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On this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interview Thomas Suh, Founder and CEO, and Ken Block, Senior Account Executive of ⁠LegalMation⁠. The company provides AI-powered tools to help litigators automate repetitive tasks and work more efficiently. The conversation focuses on LegalMation’s products, overcoming resistance to adopting new legal tech, and predictions for the future evolution of legal service delivery.

Suh provides background on founding LegalMation about seven years ago to help streamline the “scut work” litigation associates spend time on. The flagship product automates drafting responses to lawsuits, discovery requests, demand letters, and more by leveraging a firm’s historical data. LegalMation initially built an automation tool internally at a law firm before deciding to spin it off into a standalone legal tech company. The product found an early champion in the form of a corporate legal department interested in licensing it. Today, LegalMation serves large corporate legal departments, law firms, and insurance companies.

Suh and Block discuss common roadblocks to adopting new legal technology like lack of trust and skepticism. Suh notes the importance of identifying the right use cases where efficiency gains matter most. For high-stakes litigation, efficiency may be less of a concern than for high-volume routine matters. Corporate legal departments are often early adopters because they are focused on efficiency and supplementing personnel. Law firms still incentivized by billable hours may be warier of efficiency gains.

For the YouTube Viewers, Block demonstrates LegalMation’s Response Creator tool for automating drafting of responses to complaints and discovery requests. The AI leverages a firm’s historical data to maintain proper tone and style while speeding up document preparation significantly. Lawyers can still review and edit the AI-generated drafts before finalizing. Suh explains that because the AI relies solely on a firm’s data, it maintains consistency rather than attempting to generate random creative language.

Looking ahead, Suh predicts that the litigation process will become more modular, with different firms or providers specializing in discrete phases rather than handling a case end-to-end. Block emphasizes that younger lawyers expect to leverage more technology and are unwilling to slog through repetitive manual tasks, which will force law firms to adapt. Technology stacks and automation will become selling points for recruiting top young talent.

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ |  ⁠Spotify⁠ | YouTube (NEW!)

Contact Us: 

Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Threads: @glambertpod or @gebauerm66

Voicemail: 713-487-7821

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠Transcript

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Continue Reading Thomas Suh and Ken Block on How LegalMation is Revolutionizing Litigation Efficiency (TGIR Ep. 222)

In this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert have an illuminating discussion with Christina Wojcik, the new Managing Director of Corporate for LexFusion. Christina has over 20 years of experience pioneering innovation in the legal services and technology space.

The conversation covers Christina’s diverse background and journey into legal tech, including formative experiences at companies like Pangea3, IBM, Seal Software, and Citi. She shares key lessons learned about the importance of visionary leadership, solving real client problems, and embracing a fearless, entrepreneurial spirit.

Christina provides insights into top pain points for legal departments today, especially at highly regulated organizations like major banks. She discusses the cautious approach many are taking with emergent technologies like generative AI—treating it like a “monster behind the door” to be carefully studied before fully unleashing.

Christina advocates for “failing fast” when testing innovations, allowing for rapid iteration in a safe sandbox environment. She explains her rationale for joining LexFusion and how she hopes to leverage her well-rounded expertise to drive value for legal tech providers and clients alike.

The conversation concludes with Christina’s predictions for the legal industry’s evolution in areas like AI adoption, CLM consolidation, and new service delivery models. She provides a fascinating insider perspective on the future of legal innovation.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3B4A7EFJBE1WzqUteJXXRr?si=mOC-OyQ4Qhe1glFffLysdg

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ |  ⁠Spotify⁠ | YouTube (NEW!)

Contact Us: 

Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
Threads: @glambertpod or @gebauerm66
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript

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Continue Reading Unleashing the Legal Monster Behind the Door – LexFusion’s Christina Wojcik (TGIR Ep. 221)

This episode of The Geek in Review podcast provides an in-depth look at how the AI assistant Paxton, created by Tanguy Chau and Mike Ulin, is transforming legal work. The hosts speak with the founders of Paxton to explore the pain points their technology aims to solve and how generative AI can enhance lawyers’ capabilities.

Tanguy and Mike discuss their backgrounds in AI, regulatory compliance, venture capital, and management consulting. This diverse experience informed their vision for Paxton as an AI assistant specifically built for legal and compliance professionals. They explain that Paxton is trained on millions of legal documents and regulations, allowing it to search this vast knowledge and retrieve highly relevant information rapidly. A key feature they highlight is Paxton’s accuracy in citing sources, with every sentence linked back to the original text.

One of the key features of Paxton is that it can automate repetitive, low-value legal work to make lawyers more efficient. Tanguy notes that tasks like reviewing thousands of sales contracts clause-by-clause or compiling 50-state surveys that once took weeks can now be done by Paxton in minutes. Mike discusses Paxton’s advanced document comparison capabilities that go beyond keyword matching to understand meaning and intent. This allows quick, substantive analysis of contracts, marketing materials, and more.

Exploring the future, Mike predicts that like software developers, lawyers who embrace AI will become much more productive. But higher-level strategic thinking will remain uniquely human. Tanguy shares an analogy of a human on a bicycle outpacing a condor, the most efficient animal. He believes combining human creativity with AI tools like Paxton will enable radically new levels of efficiency and capability.

Paxton.AI’s Tanguy and Mike make a compelling case that AI-powered tools such as Paxton will fundamentally transform legal work. By automating repetitive tasks, AI will free lawyers to focus on high-value, client-facing work. Overall, this episode provides great insights into how generative AI may soon become indispensable for legal professionals seeking to improve their productivity and capabilities.

As a special treat, we wrap up the interview with a demonstration of Paxton.AI’s capabilities. (YouTube only)

Links:

• ⁠Paxton AI (try the Beta for free)⁠

• ⁠Forbes Article: Unlocking The 10x Lawyer: How Generative AI Can Transform The Legal Landscape⁠

• ⁠Using Generative AI to analyze the 45 page Trump Indictment using Paxton AI⁠

• ⁠Unveiling Paxton AI’s Newest Features: Boolean Composer and Document Compare⁠

• ⁠Instantly Analyzing the Congressional UFO Hearing with Generative AI powered by Paxton AI⁠

Transcript:…

Continue Reading Paxton.AI’s Tanguy Chau & Michael Ulin: How AI Allows Legal Work to Soar to New Heights (TGIR Ep. 220)

On this episode of The Geek in Review podcast, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interview Kris Martin, Executive Vice President at Harbor, to discuss innovation, AI, and the future of technology in the legal industry.

They open the show by talking about Harbor’s upcoming LINKS conference and its keynote focused on exploring human potential in the age of AI. Kris provides background on how the conference originated from an annual survey Harbor conducts to take the pulse of the legal community. He explains Harbor’s goal is to support legal organizations through insights, research, and events like the LINKS conference.

The discussion moves to AI trends and Jean O’Grady and Harbor’s strategic Start/Stop Survey results. The survey reveals 93% of firms are actively exploring AI tools, with top vendors being Casetext and Thomson Reuters. Kris emphasizes law librarians play a crucial role in evaluating new AI technologies and guiding procurement decisions as firms adopt these tools.

However, with tight budgets at most firms, Kris Martin points out it’s also important to audit usage data of existing resources. This helps inform negotiations with vendors to find cost savings on research contracts. He notes legal research tools will inevitably integrate more tightly into lawyers’ daily workflows in the future. To facilitate this, Kris introduces the concept of “citizen coders” – enabling lawyers to articulate their needs and processes in technology and code terms rather than just legal terms.

Shifting gears, Kris elaborates on Harbor’s recent rebranding from HBR Consulting, which brought six previously merged companies together under one unified brand and mission. He explains that true integration requires deep alignment across the merged organizations on culture, vision, and values. This allows Harbor to provide end-to-end solutions for legal organizations.

Looking to the future, Kris predicts legal research will become even more embedded into lawyer workflows over the next 2-5 years, rather than a separate step. He sees law libraries’ roles evolving as AI capabilities increasingly integrate into legal processes and tools. Rather than going to a separate platform for research, lawyers will access these AI-enhanced tools in their daily workflows.

Overall, the wide-ranging discussion provides insights into Harbor’s efforts to support the legal community through conferences, research, and integrating emerging technologies. Kris highlights the importance of law librarians evaluating and implementing new AI tools while also managing costs through audits. He leaves listeners with an optimistic vision for the future where legal research and lawyers’ needs are more tightly connected through technology.

Links:

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ |  ⁠Spotify⁠ | YouTube (NEW!)
Contact Us:
Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
Threads: @glambertpod or @gebauerm66
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠
Transcript

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Continue Reading LINKS, Citizen Coders & Auditing Shelfware: Insights from Harbor’s Kris Martin

This week we are joined by Brandon Wiebe, General Counsel and Head of Privacy at Transcend. Brandon discusses the company’s mission to develop privacy and AI solutions. He outlines the evolution from manual governance to technical solutions integrated into data systems. Transcend saw a need for more technical privacy and AI governance as data processing advanced across organizations.

Wiebe provides examples of AI governance challenges, such as engineering teams using GitHub Copilot and sales/marketing teams using tools like Jasper. He created a lightweight AI Code of Conduct at Transcend to give guidance on responsible AI adoption. He believes technical enforcement like cataloging AI systems will also be key.

On ESG governance changes, Wiebe sees parallels to privacy regulation evolving from voluntary principles to specific technical requirements. He expects AI governance will follow a similar path but much faster, requiring legal teams to become technical experts. Engaging early and lightweight in development is key.

Transcend’s new Pathfinder tool provides observability into AI systems to enable governance. It acts as an intermediary layer between internal tools and foundation models like OpenAI. Pathfinder aims to provide oversight and auditability into these AI systems.

Looking ahead, Wiebe believes GCs must develop deep expertise in AI technology, either themselves or by building internal teams. Understanding the technology will allow counsels to provide practical and discrete advice as adoption accelerates. Technical literacy will be critical.

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ |  ⁠Spotify⁠ | YouTube (NEW!)

Contact Us:

Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
Threads: @glambertpod or @gebauerm66
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript

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Continue Reading Observing the Black Box: Transcend’s Brandon Wiebe’s Insights into Governing Emerging AI Systems (TGIR Ep. 218)

This week on The Geek in Review, hosts Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer spoke with Katie DeBord and Kristin Zmrhal, two vice presidents from legal tech company DISCO. Greg kicked off the episode by discussing his recent work with a Houston nonprofit called Project Remix Ventures that helps at-risk youth. He took their leader on a visit to innovation hub The Ion to showcase reinventing old spaces for new purposes, like DISCO has done with legal tech. The hosts then welcomed Katie DeBord, who moved from being Chief Innovation Officer at law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner to DISCO. In her current role, Katie focuses on leveraging technology like AI to improve the litigation process for lawyers. She drew experience from her past analyst role at the CIA, where she honed her skills in synthesizing complex data sources.

The hosts also introduced Kristin Zmrhal, who has over 20 years of experience in the legal tech space. At DISCO, she helped build their eDiscovery products and services. Kristin explained that DISCO’s vision is to create great legal technology that helps lawyers find evidence faster. Their product suite now covers the entire litigation lifecycle, from intake to discovery to case management. DISCO uses AI tools like their new Celia application to automatically surface insights from case documents, allowing lawyers to review documents more efficiently. They are also careful to cite sources to ensure transparency.

In terms of company culture, Katie and Kristin discussed how DISCO values rapid experimentation, quick decision-making, and collaborating as a team. They also emphasize empathy in how they treat each other and design products for users. Being a public company also gives employees a sense of ownership. On the innovation side, Katie sees billable hours changing due to advancing legal technology, which will impact law firm profitability models. Kristin predicts AI adoption will reach a tipping point in legal tech within 2-5 years, drastically improving processes like eDiscovery. However, regulating AI poses challenges for the legal industry.

For giving back, DISCO has community service and pro bono programs. DISCO Cares allows employees to volunteer locally. Through DISCO Pro Bono, they donate their technology to support pro bono legal matters. This aligns with their mission of making legal services more accessible. When asked for parting thoughts, Katie emphasized lawyers needing to leverage professionals from adjacent disciplines as part of their teams. Kristin reiterated that this is the most exciting time in her 20 year legal tech career, with AI poised to transform legal workflows.

This engaging discussion provided insights into DISCO’s innovative products and empathetic culture. With seasoned experts like Katie and Kristin leading the way, DISCO seems well-positioned to help shape the future of legal technology. Listeners can connect with Katie and Kristin on LinkedIn and find out more about DISCO’s offerings at csdisco.com. Be sure to stay tuned to The Geek in Review for more insights from leaders in legal tech.

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ |  ⁠Spotify⁠ | YouTube (NEW!)

Contact Us:

Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
Threads: @glambertpod or @gebauerm66
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠Transcript…

Continue Reading Fast, Smart, and Empathetic: How DISCO’s Culture Drives Legal Tech Innovation (TGIR Ep. 217)

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.

Links:

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ |  ⁠Spotify⁠ | YouTube (NEW!)

Contact Us:

Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
Threads: @glambertpod or @gebauerm66
Voicemail: 713-487-7821 Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠Transcript…

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

In this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interview Laura Leopard, founder and CEO of Leopard Solutions, about succession planning challenges facing law firms. Leopard explains that many firms have partners nearing retirement age but no concrete plans for transitioning clients and leadership. This lack of succession planning threatens law firms’ futures.

Laura mentions that to make matters worse, the path to equity partnership is getting longer, making it harder to retain promising senior associates and counsel. Firms have added non-equity partner roles, keeping equity partner numbers small to inflate profits per partner. Leadership lacks incentives to retire, with no retirement plans or continued compensation. All this will hamper recruiting efforts, as younger generations prioritize work-life balance.

She recommends that in order to retain mid-career attorneys, firms must rethink policies on remote work, billable hours, and flexibility. Virtual firms with better lifestyle offerings are growing competitors. But firms seem unwilling to change. Leopard argues everything should be on the table for analysis by outside consultants. Phased retirements and succession mentoring could also help transition clients and power.

Though Laura Leopard (and even Bruce MacEwan) cannot point to examples of firms that have executed succession planning well, it is possible with courageous leadership. She advises setting retirement age limits, crafting written plans, and easing older partners’ exits. A too-big-to-fail mentality persists despite serious business vulnerabilities if talent is not retained and recruited.

Looking ahead, Leopard predicts the rise of virtual firms will shake up the legal industry as they encroach on Big Law territory with alternative fee arrangements. The pandemic accelerated dissatisfaction with law firm partnership and policies. As generational divides grow, flexible virtual firms will keep gaining ground over more rigid large firms.

This engaging discussion unpacks the complex dynamics around law firm succession planning and existential threats posed by lack of preparation. As partners cling to power, can bold leaders emerge to implement creative solutions and secure these institutions’ longevity? Tune in for an insightful examination of forces reshaping the legal landscape.

Links:

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ |  ⁠Spotify⁠ | YouTube (NEW!)

Contact Us:

Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
Threads: @glambertpod or @gebauerm66
Voicemail: 713-487-7821 Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠Transcript

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Continue Reading Laura Leopard on Law Firms’ Current Succession Planning: Step One – Do Nothing (TGIR Ep. 215)

The Geek in Review podcast hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interviewed ⁠Nicole Clark⁠, CEO of ⁠Trellis⁠, about their new Law Firm Intelligence tool (LFI). This tool allows law firms to analyze aggregated and normalized state trial court data to gain competitive intelligence across cases, practice areas, and performance. Collecting this unstructured data from county courts is very challenging, but provides valuable business insights.

The Law Firm Intelligence tool enables firms to identify growth opportunities, benchmark themselves, and drill down into the data to find strategic insights. Firms can slice and dice the data by region, practice area, time period, and other parameters to get to the most relevant information. LFI also gives litigators specific insights into judges, opposing counsel tactics, and case outcomes.

Trellis uses both technology and human QA processes to ensure the accuracy of the raw trial court data. The data comes directly from the courts, without any alterations by Trellis. This allows Trellis to spot trends like hotspots for certain case types, which can inform law firm strategy and policy implications.

As a newer legal tech company, Trellis initially had to overcome skepticism and get large firms to try their product. But steady growth has now built their credibility. Nicole Clark discussed the challenges of selling into the legal industry as a startup.

Trellis has exciting new AI capabilities in development that will leverage the trove of state court data they have aggregated. While widespread adoption of AI in legal is coming, though the timeline is uncertain. Clark predicts more law firm consolidation and AI startups, but cautions against overestimating what legal tasks AI can solve.

Links Mention:

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ |  ⁠Spotify⁠

Contact Us:

Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
Threads: @glambertpod or @gebauerm66
Voicemail: 713-487-7821 Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠Transcript

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Continue Reading Trellis’ Nicole Clark on Leveraging State Court Data for Competitive Advantage (TGIR Ep. 214)

Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle of HyperDraft, return to The Geek in Review podcast to provide an update on the state of generative AI in the legal industry. It has been 6 months since their last appearance, when the AI Hype Cycle was on the rise. We wanted to get them back on the show to see where we are on that hype cycle at the moment.

While hype around tools like ChatGPT has started to level off, Tony and Ashley note there is still a lot of misinformation and unrealistic expectations about what this technology can currently achieve. Over the past few months, HyperDraft has received an influx of requests from law firms and legal departments for education and consulting on how to practically apply AI like large language models. Many organizations feel pressure from management to “do something” with AI, but lack a clear understanding of the concrete problems they aim to solve. This results in a solution in search of a problem situation.

Tony and Ashley provide several key lessons learned regarding limitations of generative AI. It is not a magic bullet or panacea – you still have to put in the work to standardize processes before automating them. The technology excels at research, data extraction and summarization, but struggles to create final, high-quality legal work product. If the issue being addressed is about standardizing processes or topics, then having the ability to create 50 different ways to answer the issue doesn’t create standards, it creates chaos.

Current useful applications center on legal research, brainstorming, administrative tasks – not mission-critical legal analysis. The hype around generative AI could dampen innovation in process automation using robotic process automation and expert systems. Casetext’s acquisition by Thomson Reuters illustrates the present-day limitations of large language models trained primarily on case law.

Looking to the near future, Tony and Ashley predict the AI hype cycle will continue to fizzle out as focus shifts to education and literacy around all forms of AI. More legal tech products will likely combine specialized AI tools with large language models. And law firms may finally move towards flat rate billing models in order to meet client expectations around efficiency gains from AI.

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Contact Us:

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

⁠⁠Transcript…

Continue Reading You Still Need to Put in the Work: Hyperdraft’s Ashley Carlisle and Tony Thai on the AI Hype Cycle (TGIR Ep. 213)