Latest / AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers / Workflow Options: Foundation AI

Transcript

Workflow Options: Foundation AI · AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Practical, no-nonsense guidance to help attorneys put AI power to work in their practice right now.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Part of my mission with this podcast is simple.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: There are thousands of practicing lawyers who do not have time to chase every AI product, every webinar, every vendor claim, every hot take, every LinkedIn miracle story.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I do some of that exploring for you.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: I go into the AI landscape, I look around, test products, I attend demos, sometimes I ask the hard questions, and then I try to report back to you.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's what may actually matter to practicing lawyers.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Today is that kind of episode as part of our workflow options series.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because the most valuable AI in your office may not be the ability to just draft a motion or a brief.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: It may be to quietly organize your own chaos.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: So today I'm going to talk about a product that I've been very interested in for a while called Foundation AI.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: You may recall in episode, I think it was 003, I talked about four buckets in a law office.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: And every law firm, and frankly, really every business has four buckets that matter.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: One, sales, marketing, revenue, getting clients, leads, intake, referrals, collections.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Then there's production or fulfillment, which is really kind of the guts of the business.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: And in a law firm, it's doing the legal work.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's drafting, it could be litigation, creating trusts and wills, immigration work, discovery, advice, analysis.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's the heart and soul of a law practice.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: The third bucket is operations or administrative or HR, where you're talking about systems and staffing, and there are workflows, bringing in documents, onboarding people, internal process.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then the fourth, the fourth you don't see as much, but it's personal and professional development.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's been called sharpening the sword, where the people in the company, or the law firm in this case, they do training and learning and growth and leadership.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: So here's what I find interesting.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: A huge amount of legal attention goes to bucket number two, which is the bucket that's all about drafting and legal work.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: And this is really the most dangerous part of AI for a law firm.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, there's a whole hallucinations nightmare that seems to have captivated the legal AI world.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's also confidentiality and privilege problems.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: So this is why I use the green, yellow, red light framework.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Green light, low risk, supervised efficiency gains.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead, use your AI.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yellow light, very useful, but it's going to require some human oversight.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Red light, you're probably not going to want to use AI for these purposes.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So foundation caught my eye because it's pretty much squarely in the green light zone, because it attacks bucket number three, which is operations.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And specifically, it's about bringing documents in and putting them in the right place, which I think is one of the oldest pain points in business history.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think the Chinese invented paper thousands of years ago.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: And my guess is the minute they invented paper, they fell behind on their filing.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: So filing is a terrible pain point.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: A document comes in that people want to find, nobody knows where it is.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: People aren't always sure what it goes.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: People don't always know how to handle it.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Someone's got to find it later.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now that was true with filing cabinets, it's true with fax machines, it's true with shared drives, it's true with email, and it's true today.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Civilization runs or doesn't run based upon misfile documents.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually had a foundation demo scheduled right around episode 003.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I signed up for the demo.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: And when I asked to do it, you know, they always ask how many lawyers are in your firm, what kind of practice you have.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm transparent.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I'm doing this for a podcast.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: They canceled the demo and they said, we want you to talk to our CEO, and he may want to come on as a guest.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that was a great idea, and that still might happen.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: But before I interviewed him or really anybody, I wanted to better understand the product.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I saw a webinar of Foundation and CasePeer.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now, CasePeer is a case management platform primarily built for plaintiff personal injury firms.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like intake, treatment tracking, communications, deadlines, demands, settlement, reporting, case status visibility.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's really where many PI firms live.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: So in this webinar, Case Pier was the operational hub, and Foundation AI was the workflow engine feeding that hub.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: So in that webinar, you had people from Case Pier and people from Foundation, and they had an actual PI law firm all praising what Foundation is doing.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the basic premise is documents arrive from all directions: Outlook mail, scanned mail, regular mail, faxes, upload portals, PDFs, attachments.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: So what Foundation aims to do is ingest these documents, determine what they are, match them to the right case, rename them properly, and put them in the correct folders.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Foundation also claims to be able to add tags to these documents, which might trigger automated tasks or alerts and reduce manual handling and delays.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is not sexy AI, but this is AI that, if it works, is going to solve a lot of pain points for a lot of firms, not just law firms, but a lot of companies around the world.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Something, a little bit of a digression here is that there's a limitation that really caught my attention, which is that at present, the workflow will only take documents out of Outlook emails, with Gmail integration supposedly coming soon.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now that matters a lot because while many firms live in the Microsoft ecosystem, a lot of firms prefer Google.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: They've got workspace, they've got Gmail, they've got Drive, they've got calendars, and that has huge implications for law firms.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to do some future episodes on the different ecosystems, you know, Microsoft versus Google, because it's becoming strategic, not just cosmetic.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know how foundation really works.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how long or how hard it is to set it up.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know the error rate.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know a lot about that product.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: All I know is that that's a category of tool that's going to be really valuable to a lot of lawyers.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm waiting for the Gmail integration to be announced.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I got to figure when that is announced, it's going to get a lot of publicity.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point, I'm probably going to go back to foundation and try to get a little bit more information about the product because, you know, this is exactly the kind of green light AI firms should really examine first.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is not AI that replaces lawyers, but it sure will remove a lot of friction.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe when Gmail arrives, we'll have the added excitement of bringing the CEO onto the show, which would be awesome, to talk about where this category is heading.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because sometimes the most valuable AI in law doesn't write a brief.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: It just makes sure that the right PDF lands in the right file at the right time for the right person to find it when they need it.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's Workflow Options.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: We'll be back soon with another full episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Ron Drasher.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for today's episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next time.