Latest / AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers / Episode 011 From Dabbling to Deployment: How Lawyers Actually Use AI

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Episode 011 From Dabbling to Deployment: How Lawyers Actually Use 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_03: There's a moment coming for every lawyer using AI, where you go from just playing with it to actually using it in a real case.
0:24
SPEAKER_03: And that's where things can get interesting.
0:27
SPEAKER_03: Today I'm talking with Matt McCune, a 25-year consumer bankruptcy attorney.
0:33
SPEAKER_03: So, so we're we're going to be bankruptcy intensive today, who is actively rebuilding his practice around AI.
0:40
SPEAKER_03: He's not talking about it, he's doing it.
0:43
SPEAKER_03: So I'm Ron Dresher.
0:44
SPEAKER_03: I'm Heather Gardner.
0:45
SPEAKER_03: And today we're welcoming Matt McCune to the podcast.
0:50
SPEAKER_03: Matt, before we get into AI, who are you?
0:53
SPEAKER_03: Why are we talking to you?
0:54
SPEAKER_02: Hello, my name is Matt McCune.
0:56
SPEAKER_02: I am a consumer bankruptcy attorney in Colorado.
0:59
SPEAKER_02: This is my 25th year, the long slog in the uh what we call the swamp around here.
1:05
SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, I basically came out of law school.
1:08
SPEAKER_02: My story was a bit unique.
1:10
SPEAKER_02: I went bankrupt, actually.
1:11
SPEAKER_02: I was my own first client.
1:13
SPEAKER_02: The dot-com bomb got me, and I learned what a margin call was when I was in the middle of law school, and that was an education for me.
1:20
SPEAKER_02: And so I experimented on myself right out of law school.
1:23
SPEAKER_02: I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.
1:25
SPEAKER_02: I guess I just found a job, and I hung my shingle 25 years ago and and I went for it.
1:31
SPEAKER_02: And uh two and a half decades later, here I am, kind of at the at the pinnacle of probably my earning power and and legal expertise.
1:40
SPEAKER_02: And instead of just riding that gravy train to the end, I figured, well, what fun is that?
1:44
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna blow everything up and uh build it over with uh with uh what I believe is the fourth industrial revolution.
1:51
SPEAKER_03: All right, which is the AI revolution.
1:53
SPEAKER_03: So at this point, to me, anybody who is really using AI, it's are still early adopters.
2:01
SPEAKER_03: Um have have disgusters right up my alley already.
2:06
SPEAKER_03: Right.
2:07
SPEAKER_03: So so my question is all right, have you always been an early tech adopter?
2:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I was always curious.
2:14
SPEAKER_02: So I came out at an interesting time because I come out of law school really kind of with the internet, and then you know, and for me it was easy to to quickly break into the market because I had a website, right?
2:26
SPEAKER_02: You know, the majority of attorneys that were at the high level at that point didn't even have a website up.
2:31
SPEAKER_02: So so that was something that that I benefited from.
2:35
SPEAKER_02: But the counter to that was over the two and a half decades that I've been in practice, I've seen, you know, really what I think are are not high-quality bankruptcy attorneys come along and they would just gobble up market share, you know, with utilizing technology.
2:50
SPEAKER_02: And that began to irk me because I saw the people that were at the pinnacle of the practice not benefiting from the technological revolutions.
2:58
SPEAKER_02: And then these people, especially in Colorado, we've had a weird experience there.
3:01
SPEAKER_02: We'd we'd have these mills come in, and and ultimately these jokers would eventually get disbarred and all that.
3:07
SPEAKER_02: But that doesn't mean they just wreaked havoc on the industry and screwed over a lot of broke people along the way.
3:12
SPEAKER_02: So I've always been super um just because because I kind of learned I benefited and saw the damage that can happen.
3:18
SPEAKER_02: And so I've been real sensitive to technological change because the cloud kind of did the same thing, and then I played with ChatGPT for the first time.
3:25
SPEAKER_02: I guess it's been a little over three years ago, and boom, right, blew my mind.
3:30
SPEAKER_02: But my my honest reaction was was more of fear.
3:33
SPEAKER_02: I was like, what if the unscrupulous lawyers get to this first?
3:37
SPEAKER_02: How much damage can they do?
3:39
SPEAKER_02: And so my mission really has become I want to I want to reward the best bankruptcy attorneys and help us figure out, hey, here's how we implement this technology so these scumbags don't come along and just rip people off.
3:52
SPEAKER_02: Because I've seen it happen.
3:53
SPEAKER_02: Like I sue bankruptcy attorneys.
3:55
SPEAKER_02: Uh in Colorado, they call me the grim reaper of the bankruptcy bar because uh under 526, 527, 528, right, you can actually sue bankruptcy attorneys.
4:03
SPEAKER_02: I'm about the only one in the state that does that.
4:05
SPEAKER_02: And so I so I get all these referrals and all that.
4:07
SPEAKER_02: And you, you know, you've been doing it a long time.
4:09
SPEAKER_02: You see the damage that these types of people can do.
4:11
SPEAKER_03: You talked about concern about unscrupulous lawyers using AI.
4:16
SPEAKER_03: Have you seen that?
4:18
SPEAKER_02: Not yet, but it's coming.
4:20
SPEAKER_02: Look, there's a vacuum right now.
4:21
SPEAKER_02: There's not enough of us, right?
4:22
SPEAKER_02: I mean, basically, you know, the post-boom, right, about 2012, right?
4:28
SPEAKER_02: Things kind of started slowing down quite a bit.
4:30
SPEAKER_02: And then obviously, if you were teetering, COVID puts you over the cliff.
4:34
SPEAKER_02: So what's happening now is filings are exploding.
4:37
SPEAKER_02: Look, there's not enough of us.
4:38
SPEAKER_02: And so these cases have become hot potatoes and they're getting passed around.
4:42
SPEAKER_02: And I've seen this before, and so there's a vacuum forming.
4:46
SPEAKER_02: And what's going to happen is clever, you know, attorneys are gonna come in and they're gonna utilize the next technology, and they're just going to file massive amounts of cases and screw a ton of people over and ultimately probably get disbarred and booted or whatever, but that doesn't mean in the run-up to that, because it takes a couple years usually for those cycles to play out.
5:06
SPEAKER_02: I've seen it happen firsthand uh several times.
5:08
SPEAKER_03: So, all right, so let's let's talk about AI in the law office.
5:13
SPEAKER_03: Um, I, you know, Heather talks to bankruptcy lawyers all the time.
5:18
SPEAKER_03: I'm sure you're talking to other lawyers all the time.
5:21
SPEAKER_03: Are people actually starting to adopt AI in their workflows, or is it still more of like a shiny object?
5:29
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
5:30
SPEAKER_02: I mean, so the solo small firm, which which makes up most of the consumer bankruptcy attorneys, I think we're slow to adopt, is the truth.
5:38
SPEAKER_02: You know, there's an interesting book, I think, um, Crossing the Chasm is the name of it.
5:42
SPEAKER_02: And it kind of talks about the five stages of the technology adoption cycle.
5:46
SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, most of the consumer bankruptcy attorneys are probably laggards, right?
5:51
SPEAKER_02: But the change that I've seen in the last six months, which is interesting, is I think there's becoming this acceptance of like, well, this is here, this is gonna change everything.
5:59
SPEAKER_02: And if you're old enough to ride it out into the sunset, and I got a lot of friends that are doing that, and good for them, right?
6:05
SPEAKER_02: They've earned the right, they're they're mid-50s, they're like, whatever, I'm just gonna ride this into the sunset, this boom.
6:12
SPEAKER_02: But for the rest of us and younger attorneys, look, man, you better get on board because just the capacity to scale your firms is going to explode.
6:22
SPEAKER_02: And so those of us that embrace it are gonna be rewarded.
6:25
SPEAKER_02: Those of us that don't are gonna be the dinosaurs.
6:28
SPEAKER_02: In my personal mission, you know, I got about another decade, is I'm going to try to help like when I leave, I want to leave behind a bunch of high-quality bankruptcy attorneys that get rewarded for doing things the right way.
6:40
SPEAKER_02: I view it as a profession still, and unfortunately, that's becoming less and less common.
6:45
SPEAKER_03: So I see how you're trying to implement that through your Substack.
6:50
SPEAKER_02: Right, exactly.
6:51
SPEAKER_03: Which is a fair a fairly recent thing that you jumped into with both feet.
6:55
SPEAKER_03: How is that going?
6:56
SPEAKER_02: I I mean the adoption of the Substack has been really fast.
7:00
SPEAKER_02: And so it's it's bankruptcyatorney.ai.
7:02
SPEAKER_02: You go to www.bankruptcyAtorney.ai, you can sign up for my Substack.
7:06
SPEAKER_02: And it's nothing formal, Ron.
7:08
SPEAKER_02: This is just me kind of saying, hey, here's this thing I tried, check it out.
7:13
SPEAKER_02: I'm by no means an expert.
7:15
SPEAKER_02: But but what's interesting for our particular vertical is that everything is so specialized within consumer bankruptcy that, you know, you can go watch these other Claude for lawyers or whatever.
7:25
SPEAKER_02: I don't know that it's super relevant to our unique practice areas.
7:29
SPEAKER_02: So that's what I'm trying to show.
7:30
SPEAKER_02: And I'm playing with a bunch of different stuff.
7:32
SPEAKER_02: Like I like I've I've embedded my stuff into Cleo kind of as an experiment.
7:37
SPEAKER_02: I've been with Clio forever, but I've kind of tried to silo it within Clio.
7:41
SPEAKER_02: It's not great, is the truth.
7:43
SPEAKER_02: I think you're going to be able to build better solutions outside of Clio, probably on your own to a degree.
7:48
SPEAKER_02: The problem is most of us don't want to do that.
7:51
SPEAKER_02: Who's got time?
7:52
SPEAKER_02: We're busy, we're crazy busy right now.
7:54
SPEAKER_03: Right.
7:54
SPEAKER_03: Well, that's why I'm doing this.
7:56
SPEAKER_03: You know, I just retired and I I just miss the boom, which to me is a good thing.
8:02
SPEAKER_03: And I get it.
8:04
SPEAKER_03: You know, so I've got time to do product demos and podcasts and talk to lawyers about what's going on in the world of AI.
8:13
SPEAKER_03: Most lawyers don't have time to do that.
8:15
SPEAKER_02: I think it's amazing what you're doing.
8:16
SPEAKER_02: I love it, and we're on the same page there.
8:18
SPEAKER_02: What I always liked about the bankruptcy community, which was kind of unique, is that, you know, it was close knit, right?
8:25
SPEAKER_02: I don't feel like it was super competitive, at least amongst those of us that were kind of, you know, trying to be at the high end, like the top third.
8:33
SPEAKER_02: You got the middle that's just gonna follow around.
8:35
SPEAKER_02: The bottom third, you got numbskull screwing people over, usually not on purpose, right?
8:40
SPEAKER_02: But accidentally.
8:40
SPEAKER_02: And then at the top third, you kind of have the leadership that kind of steers the ship around.
8:45
SPEAKER_02: Like, and that's where, like, like you were, and that's where where I want to be.
8:49
SPEAKER_02: And those are the people I want to talk to.
8:50
SPEAKER_02: Because look, if you're at the pinnacle of your career and all of a sudden with technology, you can do 5x the amount of cases.
8:58
SPEAKER_02: That's a win for everybody.
8:59
SPEAKER_02: You get rewarded for doing things the right way.
9:02
SPEAKER_02: Consumers get more access to higher quality legal services, and ultimately the price is going to drop for the American debtor that's obviously struggling with bills when they're going bankrupt.
9:12
SPEAKER_02: So I just view this this is evolution, man.
9:14
SPEAKER_02: Like, right?
9:15
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we are evolving to a higher level through technology, but it's a win for everybody if the good lawyers get rewarded for doing things the right way.
9:23
SPEAKER_03: See, I'm concerned when you you talk about being able to do cases five times faster or or five times as many cases.
9:30
SPEAKER_03: I get the sense that things are gonna fall between the cracks if that happens, if there's not enough human oversight.
9:36
SPEAKER_03: I mean, are you seeing that in in the your AI adoption that you are seeing?
9:41
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, admittedly, I am to a degree.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: You know, they they refer to this, they're we're referring to this as the human in the loop, right?
9:48
SPEAKER_02: That's the the kind of terminology, right?
9:50
SPEAKER_02: You gotta have someone in the loop paying attention to this stuff.
9:53
SPEAKER_02: And admittedly, even like even with my own firm, because I'm I'm trying five different things at one time, so they don't always work, right?
10:00
SPEAKER_02: And then I'm like, oh my gosh, that glitched or whatever.
10:03
SPEAKER_02: But at the end of the day, you know, if you have the capacity and skill to kind of be like, okay, wait a second, we can fix that or whatever, I think it's gonna be all right as long as you have fallbacks, right?
10:15
SPEAKER_02: Backups checking on these things.
10:17
SPEAKER_02: But once once you have that workflow perfected to a degree, a lot of this is plug and play, right?
10:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I go ahead, sorry.
10:26
SPEAKER_02: No, go ahead, Heather.
10:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you see, you're seeing this more than anybody.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm listening to both of you and wanting to talk so bad.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: You guys like what Matt is making so many points that I've been like preaching on this podcast for you know months, and that is you can multiply your practice.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: AI can serve as a multiplier in many aspects.
10:46
SPEAKER_01: Not necessarily when he says five times the cases, that's not necessarily having a that's not having AI maybe prepare anything.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: You could have AI doing your lead capture, you could have AI qualifying your debtor clients more effectively, you can have AI creating your SOPs as you build them, as you hone them.
11:06
SPEAKER_01: You can have AI doing so many things.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: It can be reading your emails, responding to people.
11:10
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, there's just so many things that free up your time.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: And he's made another great point.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: Bankruptcy is exploding currently.
11:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, we're really getting to that fallout from the pandemic, from the government layoffs, from everything we've been having in the last several years, all of the business bankruptcies.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: And we don't have enough attorneys, paralegal support staff to go around.
11:30
SPEAKER_01: So this is giving a lot of solace, if you will.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: It's giving more access to justice, more people released.
11:37
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that is a great, you know, 90% of what I do on a day-to-day basis is not practice of law.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry.
11:44
SPEAKER_02: It's just not, right?
11:45
SPEAKER_02: I'm running a business, I'm doing all these things.
11:47
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I was when I started 25 years ago, I was scrubbing the toilets.
11:51
SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
11:52
SPEAKER_02: I was doing everything within the firm just to make the business run.
11:56
SPEAKER_02: And if you can segment out as much of that sort of stuff as possible, yeah, you can file five times the amount of the cases, but the majority of what you do is actually be a lawyer, right?
12:07
SPEAKER_02: You're using your judgment, your profession, you're doing all these things to help people, and you're not, you know, like on the phone constantly like, hey, answering questions that you've asked a million times.
12:18
SPEAKER_02: You know the questions that are coming.
12:20
SPEAKER_02: We know what's coming.
12:21
SPEAKER_02: Like you're the humanity.
12:22
SPEAKER_02: I've never heard a question.
12:23
unknown: Yeah.
12:24
SPEAKER_03: I've never heard a question.
12:25
SPEAKER_03: I haven't heard.
12:26
SPEAKER_03: See, my take on what AI is going to do, it's not going to make us go faster.
12:32
SPEAKER_03: It's going to elevate our practice.
12:34
SPEAKER_03: Like that email that you just like, all right.
12:38
SPEAKER_03: I just had to convert a case from 13 to 7.
12:41
SPEAKER_03: And I and there is a little bit of risk that some equity in the house may or may not be exposed.
12:47
SPEAKER_03: That's a tough email.
12:49
SPEAKER_03: That's a tough communication that you have to give to your client.
12:52
SPEAKER_03: So I had ChatGPT, actually, it wasn't, it was Claude.
12:56
SPEAKER_03: I had Claude go into the folder based on that whole folder mania episode we did.
13:01
SPEAKER_03: Went into the folder and I said, I'm converting this case from a 13 to a seven.
13:06
SPEAKER_03: I want you to prepare an email to the client explaining the risk factors in doing that.
13:13
SPEAKER_03: And you know, Claude did a fantastic job in that.
13:16
SPEAKER_03: And it wasn't so much that it saved me time.
13:20
SPEAKER_03: That's that's an email I don't want to write.
13:22
SPEAKER_03: That's an email that is just a harder thing to do.
13:26
SPEAKER_03: So when you've got AI helping you do those kind of difficult tasks, it's going to elevate your practice and it's going to make the clients happier because you can communicate with the clients more effectively and more efficiently than if you're just kind of like, oh, I got to send that email out.
13:43
SPEAKER_03: All right.
13:45
SPEAKER_01: Saving you so much time though, Ron.
13:47
SPEAKER_01: You you're you're you're just humans do that.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I got to send that email and we procrastinate.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: Having Claude do it where you're like, oh, here's my email.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: I just need to review this.
13:55
SPEAKER_04: Right, right.
13:55
SPEAKER_01: And tweak it.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: You know, there may be some things in there you need to change, but you're saving all the time of sitting down, procrastinating, taking yourself away from other work, you know, and your podcast and your AI deep dives so that you can just have Claude do that work for you.
14:11
SPEAKER_01: You just are the human oversight at that point.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
14:14
SPEAKER_02: It's the number one complaint that the client has is a lack of communication, right?
14:19
SPEAKER_02: Right.
14:19
SPEAKER_02: And we get busier and busier and busier, and you're like, oh my gosh.
14:22
SPEAKER_02: And then you can automate these things.
14:24
SPEAKER_02: I I have a project, a product I use called Hey Gen.
14:27
SPEAKER_02: So I go on to Hey Gen, like I record a video of myself for like 10 seconds, and then I plug a script in, and boom, that entire dialogue.
14:37
SPEAKER_02: Like, so that's how my clients are getting prepped for 341s now.
14:40
SPEAKER_02: They're getting a text message, there's a talking head on there going, hey, here's the questions trusty's gonna ask.
14:45
SPEAKER_02: We go through all that sort of stuff.
14:46
SPEAKER_02: I, you know, like I used to call them a half hour before the 341.
14:49
SPEAKER_02: Now I'm calling them 10 minutes.
14:50
SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
14:51
SPEAKER_02: And they're like, oh no, we watched it.
14:53
SPEAKER_02: We're good, we got it, we're ready to go.
14:55
SPEAKER_02: Because I'm saying, you know, when you find yourself saying the same stuff again and again and again, typing the same stuff again and again and again, that's an opportunity to automate that, right?
15:02
SPEAKER_03: That is that is an awesome real-world use of AI.
15:07
SPEAKER_03: Now, did you say hey Jen?
15:09
SPEAKER_03: Is that H E Y G E?
15:11
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yes, exactly, like generation, yeah.
15:13
SPEAKER_02: So in and you can pick avatars too.
15:15
SPEAKER_02: Like we have this thing we're experimenting with where so the client's gonna be able to pick their guide through the process, right?
15:22
SPEAKER_02: It's so it's like you know, if you kind of want the old wise guy, you can get that.
15:27
SPEAKER_02: If you kind of want the warm therapist or whatever, you can get that.
15:30
SPEAKER_02: It's pick and choose who I'm communicating with them through, and that's the person.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: You should definitely upload your own video and have it create the avatar video.
15:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I do well, yeah.
15:41
SPEAKER_02: I do that too.
15:42
SPEAKER_02: I'm doing that too.
15:44
SPEAKER_02: But it what's funny is is that don't want you, some of them don't.
15:48
SPEAKER_02: Some of them, but I'm I'm alive, man.
15:50
SPEAKER_02: I'm you know, I'm super direct.
15:52
SPEAKER_02: You're setting their ego aside here.
15:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're like, if you would rather have a nice lady telling you this, that's fine.
15:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's I mean, in in the next generation that's coming up, these kids right now, they're uh you know, they're adults now, they are really used to things being curated for them, right?
16:10
SPEAKER_02: And that's what they kind of want, and that's what they expect.
16:13
SPEAKER_02: And I agree.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: I would rather for me, I'd rather see my lawyer actually talking to me or whatever.
16:17
SPEAKER_02: But not everybody wants to do that.
16:19
SPEAKER_02: And I don't have to shoot those videos, videos either for me.
16:22
SPEAKER_02: It's crazy.
16:23
SPEAKER_03: All right, so you've got uh you've got a speaking gig coming up.
16:26
SPEAKER_03: You're gonna be talking for NACPA at stop dabbling, start deploying.
16:32
SPEAKER_03: So, all right, I want to explore what deploying actually looks like inside a real practice.
16:39
SPEAKER_03: But before I set you off and and light the match and have Matt McCune go off, what I want to do is talk a little bit about our framework.
16:48
SPEAKER_03: One of my concerns about AI and CLEs is that lawyers are not on the same level.
16:56
SPEAKER_03: We've got we've got Flintstone's level lawyers, we've got Simpsons level lawyers, and we've got Jetson's level lawyers, and they're all have interest in AI, but you're you got to use a different language when you're speaking with with each of those tiers.
17:13
SPEAKER_03: And we talk about Flintstones, Simpson's lawyers on every episode.
17:17
SPEAKER_03: It's a major framework for us.
17:20
SPEAKER_03: So I'm gonna ask you: what does deploying look like to a Flintstones level lawyer who has never opened up an AI chat box?
17:31
SPEAKER_03: What is what does that look like?
17:33
SPEAKER_02: Here's the best recommendation.
17:34
SPEAKER_02: It look, I'm a single data point.
17:36
SPEAKER_02: This is how I started.
17:37
SPEAKER_02: So um I went I downloaded Chat GPT onto my phone.
17:41
SPEAKER_02: Once I figured I could talk to it, right?
17:43
SPEAKER_02: You know, the the audio feedback where I'm not typing or anything, I turned that on.
17:47
SPEAKER_02: I kept it in my car, and I just, as I'm drive, as I'm running my kids around, I'm I'm an unpaid Uber driver for my children most of the days.
17:56
SPEAKER_03: Everybody is.
17:57
SPEAKER_02: I just talked to it.
17:58
SPEAKER_02: I start, hey, here's a business idea, here's this, here's that.
18:02
SPEAKER_02: Like, so if I'm a flinchstone bankruptcy attorney, what I would do is I would pay my 20 bucks a month to get Gemini, whatever you claw, it doesn't matter, I think, whatever you're most comfortable with, and just start to talk to it.
18:16
SPEAKER_02: Hey, how could I incorporate AI into my law practice?
18:21
SPEAKER_02: And it's gonna talk back to you and give you some suggestions.
18:23
SPEAKER_02: And then all of a sudden, you're in this interaction with this thing and it remembers.
18:28
SPEAKER_02: You can instruct it to remember your conversations.
18:30
SPEAKER_02: So then a week later, you're like, hey, last week we were talking about this thing.
18:33
SPEAKER_02: What do you think?
18:34
SPEAKER_02: I had a few ideas.
18:35
SPEAKER_02: And to my mind, that's the best way to just start.
18:38
SPEAKER_02: It's like you're having a communication with a colleague or a mentor about this particular issue, and you're gonna come up with so many good ideas from something like that.
18:48
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
18:48
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
18:51
SPEAKER_01: I say all the time have a conversation with your AI.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: People don't understand that.
18:55
SPEAKER_01: You really need to make sure it's got the memory going on, make sure you're talking to it, and don't just accept what it gives you.
19:03
SPEAKER_01: Keep talking to it until you get the result that you are looking for.
19:06
SPEAKER_03: All right, so let's let's now talk about the Simpsons level lawyer.
19:11
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
19:12
SPEAKER_03: Simpsons level lawyer is somebody they've they may have accounts in all of them.
19:16
SPEAKER_03: They may have the Gemini account, they may have the co-pilot account, they may have stuck their little toe into Claude, they may have a ChatGPT account, and they might be using it to write emails or do business related things.
19:32
SPEAKER_03: How do they level up their AI practice?
19:36
SPEAKER_02: I think the next stage is before you start to try to build systems, right?
19:42
SPEAKER_02: Is maybe just build like a landing page, right?
19:45
SPEAKER_02: I I've got that thing on bankruptcyattorney.ai where I literally build that website in 15 minutes I recorded on Claude.
19:51
SPEAKER_02: So what I did for that, and you can watch me do it, is I I so Cloud co-work is amazing.
19:57
SPEAKER_02: I I think you should be playing with Claude.
19:59
SPEAKER_02: And this is the problem with this stuff too.
20:00
SPEAKER_02: These tools are gonna change constantly.
20:02
SPEAKER_02: That's another issue.
20:03
SPEAKER_02: But I I'm not leaving my chat GPT.
20:06
SPEAKER_02: And why I'm not gonna leave my chat GPT because it's got all my history.
20:09
SPEAKER_02: So I was able to go into Chat GPT and say, write a prompt for Claude Cowork to build this.
20:16
SPEAKER_02: And like it will blow your mind.
20:18
SPEAKER_02: Like, why do you only need one website, right?
20:20
SPEAKER_02: So let's say you're a bankruptcy attorney that also dabbles in the student loan stuff.
20:24
SPEAKER_02: Maybe you do chapter 13, maybe you do some bankruptcy litigation.
20:27
SPEAKER_02: You know, you don't have to pay$10,000 now to build that website.
20:30
SPEAKER_02: You can build it in 10 minutes.
20:32
SPEAKER_02: Like, we all now have million-dollar marketing agencies available to us.
20:37
SPEAKER_02: And those are those are low-lying fruit things to build because it doesn't actually do anything, right?
20:42
SPEAKER_02: You're building a billboard basically, and it will walk you through the process of how you get it online and all that sort of stuff.
20:49
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, the system structure, you know, that the Jetson level thing is the next progression after that.
20:55
SPEAKER_02: So I would just in cloud design, which has been out for like two weeks now, is unbelievable.
21:01
SPEAKER_02: Unbelievable.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: These are Jetsons level activities you're talking about.
21:05
SPEAKER_03: So now, now you've you've taken us up to the next level, to the Jetsons level.
21:09
SPEAKER_03: And the Jetsons level, you know, maybe they've fooled around with foundation AI.
21:15
SPEAKER_03: Maybe they've got uh if they're not a bankruptcy lawyer, if they're a litigator, they've got litmus.ai, maybe they've got HONA, they've got uh an AI receptionist.
21:27
SPEAKER_03: What advice?
21:28
SPEAKER_03: And listen, to me, I'm I've never been a real Jetsons lawyer.
21:31
SPEAKER_03: I've always been kind of an advanced Simpsons lawyer.
21:35
SPEAKER_03: What advice do you have to help a Jetsons level lawyer really take it to the next level?
21:40
SPEAKER_02: I would sign shameless plug.
21:43
SPEAKER_02: I would sign up for the NACPA webinar for sure.
21:46
SPEAKER_02: It's a two part series.
21:47
SPEAKER_02: Tara Salinas is a friend, she's on the NACPA board.
21:50
SPEAKER_02: We've been friends for two decades.
21:52
SPEAKER_02: Like she has taken this stuff to the next level.
21:57
SPEAKER_02: What you will see on this next web.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Like we because we went over it a week or so ago.
22:03
SPEAKER_02: Like, so so she has built that Claude calls them skills, right?
22:07
SPEAKER_02: So you can build these things called skills, you can connect it to you.
22:11
SPEAKER_02: Basically, these things need to be closed.
22:13
SPEAKER_02: It's real important.
22:14
SPEAKER_02: And I bet you've talked, you probably touched on your Kansas case.
22:17
SPEAKER_02: We should keep you know beating that into people's brains.
22:19
SPEAKER_02: You need to be on the right system if you're going to be putting PII of your clients into it.
22:24
SPEAKER_02: It needs to be closed, can't be open for the training model or whatever.
22:27
SPEAKER_02: And so she's on these closed systems.
22:29
SPEAKER_02: So she is plugging in bank statements, pay stubs, and this stuff is instantly analyzing it.
22:35
SPEAKER_02: And anything unusual comes up like, hey, here's a$10,000 transfer from four months ago.
22:40
SPEAKER_02: What is that, right?
22:41
SPEAKER_02: It would have taken you or your paralegal 45 minutes to go through these documents.
22:46
SPEAKER_02: It takes 4.5 seconds.
22:49
SPEAKER_02: Like, this is the thing that's going to make you a better attorney.
22:52
SPEAKER_02: The surprises that happen in the cases here are like, I wish I would have known about that, or no one told me that, or whatever.
22:58
SPEAKER_02: If you can get the data, the documents from the client and put these into use in some of these tools.
23:03
SPEAKER_03: You know, I did a demo of a product called Strong Suit that I haven't had a chance to talk about on this platform.
23:11
SPEAKER_03: And Strongsuits for divorce, divorce lawyers.
23:14
SPEAKER_03: And they have what they're doing is they're presetting prompts.
23:19
SPEAKER_03: Right.
23:19
SPEAKER_03: That's the direction that specialist AI tools are going in, where they have all the prompts preset.
23:25
SPEAKER_03: And there's a whole segment of Strongsuit dedicated to uh investigating uh marital affairs.
23:33
SPEAKER_03: And you could and you could do that.
23:35
SPEAKER_03: So what I see happening is that these specialist tools are going to create such complex prompt networks that it'll be much easier for the Simpsons level lawyers to level up to Jetson's level just by finding the right tool for their pain point.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: That is just whatever the genius of that's genius of that product to do that because prompt engineering is one of the most vital parts of utilizing any LMM, and most people do not know how to really effectively create, you know, really good prompts.
24:11
SPEAKER_02: And the truth is we don't want to, right?
24:14
SPEAKER_02: You don't need to anymore.
24:22
SPEAKER_02: And these amazing things are going to happen.
24:24
SPEAKER_02: And that's obviously where this thing is going to go.
24:26
SPEAKER_02: It's still early days because you know the fact that you're having to kind of build some of this on your own for your own products.
24:31
SPEAKER_02: I mean, what an opportunity for for some businesses to come along and build niche vertical specialty products.
24:38
SPEAKER_02: And looking at full disclosure, I'm in that world as well.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: You know, looking at looking at the real early prompt libraries, the one like I offered you back in 22, Ron, or 23, compared to what they look like today, it's night and day.
24:51
SPEAKER_01: It's a totally different world.
24:52
SPEAKER_03: It's exciting to see your enthusiasm for this topic, because there is so much to talk about because it's changing so rapidly.
25:05
SPEAKER_03: But we're we're now going to jump over to the other segments.
25:10
SPEAKER_03: And you know what, Heather, one of the nice things about the way that we structured this episode is we already kind of did the Flintstone Simpsons Jetsons segments.
25:20
SPEAKER_03: So if you have something, we could talk about it.
25:23
SPEAKER_03: But if you want to save it for another episode, we could do that too.
25:27
SPEAKER_03: No, you go for it.
25:28
SPEAKER_03: Go ahead.
25:28
SPEAKER_03: All right, let's jump into the practice signal.
25:31
SPEAKER_03: The practice signal section is something we do on every episode where we talk about lawyers in the wild who have problems that they post on social media, and we talk about how they might solve those problems, particularly whether or not AI would be a good way to solve this problem.
25:51
SPEAKER_03: And I'm gonna read this one because it's kind of complicated.
25:55
SPEAKER_03: All right.
25:56
SPEAKER_03: Um, seeking advice, and and of course, this is this is a bankruptcy episode, so this is a bankruptcy practice signal.
26:03
SPEAKER_03: Seeking advice on client communications.
26:05
SPEAKER_03: I have a case that converted from a seven to a 13.
26:09
SPEAKER_03: Clients, a married couple are understandably frustrated.
26:12
SPEAKER_03: Uh, their 13 plan got an objection that it's gonna likely be resolved.
26:16
SPEAKER_03: I've emailed them about it, always responding within a day or so, and I spoke to them by the phone after the 341.
26:24
SPEAKER_03: All right.
26:24
SPEAKER_03: The couple shares one email address, and up until a month or so ago, I've only communicated with the husband.
26:31
SPEAKER_03: But once I ask for information, the wife frequently kind of goes a little off the deep end.
26:39
SPEAKER_03: She's got time on her hands, she's probably socially isolated.
26:42
SPEAKER_03: They use their tax refund to move once a year.
26:46
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that would drive anybody crazy, moving every year.
26:49
SPEAKER_03: So today, uh, I got an inquiry from their legal insurance provider expressing concern about not receiving updates.
26:57
SPEAKER_03: I don't think that less than two business days is long to wait for a response to a list of seven questions.
27:04
SPEAKER_03: Any input on how to best to deal with this couple is appreciated.
27:07
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: I'd love to read the comments on that.
27:10
SPEAKER_01: I read the, I did read this, you sent it to me, but I'd love to read the comment thread to see what other people suggest.
27:15
SPEAKER_03: Well, Matt, what's a good way to use AI to deal with this problem?
27:19
SPEAKER_02: The first thing I would do is I would I'd go to Chat GPT, Claude, whatever your preferred AI is, and I would plug in a prompt that basically says, hey, summarize the fact pattern.
27:31
SPEAKER_02: Am I even allowed to communicate with this insurance provider?
27:35
SPEAKER_02: Right?
27:35
SPEAKER_02: I mean, you know, you've you've got confidential information here.
27:39
SPEAKER_02: Can you even talk to these people?
27:40
SPEAKER_02: Right?
27:41
SPEAKER_02: Say, here's the fact pattern, here's what happened, CYA, right?
27:45
SPEAKER_02: Who am I allowed to talk to?
27:47
SPEAKER_02: What am I allowed to say?
27:48
SPEAKER_02: Apply the model rules, professional responsibility, apply the ethical rules in my state to this fact pattern and make sure I don't get sideways with this, right?
27:57
SPEAKER_02: Boom.
27:57
SPEAKER_02: So so and instantly you're gonna start this conversation, be thinking about things.
28:02
SPEAKER_02: You're gonna want to verify, right?
28:04
SPEAKER_02: That's the you know, any information it gives you or whatever, you can ask it for a link, say, okay, great, take me to the Supreme Court website, let me make sure I'm I'm I'm taking a look at this rule that you've cited here.
28:14
SPEAKER_02: So the first thing I would do, and and this happens all the time in chapter 13, right?
28:18
SPEAKER_02: If you're if you're chapter 13 practitioner, marriages uh of the things unravel in the middle of it, right?
28:22
SPEAKER_02: So you always got a CYA and make sure who you're communicating with.
28:26
SPEAKER_02: So that's step one that I would do.
28:27
SPEAKER_02: And then I would I would basically ask, hey, when I know who I can communicate with and I'm safe and covered, you know, it's gonna have some suggestions on how to properly communicate with people, at least give you some ideas of what you can or cannot say, or or to what you did in your case, start the email for you that that you can start to go with.
28:45
SPEAKER_01: I think to clarify, this is a legal insurance case, and the legal insurance is getting involved because they're only a concern of the response time.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: Many attorneys work with these legal insurance companies through people's employment.
28:57
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I think this is uh legal insurance case, right?
29:01
SPEAKER_02: Can you be communicating directly with them?
29:03
SPEAKER_02: Is a question you should be talking about.
29:05
SPEAKER_02: You're talking about, you know, client communications.
29:07
SPEAKER_02: I'm always gonna CYA.
29:09
SPEAKER_02: That's the first thing I'm always gonna do is make sure I'm covered and not in it and not starting communications with someone I don't think I should be talking to.
29:15
SPEAKER_03: So, Heather, what do you think?
29:16
SPEAKER_03: I mean, this is a this is the kind of thing.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: And if I were that paralegal, I would say we have our enterprise GPT connected to our Google business, so it's connected to my Gmail.
29:30
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna direct it to answer these emails for me.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: And even if it's just a cursory response that says, I I can't get back to your email right now, but I will call you at such and such time frame, or I will answer this more detailed within this time frame, the next 24 hours, et cetera.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: But if you've got a spouse, you know, that's this upset about not being answered right away, automate it where it answers her right away.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: However, you know, you've got AI here, why not let it do that?
30:02
SPEAKER_01: It's it's already something you've got available to you.
30:05
SPEAKER_02: Build a system to where if I mean these things can oh, you got an objection in your case.
30:09
SPEAKER_02: There could be an instant email that goes out.
30:11
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't have to touch on the particulars, just say, hey, we have an objection.
30:14
SPEAKER_02: Here's a normal thing.
30:15
SPEAKER_02: We'll be in touch in a couple of days and talk, you know.
30:17
SPEAKER_02: I mean, these things can be automated and the clients are gonna love it.
30:21
SPEAKER_02: You're gonna be able to do that.
30:21
SPEAKER_01: Because when it shows up in the mail, it freaks them out.
30:24
SPEAKER_01: They've already gotten the email before they even opened the letter.
30:27
SPEAKER_01: It's great.
30:28
SPEAKER_01: You know what?
30:28
SPEAKER_03: At my best, I would get an email like that and I would send an immediate response that said, Thank you for your very thoughtful concern.
30:37
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, all right.
30:39
SPEAKER_03: And your question is gonna take a little time for me to analyze.
30:43
SPEAKER_03: So give me a few days and I will respond.
30:46
SPEAKER_03: Then after I procrastinate for a couple of days, I dump her email into Chat GPT.
30:53
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
30:54
SPEAKER_03: Uh, and we work through a good response, or even better, Claude.
30:58
SPEAKER_03: Claude's a little bit better than that than ChatGPT for that.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: She don't even have to dump it in, Ron.
31:03
SPEAKER_01: They're connected.
31:04
SPEAKER_01: Mine are connected.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: I don't even have to dump it in.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: I just tell Claude, go in my email and pull this person's email, and I need you to analyze it and help me answer it.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: You don't even have to dump anything in.
31:14
SPEAKER_03: Heather, you have just confirmed that you are more Genesis level than me.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: You do not need to be copy-pasting, Ron.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: You can configure, and I'll help you do this.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: My Enterprise GPT and Enterprise Cloud are connected to my Google Business emails.
31:28
SPEAKER_01: They can go in.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: If I'm in, if I'm on the road and I get an email with a document, I can't really look at it well on my phone while I'm driving.
31:34
SPEAKER_01: It can pull it up and summarize that for me.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: Talk to me while I'm driving, tell me what's in it.
31:39
SPEAKER_03: You know what, Heather?
31:40
SPEAKER_03: We're going to make you a guest on the show.
31:42
SPEAKER_03: There you go.
31:43
SPEAKER_03: And you're and you're I'm a guest on the show every week.
31:45
SPEAKER_03: And you're going to walk through those those workflows because that's the kind of thing simple configuration.
31:51
SPEAKER_03: That lawyers who are listening say, I want that in my practice.
31:55
SPEAKER_03: So talk to you.
31:56
SPEAKER_02: Talk to your LLM and they'll instruct you how to set it up.
31:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
32:00
SPEAKER_02: How would I do this?
32:00
SPEAKER_02: And they walk you through the steps.
32:02
SPEAKER_01: Make sure you have a cow system.
32:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
32:04
SPEAKER_02: This this transaction is interesting, is you can actually instruct your LLM to say, hey, respond in the proper tone, right?
32:12
SPEAKER_02: Here's clearly someone who's fairly fragile, right?
32:15
SPEAKER_02: You know, upset a little bit.
32:17
SPEAKER_02: You can these things will even honor the tone of how you should probably empathetic tone.
32:22
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
32:23
SPEAKER_01: I do tone, I add tone instructions for every email it's writing for me.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: Everyone.
32:27
SPEAKER_03: All the time.
32:28
SPEAKER_03: Tone is so important, and it's such a and you know what?
32:32
SPEAKER_03: And sending an email in the right tone is a big labor burden for lawyers because we're not we're not thinking in that way.
32:40
SPEAKER_03: We're thinking, let's resolve the legal issue.
32:43
SPEAKER_03: But the client needs that hand holding, and the AI can be trained especially in bankruptcy.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: Especially in bankruptcy.
32:52
SPEAKER_01: I think it's true.
32:53
SPEAKER_03: I think every client.
32:54
SPEAKER_03: I think every I personally think big law clients, in-house counsel on multi-billion dollar transactions need hand holding.
33:04
SPEAKER_03: That's interesting.
33:05
SPEAKER_03: I really do.
33:06
SPEAKER_01: I think they need the least hand holding, but okay.
33:08
SPEAKER_03: Well, we'll we'll see.
33:10
SPEAKER_03: But I I think I just my opinion.
33:13
SPEAKER_03: You know, this has been a great episode, Matt.
33:16
SPEAKER_03: I really appreciate your spending time to come here.
33:19
SPEAKER_03: And I think what we've learned is you go from Flintstones, you open the door, Simpsons, you start prompting, Jetson's, you work up your systems.
33:29
SPEAKER_03: And I think I think that's a a good takeaway for listeners of our show today.
33:34
SPEAKER_03: Matt, I want to hear, we're gonna have you back because this was a ball.
33:38
SPEAKER_03: And uh, I want to hear more about that webinar that you're doing for NACPA.
33:42
SPEAKER_03: When are you doing that webinar?
33:43
SPEAKER_02: NAC, so it's a two-part webinar.
33:46
SPEAKER_02: May 14th is part one.
33:48
SPEAKER_02: Stop dabbling, start deploying.
33:50
SPEAKER_02: And that's myself and Tara Salinas.
33:53
SPEAKER_02: And then part two, we're gonna get further down into the nuts and bolts of it, and that's with Tara and Jenny Doling.
34:00
SPEAKER_02: Jenny's the future president of NACPA.
34:02
SPEAKER_02: Tara's on the board.
34:03
SPEAKER_02: These ladies are brilliant.
34:06
SPEAKER_02: I I've been speaking at bankruptcy CLEs for two and a half decades.
34:09
SPEAKER_02: I pay to go see Tara and Jenny speak because I always learn something new.
34:14
SPEAKER_01: We've been doing the AI panels for NACPA since NACPA started doing AI panels.
34:18
SPEAKER_01: I've been at every one of them that I've and if I've been in attendance, I've gone to those panels to look into them.
34:24
SPEAKER_03: I think Jenny Doling is a future president of the United States.
34:28
SPEAKER_03: She could be.
34:29
SPEAKER_03: But I don't know.
34:30
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
34:31
SPEAKER_03: I I don't know that she wants to take that step down.
34:34
SPEAKER_02: She's too smart.
34:35
SPEAKER_02: She's too smart.
34:36
SPEAKER_03: All right.
34:37
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, this was great.
34:39
SPEAKER_03: Matt, thank you so much for being with us.
34:42
SPEAKER_03: And we will see you all next time on AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
34:46
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
34:47
SPEAKER_03: Bye.
34:48
SPEAKER_00: That's it for today's episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next time.