs and inefficiency. With 273 Ventures and Kelvin.Legal, he is building solutions to help firms ⁠bring order to the chaos⁠ that is their legal data.

AI and data offer promising solutions for the legal industry but foundational issues around education and adaptation must be addressed. Bommarito explains that decades of inefficiency and mismatched data need to be adjusted before the true value of the AI tools can be achieved. He also believes that while there might have been many false starts on adjustments to the billable hour through things like Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs) in the past, the next 12-36 months are going to be pivotal in shifting the business model of the legal industry.

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

⁠⁠⁠Transcript⁠:

⁠
Continue Reading Michael Bommarito on Preparing Law Students for the Future, and His Quest on Bringing Order to the Chaos of Legal Data (TGIR Ep. 205)

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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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)

In this episode of The Geek in Review, we interview ⁠Josh Kubicki⁠, Director and Professor of Legal Business Design Hub and Entrepreneurship Program at Richmond Law School, and the creator of the daily newsletter ⁠Brainyacts⁠. Kubicki discusses the speed of change in legal technology and how it is now measured in days and weeks, rather than years and decades. He also talks about the need to embrace technological changes and how he created Brainyacts to force himself to learn about generative AI in the legal profession. Kubicki shares his experience of writing 100 consecutive days on generative AI and how it has helped him stay accountable and take a deep dive into the terrain. He also discusses the reaction from the industry side of things and where he digs in to find good content.

The advancements in generative AI tools like GPT, Bard, Bing Chat, and a slew of new products that seem to be launching daily has overwhelmed many of us. Resources like Brainyacts helps put a little bit of stability in this time of rapid change. So, take advantage of Josh’s hours of work on a daily basis and subscribe and read the very practical newsletter.

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Music: ⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠

⁠Transcript

Continue Reading Josh Kubicki and the Brainyacts Newsletter – Helping You Keep Up with the Advancements of Generative AI in the Legal Industry (TGIR Ep. 198)

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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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

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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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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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

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