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Episode 022: The Jetsons Vacation In Florida · AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: Practical, no-nonsense guidance to help attorneys put AI power to work in their practice right now.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a question I can't stop thinking about.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: This morning I sat through a demo of a legal AI platform.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: The impressive part wasn't the AI.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: The impressive part was the spreadsheet.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: A giant spreadsheet.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Categories, subcategories, naming conventions, document types, workflows.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it hit me.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: The hard part wasn't teaching the AI.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: The hard part was teaching the law firm what it knew.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's the question behind today's episode.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone wants an AI-native law firm.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: But how much work has to actually happen before AI can help?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're talking with Lisa Wentz, a family law attorney and founder of Legal Authority Lab, who says her firm operates as an AI-native law firm from intake to final judgment.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let's find out what that really means.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Ron Trescher.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Heather Gardner.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And welcome back to AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Lisa Wentz, it is really great to meet you.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing today?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing well.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: It is nice to meet you.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: So you're a family law attorney and you are the founder of Legal Authority Lab.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: What is that?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the Family Law Attorney is easy.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: The Legal Authority Lab is kind of a new legal tech company that was the natural offspring of what I built inside of our Florida family law firm.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: And kind of noticing along the way that lawyers that I know and that I work with as a lawyer were just blown away by our systems and how they worked.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mediate a lot.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so one of the things is that I would be using this in mediation to build equitable distribution charts, to build, to draft final judgments.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so it it sort of became an odd a need that people were asking me, how do I get this and how do I build this?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I loved your opening that you just did because of the demo you watched this morning, because I I think that that is spot on to what pe to what people really do need to understand is that it ai is fantastic as long as you have the systems in place to support it adequately and to teach it and train it adequately.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're a lawyer and you want a native AI law firm, you have to teach that that AI everything you want it to know from A to Z.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that teaching is a process, it's a lot the teaching's easier using AI to put your teaching mechanisms together, but but you do have to teach it.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so what I found was people didn't know how to teach it, they didn't know what to teach it, they don't know what to provide it or not to provide it, or how to use what they already have and what they already have built with their firm and not have to reinvent the wheel.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: So Legal Authority Lab was born, and um we really do kind of a combination of things for small law firms or solos.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: All of our Florida family law systems, our AI system is we sell it pre-packaged exactly how I built it.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's built on all of my forms and my templates and my intakes and the way that I like final judgments done.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: But it's done and it works fantastically.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: What it does not do is it doesn't, it's not customizing that off of your own firm's processes.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's a good starting point, but a lot of people don't know how to customize or how to build if you're outside of Florida family law, how do you build your own native AI firm?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: So what we've started doing in that sense is um I call it either coaching or a fractional CTO or AI expert for them, where I work with them to teach them the skills that they need to be build out their own AI native firm.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: Or there's lawyers that don't want to be bothered with it, but they want the end product.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so we then offer custom builds where, like, you give me access to your stuff and I'll go build your systems out for you.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you identified a prime kind of demarcation amongst legal AI uses that I've identified, which is there are builders and there are users, and there are people who you know Jetson lawyers, they want to build.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: When you were building out your system, what tools did you use to create that?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so I it my system has evolved over time, and it certainly has evolved a whole lot in the last two years with AI.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so when you ask what did I use, I've kind of used just about everything in the world to build out my systems.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: I originally started out um just recording content constantly and reducing that to transcripts and then using that as sort of like the backbone of our trainings and things.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then with when AI popped, well, when Chat GPT came out a few years ago, I started feeding all of those transcripts.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and I'm talking in the beginning of Chat GPT, where we were all still just prompting, what do what do I do with this right now?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: I started feeding all of my training transcripts into it way back then to create to take the transcript where I was teaching my paralegal or my just going through something with a partner and kind of reducing it.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then as our AI systems evolved and um and vibe coding came about, then changed the game.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: I was able to accomplish a lot more than I could before with the concept of vibe coding.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I will add that I am a little bit lucky, I'm very technologically inclined to begin with.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like I get technology easy, I love technology, I like trying new systems, I like trying, I've tried every case management platform that you could imagine for myself just to demo it.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm also married to an engineer who's a computer engineer.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: So well, that's not fair.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's not true.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: That makes life a little bit easier.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he actually originally, when I launched Legal Authority Lab, he was just kind of in the background.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: But as I started really trying, really doing the work and seeing what what these firms that have hired us, what they want from us, some of what they want from us is above my pay grade, but it's not above his pay grade.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so I actually have pulled him in and he is now one of the partners in Legal Authority Lab because there are certain builds that are just they're outside.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: I I can offer the practical side of it, the user inside.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: I have the ability to say, hey, that's not gonna work well because of this, that, or the other, or these are the things we need to consider.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: But there are certain things that are definitely above my technical pay grade, and that gets pushed on to Henry.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Let me just make sure I understand.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: So is Legal Authority Lab just kind of a company that can provide AI solutions, or is it specifically a product that runs at least partially using AI juice?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Both.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Currently, it is a product for Florida family law only, currently, and it is a service for anything outside of Florida family law or for any customization of Florida Florida family law.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: However, my husband, who is the computer engineer, is also a real estate broker and real estate attorney, and our other partner, Cheryl Dean Spring, is a real estate attorney.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: So the AI native real estate firm and title firm is in progress and in route.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: So that will be a product in the future.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then our intention is to develop more products.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: But what I don't what what I am very careful about, because this is what I have found, is that legal AI products that are available out in the world that you can subscribe to or purchase or pay your monthly fee for.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, a lot of them are fairly expensive, not all of them.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: But number two, there they are not custom to you or your firm at all.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: They are general, like if you can get it custom to a particular state and a particular practice area, then that's that's a step above.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Normally, you're not even going to get that level of customization.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: And for you to really have an AI native firm, it has to be that custom.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: A perfect example is Claude's legal skill set.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like everyone was very excited when Anthropic came out with this.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, the legal skills are built, and now all you have to do is just go and add it onto your skills from Anthropic.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: I actually, like, when they were released them, I went and looked and I ran it against our systems because I want to see, did they were they doing something that was better or could improve upon what I've done?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: And all of my systems were like, nope, you do not want to adopt any of those legal skills.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: They are definitely much more generic and boilerplate stuff than what you have, and and it would set you back, not push you forward.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: When Claude for Legal came out, and I looked at a lot of it similar to the way you did, it struck me that it was more symbolic than actually useful.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is the introduction of the idea that you have these agents and that they're gonna persist beyond the static prompt.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the introduction of these connectors that are going to allow your AI to go out into the world and do supplemental things.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so I never really thought that that Anthropic was trying to build something that was going to be genuinely useful in your law office tomorrow, but that was kind of demonstrating to the world this is where legal AI is going.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Did you end up walking away with that kind of takeaway, or or did you think something completely different?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: I like your takeaway, and I think that I will adopt it as a good takeaway.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have that thought.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: My thought was that they were just trying to rope more people in by saying, hey, now Claude has free embedded legal skills available, and then more lawyers are like, I need Claude, I need Claude.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that was my takeaway personally.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the firms that I work with, I think, you know, they they do a demo of what my AI does, and then think, and I this kind of goes back to the point you started with, that they can go in and like just type in the prompt of here's what I like to use equitable distribution charts as a good example because it's one of those things that I guess on paper it kind of looks simple.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's one party has their assets, the other, you know, there's the total assets, who's getting what, and add it up and do the math kind of a thing.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is there's, I mean, it took me months to build out our our skills for um the equitable distribution chart because there's so many little caveats and nuances of things that you want it to know and understand in answering questions for you.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think sometimes a lot of people don't understand that if you haven't initially taught your AI system some underlying knowledge base of what you practice and what the rules are, and like what's the life cycle of your case, what how do things move through your firm?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: What's your normal process?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: If you haven't taught it all of that, then you end up using it like a prompt engine instead of really using it to its full capabilities, where it's like instead you're saying, do this, here's what you need, give me the answer, and then you're waiting on the answer.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: So now what does your what does your software actually look like?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is it is it a clawed skill that you add in?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Is it is it a web app?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: How would a a Florida divorce lawyer access your product?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Currently, I am installing them as clawed skills, um, organizational or individual level skills onto their claude.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm doing it in a way where where they're connected to a source material that I can update and I can push changes through where and they can opt in or opt out of it on their Claude.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: However, there I think there's been there is a push from attorneys for it to be freestanding outside of Claude, like an app of sorts.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I have built it as an app and run it as an app.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: I just have found that at this point for me in running my law firm, it just runs better in Claude than it does on an app.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I really am pushing my coaching clients to for the moment stick stick it out with Claude.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's one of those things where I've shared with my husband, here's kind of the glitchiness in the app or the delays in the app or the things that I don't think flow as well.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, when you remove it from doing it directly and claw with Claude and GitHub.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't know how technical we talk on on this podcast, but even just having the skills packaged with GitHub repositories and and do plugins, those kinds of things alone are more helpful right now and run better than having it all rerouted to a freestanding app.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And besides, when you have a when you have a web app, you're opening up all sorts of login issues, you're opening up enterprise data storage issues, you're opening up knowledge base issues, you're opening up product support issues.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good thing you're married to an engineer.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_03: So you're you're you're saying that it works better living inside of Claude, though.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_03: Is that what you were saying earlier?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: Rather than the app or pulling it out with GitHub and doing a vertical, it runs better if they let you install it.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: And in that case, I would assume they would have to have Claude Teams or Enterprise.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yes, although supposedly I do have the ability.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, everybody who I work with has got to be on a Teams account because really for most ethics compliance in most states, that's what you need to be on for to be able to have the options available to you to comply with the ethics rules.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: So all of them run Teams, and I basically have taken all of my templates and references and packaged them into skills and with GitHub repository access, like read-only access, so they can just pull from there and then install it on their Claude, and then I show them how to use Claude in some ways as a case management system.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: You just set up a project for each client, you provide the project with the link to the client file, and then all of our skills take over and run the file.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, you're saying Claude can take and actually replace case management in firms?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I do think it can.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: The one thing I think Claude misses is visual display capabilities.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would like for my staff to be able to open a project and have one visual command center.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you've used any newer case management system like Smoke Ball or Clio or Rocket Matter or any of those, when you open that matter on there, you you open a really pretty visual of here are the documents that exist in this matter and here are the filing dates for the dashboard.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, dashboard.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: You have a pretty dashboard.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: The closest thing that you can get in Claude to a pretty dashboard is basically an updated HTML of that case that just keeps getting updated applies.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_03: If you had Claude connected to your systems and all of your files and folders, it seems to me you could have it run the skill to create and update that dashboard automatically, no?
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: No, you can, and I do.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_03: And I was gonna actually say, have you thought about doing it as an HTML?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: Because Claude does really nice HTML.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think the problem is maybe that Heather and Ron and I are having this conversation instead of us having this conversation with Rando attorney on the side of the street who's never used AI before.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: Gotcha.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Or never doesn't necessarily know how a case management system works.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like I have lawyers that's uh that I'm working or that have attempted to work with me and I've said you are nowhere near AI ready, right?
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like you before you're AI ready, we just need basic systems of, I mean, because they have Excel sheets where they're still typing things in and stuff.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: And for for lawyers that are super case management system reliant and who are not super techie, opening up a project on Claude and then having to go down to the artifact and open it, it's that's even a step much for them.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think they would just like to see it as a command center.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: So Flintstone lawyer comes to um to Lisa Wins and says, Yeah, I want to bring AI into my practice.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And Lisa says, You are nowhere near ready to bring AI into your practice, which by the way, is a response I really respect.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: The next question is how do you help them get to where they need to go so that they they can take the benefit of these tools?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I basically I start with the basics.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: The basics are what kind of law do you practice?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of cases do come through your firm?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: And what is the life cycle generally of those cases?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by life cycle is from the time they contact your firm, how do they contact your firm?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: Are they calling you?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a form they're filling out on the website?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: These nowhere near AI ready lawyers.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: People are just calling their office and people are taking notes on a notepad and handing it saying, here's the person for you to call this lead back.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: You we need lead forms.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: There, you need to be able to gather information from people who want your services without them having to call your office.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: So let's generate some lead forms.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes people don't even have the system to generate lead forms.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: So then I'm problem solving with them.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: Do we want to get you on something like Cleo Grow or do we want to build out something custom that's like a more pared-down case management system just for you with your cases?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: An example is a girl that I'm working with now who primarily mediates and does guardian and lightum work.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: So she doesn't need a whole big case management system.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: I can, between Slack and Claude and uh JOT form, I can piecemeal her together a case management system that does her billing and that keeps up with what cases she has active and where they are, and get generate the intake forms to feed her system the information it needs to do its job.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because forms are key, whether they're through transcript or clients filling them out.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to feed your AI the information for it to do its job.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever stumbled upon a potential customer and they're using a tool you've never seen before?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right, but when when does that happen?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's actually happened recently with I have two clients that are using Go High Level, and I had never used or looked at Go High Level.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so for me, part of that process is me doing some investigatory kind of digging into Go High Level.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And for the most part, like I said, I'm I'm a techie person.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when I in the conversation with the two of you, you all probably would agree.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Most systems, if I can pluck around at them for a little bit, I can kind of get the gist of what they do.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then I can talk to my own systems to see, hey, this is what they're using.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do some deep research and figure out how we integrate better.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I use Go High Level.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really an incredibly expansive tool.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, huge.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: I I have just barely poked around in it.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm planning on spending a pretty good amount of time in it this weekend because I have two clients that are using it.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it warrants just some deep dive and investigatory uh poking around to see.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because I also what I hear is that it is very AI friendly, plays very well with Claude and uh and others, and that you you really have a lot of flexibility with it.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, let's let's switch gears a little bit because you're a Florida lawyer, and Florida has recently taken measures to kind of apply uniform rules towards AI use in courtrooms.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Heather just showed this to me.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: What's your take on the new Florida rules?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Heather and I were chatting just a little before, and I was saying to her that I wrote a LinkedIn article on it, and my LinkedIn article was not like a deep dive on it, more like a celebratory, like, thank goodness that this is happening.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because what was happening for us in Florida just before the Supreme Court made the statewide provisions is that not even just individual circuits, individual judges were adding into their specific judicial procedures for their division, their AI use rule.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: So each judge would be different.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Most of them were requiring disclosure, and some of them were requiring these broadly expansive disclosures where it said, if you have used AI in any form or capacity in drafting a pleading and putting together something that you filed, anything that was if anything that gets filed has been touched by AI at all, that you need to have this disclosure language on there saying that you've used AI.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that was so problematic.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: Not only was it it is it just dumb, because basically at this point, every single thing I file is going to have this giant disclosure on it that says AI was used, because most law firms at this point are it.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, let's not say most, but a lot of law firms are using some version of AI at some in some capacity.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: They are using it.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that the the problem was that the judges who were making up these rules were not understanding the way that lawyers really practice and the way that AI should be working.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: And basically, what the the Supreme Court did, which I so appreciated, to put it back on the lawyers and the people who are filing things.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: At the end of the day, I am the one filing it.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: And whether I'm a lawyer or I'm a pro se person that has decided to represent myself and am subjecting myself to the exact same rules.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm filing something, I'm standing behind that what I filed is good and valid.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I don't mind the extra abundance of caution around case law stuff.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I don't mind the abundance of caution because most attorneys who are using AI are not using it properly.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: They're not using it set up in systems like I have that really doesn't have the ability to hallucinate case law because it's confined to the case law that I've provided it or for to prompt me to go gather the case law and bring it back if it's missing it.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: But so like I don't mind some level of precaution on case law, wanting lawyers to stand behind that they've verified case law citations and those kinds of things.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: But regardless of what tools I use to put something together, I'm the one filing it at the end.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: So why there would need to be disclosure on there makes no sense to me.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Heather, you are the one that brought the Florida rule to my attention.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: What's your take on what they're trying to do?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's great because I and I'm surprised that this is only there's only two states who this month even have made a unified statewide regulation, New York and Florida.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: California has pending regulation.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: But I'm surprised that three years in we only have two states that have this statewide adoption of AI policy, if you will.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_03: It kind of makes me think of how we talk about all the time that most attorneys are using AI but don't really know how to use it properly or ethically or responsibly.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_03: Every law firm, every business, but every law firm very, very especially should have an AI policy by now.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_03: And I think every state should have a uniform mandated AI policy.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's amazing they're saying you can use AI, just use it responsibly.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: What would be a great next step is for there to be education to lawyers about how to use it responsibly, and I think we're kind of getting there, but there's a there are so many people pushing AI products all over the place now, and there's a lot of non-lawyers building AI products to push to lawyers.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think that it's really important that lawyers understand.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in for our ethics rules, I'm pretty sure that this is widesweeping as well.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Part of our responsibility is to understand how our AI is working, where it is getting information from, how it is deciphering information, is for you to understand where it all comes from.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you're doing that responsibly, if if without training your AI, you you should not be getting very good results because you shouldn't be allowing your AI to roam the internet to figure out how to put together a petition for a divorce.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: That that is not a thing that you should be having AI do.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, um I've got a question out of the United Arab Emigrants, who is trying to be AI forward in what they're doing.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: And here's a story that service, and I'd really love your take, and both of your takes.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the UAE has deployed an AI platform that assists judges by reading case files, surfacing precedents, drafting documents, and providing analysis under judicial oversight.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, whether or not U.S.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: courts move at the same pace, it's another sign that AI is really reaching every part of the legal system.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, is this inevitable?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Is this just gonna happen in courts and at a certain point it's AI is gonna like raise all the votes?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: I I say yes.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's inevitable because what I think is gonna end up happening, in my opinion, is the more the more that lawyers start to have access to and understand and utilize AI, and and it's gonna become much more a part of our everyday practice, judges are gonna want the same level of efficiency.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Our waiting times on getting judges to move through cases are so substantially long.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: And if incorporating AI can let me run a law firm in 25% of the time that it used to take me, then imagine the benefits to a judge for being able to reduce their work time and increase their caseload to efficiently move things through.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think at some time at some point it's just gonna be an inevitable consequence.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: What do you think, Heather?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: I agree.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: And I think there's nothing wrong with that.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_03: I think just like what Florida and New York are doing, they're they're putting the onus back on the attorney.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they're not regulating AI as much as they're regulating attorneys.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: This opens the door for our practice signal segment where we look at how lawyers in the wild are dealing with their practices and their careers.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: These all come from Reddit, where anonymity uh yields insight.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I found a fascinating post, and I'm calling it AITA AI edition.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's a real alphabet soup.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so a lawyer took a part-time job making about$100 an hour evaluating AI's answers to legal questions.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: The work is straightforward, pay is good, completely flexible.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: But after a few days, he he had a crisis of conscience.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: He started asking himself, wait, wait, am I training my own replacement?
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: His wife, also a lawyer, thinks he may be helping put future attorneys out of business.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: So here's my question for both of you: Is this lawyer accelerating the decline of our profession, or is he simply participating in progress that's going to happen anyway?
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: I do not think that AI is going to replace any of us as lawyers, provided that we as lawyers learn to incorporate and adopt AI into our practice and utilize it to practice law differently, but not to stop practicing law.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: And my response to this guy, my my only real response is if if you want to work for$100 an hour to read or whatever, however much it was he was, he was getting to review this company's answers and give feedback.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's the decline of the profession, but I do always ask myself, why would I be giving that time away to somebody else to build an AI system if I could be using that same time to build it out for me?
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: But it depends on who he's providing the feedback to as to whether he's advancing things for all of us or not, because I don't know who he's providing the feedback to.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, Lisa, that is a classic builder entrepreneur response.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I totally appreciate it.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think, Heather?
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's not gonna put attorneys out of business, of course.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_03: We we talk about this often, and I think it's a natural thing that people are fearful, fearful of this, but we have such an access to justice problem in this country and all over the world.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_03: I think that AI is gonna now allow more access to justice, meaning attorneys can help more people because they can save time utilizing AI.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: I just wanted to add another layer to that.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's also a creativity element.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: When something new comes out and it's gonna impact our career, the way we do our job, we have to kind of go back to the drawing board sometimes and think creatively about what we offer.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that we build along the way from my law firm is we developed this do-it-yourself legal program, which there is an app for coming out soon, that is for for pro se litigants in Florida family courts.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a tailored AI training system to help coach them through self-representation.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of where the the creativity thought comes to me because it's like, am I gonna go out of business?
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: But am I gonna do business the exact same way I've always done business?
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: Also, no.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I personally think that this lawyer is a hero for giving his time for$100 an hour.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because as AI legal systems continue to evolve and develop, we're gonna be a little bit less reliant on just going out into these massive legal databases and asking AI to respond to searches, which will inevitably and do inevitably result in hallucinations that are causing whatever crisis there might be amongst the courts that give rise to these Florida rules.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: And more and more, I think legal AI tools are going to be built with structured legal protocols built into them that will constrain the AI from going out into the wilder, wider world and will provide a more meaningful user experience because of the correct legal analysis and frameworks are already baked into the tool.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I say you are not TA, I think you're my hero, and this also gives us a great opportunity to segue into our season two Flintstones Simpsons Jetsons AI build.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: Over the last four weeks, we've been building the foundation for something much bigger.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, Lisa, this is perfect because you you are really, we've had some great builders on the show, and I would absolutely categorize you as being amongst the top of them.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I do think you'll appreciate that what we're trying to do on this segment.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: We're trying to help lawyers uh understand how to build even very modest AI tools for their practice.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: So over the last four weeks, we've been building the foundation for something much bigger.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: First, we identified our firm's knowledge assets, then we organized them, and then we clean them, and then last week we standardized them so they were easier for both people and AI to understand.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: This week, and I'm gonna put examples of all of this in the deliverables on our website.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: We'll link to it in the show notes.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to make them AI friendly, and we're going to do it with something called markdown.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, before you panic, markdown is not programming.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, Jetsons level lawyers, they may start yawning, yeah, markdown, that's you know, that's so March 2026.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: But Markdown is simply a way of adding a little structure to your documents so AI immediately understands what's important.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of writing one long page of text, you use headings, you use bullet points, number your steps, separate sections with clear labels.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: Think of markdown as a punctuation for ideas.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: For example, instead of a document that starts with three paragraphs explaining a client intake process, you might write purpose, collect the information needed to determine whether the firm should accept representation.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Require documents, driver's license, pay stubs, tax returns, process, one, schedule consultation, two, collect documents, et cetera, et cetera.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're a Flintstone's lawyer, pick one of your best forms, don't change the form, and create a companion document that explains what the form is, when you use it, and any practice tips another lawyer should know.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: Organize it with headings and bullet points.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a Simpsons lawyer, take one of your client facts, rewrite it using headings.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: Start with the client's question, then the short answer, then additional details.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, common misconceptions.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a Jetsons lawyer, choose one of your firm's systems and rewrite it as a step-by-step procedure with clear headings and numbered steps instead of long paragraphs.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: AI doesn't just read words, it recognizes patterns and structure.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not changing our firm's knowledge, we're just making it easier to teach.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: So Lisa, how'd we do on our Flintstones Simpsons, Jetsons, AI build segment this week?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I think you did pretty good.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's a good place to start.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and if you're not understanding that, I always say you can start with the dumb questions too, with with your AI system.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: As long as you can point it in the right direction for where you want it to get answers with the markdown example you're giving, that you have a template, that you, you know, an example of something that you use all the time, and you simply just type in to your Claude or Chad or Gemini or whatever it is that you're using that you're training.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: Here, here is this form.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: This is when I usually use it.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think that voice recording is a game changer for AI.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: I record myself saying things all the time so that I can just say them in my natural words and let AI figure it out.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so that that's one of the examples where I might even just dictate, here's a form that I use for this, that, and the other thing.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to make this usable for other cases in the future.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: What's the best way for me to do this?
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Or now that they've listened to your podcast, I want to create a markdown, walk me through what that's gonna look like, and it'll help teach you.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I I didn't know what the word markdown meant six months ago.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: I knew what I was trying to accomplish, but I didn't necessarily know to use the right markdown or when to use the word markdown appropriately in my chats, um, my AI.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: So if you don't know the right word, sometimes you can just try to explain it.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think that firms, especially when they're transitioning to AI, should have a markdown library?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: However, I will say that I started with a whole markdown library.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and my law firm's formatting requirements are we are very strict because we really like things to look a very particular way.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: What I did find along the way is that my skills and my agents did not replicate from Markdown very well the subtleties of the visual display that I'm looking for.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I learned to include a clean, not client information, a cleaned, scrubbed PDF reference along with my markdown.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that really drastically improved how my skills responded.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this makes me imagine a future where courts authorize lawyers to submit their pleadings and briefs in markdown.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: Did you ever see that coming?
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't thought of that.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if if you're a if you're in the UAE and you have this new deployed uh AI system, wouldn't that system prefer to not have to manage really outdated formatting rules?
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's worse than that because for for at least in Florida, for our e-filing compliance, you have to use PDFAs, which are by definition, um, they have to be OCR'd to be able to be read and converted to text so that AI can understand it.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: So literally, one of the things that I always have to teach every law firm that I work with in Florida's AI is before you do anything, just go ahead and assume you're gonna need to OCR any pleading we give you and stop telling me that you've got to OCR at first because it's just a ridiculous step.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I certainly hope that we at some point get there, but I don't I don't know how distant of a future that is.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: I put that later down the road than judges using a all right.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, listen, this this has been a a great episode.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: Lisa, I learned a lot.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: I really enjoyed having you here.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to see what else you're going to do.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: I I definitely am going to drop a link to your LinkedIn article in the show notes about the Florida law.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: And just to our listeners, we've been audio only for quite a while now, but uh Riverside, uh, the platform we record on has made it really easy for us to share some of the best moments on Instagram and YouTube.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to start doing that if you want to get little slices of uh some of the AI ideas that we're throwing around.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: But uh Lisa Wins, thank you so much for joining us.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Lisa.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really excited.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: This has been AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers, and we'll see you next time.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's it for today's episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see you next time.