Latest / AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers / Episode 028 AI Skills and the $1500 Divorce

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Episode 028 AI Skills and the $1500 Divorce · AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers

0:03
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
0:07
SPEAKER_01: Practical, no-nonsense guidance to help attorneys put AI power to work in their practice right now.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: I thought this episode was going to be about an app store for legal AI.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: Our guest, Yvonne Nath, built Council Commons, a marketplace where lawyers and legal professionals can sell the AI skills and workflows they've created.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: I was fascinated by that idea because before I started building Bankruptcy Central, I briefly considered building almost exactly the same thing.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: But pretty quickly, our conversation went somewhere I wasn't expecting.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: Yvonne has spent her career in law firm management and operations.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: And she says she's now able to use AI to automate sophisticated projects that once took her weeks, sometimes months, and do them in minutes.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: And that raises a much bigger question.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: What happens when AI doesn't just make legal services more efficient?
1:16
SPEAKER_00: What happens when it makes them cheap enough that law firms can profitably serve the millions of people who can't afford traditional legal representation today?
1:29
SPEAKER_00: Maybe the biggest opportunity in legal AI isn't taking work away from lawyers.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's creating an entirely new market for legal services.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: And maybe the firms that capture that market won't just be law firms that use AI, they'll be firms that were born with AI.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm Ron Drescher.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm Heather Gardner.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: And our guest today is Yvonne Nath, founder of Council Commons.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: Council Commons is built around an idea that I find fascinating.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Lawyers and legal technologists are learning how to build prompts, skills, and AI agents that solve real problems in legal practice.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: So what if there were a marketplace where they could sell those tools to other lawyers?
2:27
SPEAKER_00: In other words, think of something like an app store for legal AI builders.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: This one is especially interesting to me because before I started building Bankruptcy Central, I was experimenting with a remarkably similar idea, markdown-based workflow packs that lawyers could build and share.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: So today we're going to talk about the people who use these tools, the people who build them, whether lawyers can turn their own expertise into AI products, and whether an entirely new legal tech marketplace is beginning to emerge.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Yvonne Nath, welcome to AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
3:06
SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Ron and Heather.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, for about 30 seconds in May, I thought, why don't I build an exchange for lawyers who want to start using these markdown workflows?
3:22
SPEAKER_00: And then I came to my senses and realized, no, I don't want to do that.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: But you apparently have not yet come to your senses.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: So how did you come out and build councilcommons.com?
3:34
SPEAKER_02: So it actually started from my perspective.
3:37
SPEAKER_02: So I have a master's degree in law firm management, and I've spent my career in the legal industry on the strategy and operations side of law firms.
3:46
SPEAKER_02: And I got to this point where the stuff that I really enjoyed doing were the huge projects like profitability analyses and setting setting up a partner compensation system and competitive intelligence reports on the strategic side.
3:58
SPEAKER_02: What I didn't enjoy doing was people management all day long for little things like you're late and the things that are just they they fill up your day with busy work.
4:07
SPEAKER_02: And when I was a kid, I thought one day I want to be an efficiency expert.
4:11
SPEAKER_02: I either want to be an efficiency expert or a fashion designer.
4:13
SPEAKER_02: And I tried fashion in the apparel industry for a while in New York and it was fun.
4:17
SPEAKER_02: But um I ended up flipping to the efficiency side.
4:20
SPEAKER_02: And I came to this conclusion over years of working with law firm leadership that my purpose currently is really just to help them make more money.
4:29
SPEAKER_02: It's to improve the client experience, of course, et cetera, et cetera.
4:32
SPEAKER_02: But at the end of the day, it's measured in profitability for the most part because happier clients mean more money.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: Any well, anytime you touch a business, the end goal's gotta be to enhance profitability.
4:44
SPEAKER_02: As long as it's for a for-profit business.
4:46
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
4:47
SPEAKER_02: So I was often brought in as a consultant, or I had a role in an AM Law 200 firm called Director of Strategic Operations, which I don't know if I'm allowed to swear, but it scared the shit out of people.
4:57
SPEAKER_02: They didn't know I was there, but I was there as an efficiency expert.
5:00
SPEAKER_02: That was it.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: Why that's why was that so scary to them?
5:04
SPEAKER_02: It's vague and they don't really know what it means.
5:06
SPEAKER_02: Um, strategic operations.
5:07
SPEAKER_02: Like, why are you here?
5:09
SPEAKER_02: And so historically, I would be brought in for a short period of time, months to a year or two, and I would come to transform operations.
5:17
SPEAKER_02: And I didn't have that time to build trust with the people at the firm.
5:22
SPEAKER_02: Change management to be effective at it requires a lot of trust.
5:25
SPEAKER_02: So I found that a lot of the changes that I wanted to implement, I couldn't implement very quickly, which I found really frustrating because in my own line of work, I was always curious like, can I automate this?
5:35
SPEAKER_02: Can I spend less time on this?
5:37
SPEAKER_02: Can I do more?
5:38
SPEAKER_02: Can I bring more value to my clients?
5:40
SPEAKER_02: So earlier this year, um, I left a firm where I was executive director and I decided to uh play with AI full time to see if I could automate the majority of the law firm management piece within, I don't know, a year was my goal.
5:56
SPEAKER_02: And then as I started working with AI, mostly Claude, I realized very quickly that this is not a year-long project.
6:03
SPEAKER_02: I can automate the majority of what I do in probably three months.
6:07
SPEAKER_02: And then I kept automating and I thought, oh my God, no, the substantive part of the work that I do, where it's not people management, little questions here and there, water cooler talks on Slack, where it's like the real substantive meat of my work, the most valuable stuff I can automate in four weeks, and then I'm out of a job.
6:25
SPEAKER_02: So, all right.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: So, what was what was that?
6:27
SPEAKER_00: What were those things you come to?
6:29
SPEAKER_02: It's like it's like what I say, it's like a merger analysis.
6:31
SPEAKER_02: Like, should we merge with this law firm?
6:32
SPEAKER_02: Or should we bring in this lateral partner?
6:35
SPEAKER_02: How many years until they'll probably pay off or not?
6:38
SPEAKER_02: Is it a good investment decision?
6:40
SPEAKER_02: Should we open an office in this area?
6:41
SPEAKER_02: Who are our competitors and how can we differentiate ourselves?
6:44
SPEAKER_02: Like all of those big, large projects that are exhausting and take weeks to months to actually do by a human.
6:51
SPEAKER_02: I automated some of those so they could be done in five minutes.
6:53
SPEAKER_02: And the quality is maybe better than what I would have done myself, if I may be honest.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: But those those kind of automations, did you find that lawyers were comfortable with your work product?
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe a little bit like, no, that's not really our lane.
7:10
SPEAKER_02: So that's the thing.
7:11
SPEAKER_02: So most people are focusing on automating legal work, right?
7:14
SPEAKER_02: And I created counsel comments to say, here's the ops side, legal ops side.
7:19
SPEAKER_02: I know this is a cost center for most firms.
7:21
SPEAKER_02: We're not generally bringing in direct revenue.
7:24
SPEAKER_02: Maybe through improving business development, revenue will come, but it's not easy to say investment in your ops person is directly related to more income or more profit, right?
7:32
SPEAKER_02: So I thought this is not scary because it's just my own work.
7:36
SPEAKER_02: It's you don't need to spend$10,000 on a consultant.
7:39
SPEAKER_02: You can spend$600 for the almost exact same thing and possibly better.
7:42
SPEAKER_02: Uh output.
7:44
SPEAKER_02: So I wasn't trying to automate lawyers' work.
7:48
SPEAKER_02: I understand that my work can be a threat to the business professionals.
7:52
SPEAKER_02: However, um, based on the people that I've spoken with who work on the business side and my own experiences, so much of our time is wasted on stuff that's not high value.
8:02
SPEAKER_02: So if we can free up our time, we can reach more clients.
8:05
SPEAKER_02: We can grow the firm, we can work on more interesting projects.
8:08
SPEAKER_02: And I think the value just increases.
8:11
SPEAKER_02: Now, when I was at a firm as executive director, and I was trying to encourage the team to say, hey, if we can reduce your busy work, if we can stop you from going to the post office and have it email letters scanned and sent to your inbox instead, then you have more time to do higher value work and you can be paid more.
8:27
SPEAKER_02: We can, we can promote you.
8:28
SPEAKER_02: But I got a lot of pushback.
8:30
SPEAKER_02: People just were afraid to lose, to leave their comfort zones.
8:34
SPEAKER_02: So that's where I took it on my own and focused on my own work only and automated my own stuff and nobody else's.
8:40
SPEAKER_02: And I thought, wow, these are really valuable automation tools that I've created here.
8:44
SPEAKER_02: Skills.
8:44
SPEAKER_02: I really don't create agents for a couple of reasons.
8:47
SPEAKER_02: One is skills, I think, gives you 95% of the lift.
8:51
SPEAKER_02: It really can.
8:52
SPEAKER_02: The quality of the skills that I put on Council Commons is so high.
8:55
SPEAKER_02: Again, it's a$10,000 project you now get for$60 to$600.
9:00
SPEAKER_02: You don't need an agent.
9:02
SPEAKER_02: Two, I've worked with very skeptical defensive lawyers my entire career.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: We're paid to be that way.
9:09
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
9:10
SPEAKER_02: Right.
9:11
SPEAKER_02: And I don't want, I don't want professionals in this industry to feel like they don't have control over their work.
9:17
SPEAKER_02: And so, of course, there's human in the loop, but it's also discrete projects with discrete outputs.
9:23
SPEAKER_02: So it stops.
9:24
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't just keep going in your sleep.
9:25
SPEAKER_02: Like you can just stop it, which I think is is important.
9:28
SPEAKER_02: So I set up council commons because I thought I can't be the only person who would like to make money off of their automation tools.
9:33
SPEAKER_02: When I first set it up, it was mostly prompt libraries and skills that people were creating.
9:37
SPEAKER_02: But now people have been moving into creating agents.
9:39
SPEAKER_02: Um, even though I really don't create them, it's a platform where you can sell them if you want to and buy them.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: Fine.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the file format isn't that much different.
9:47
SPEAKER_02: It's just an agent calls on tools and it's more iterative than a skill.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: So what what kind of products are you seeing on?
9:56
SPEAKER_00: Can I call it an exchange?
9:58
SPEAKER_00: Is that is that a good marketplace?
10:00
SPEAKER_00: That marketplace is a marketplace for legal AI expertise.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
10:05
SPEAKER_00: So so in this marketplace, are you seeing more operational type uploads or tools, or are you seeing more legal work type tools, or are you seeing some sort of combination?
10:19
SPEAKER_02: It's a good question, Ron.
10:20
SPEAKER_02: And to be honest, as soon as I launched Council Commons, because I keep my legal in a i um business going, Council Commons, I created it and it kind of set and forget.
10:30
SPEAKER_02: Honestly, it's it's a platform that people can use now.
10:33
SPEAKER_02: And I uploaded several of my strategy and operations skills to get it started.
10:37
SPEAKER_02: And then I didn't really promote it very much.
10:39
SPEAKER_02: I didn't really get the word out.
10:40
SPEAKER_02: I didn't market it.
10:41
SPEAKER_02: I didn't do much on social, a little bit, but not much.
10:43
SPEAKER_02: And then I switched to helping another client that I have in the nonprofit space, which is where I really wanted to go.
10:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, and I've been really busy with that lately.
10:50
SPEAKER_02: So just this past week, we got an attorney who posted an agent for fact-checking, which is cool.
10:57
SPEAKER_02: And so we're starting to get different users on the platform for the very first time.
11:02
SPEAKER_02: It's taken a while.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: I'd hate to think what Jeff Bezos' life would look like if he had created Amazon and thought, I'll set it and forget it.
11:12
SPEAKER_02: You know, I know.
11:13
SPEAKER_02: Building a marketplace is is always like the the pipe dream people have.
11:18
SPEAKER_02: If you can get the buyers and the sellers to come, right?
11:21
SPEAKER_02: That's when it works.
11:22
SPEAKER_02: So I haven't pushed very hard to do that, but it is this great resource that I hope will build over time.
11:28
SPEAKER_04: So you've built this marketplace basically for legal AI expertise, which I love.
11:33
SPEAKER_04: And this is the first I'm hearing of this sort of thing.
11:35
SPEAKER_04: I'm assuming the first several were your own skills that you had created.
11:40
SPEAKER_04: When did you open it up to allow other legal professionals to add their own listings?
11:45
SPEAKER_04: And how do you vet those or verify them, or do you?
11:49
SPEAKER_02: That's a great question.
11:50
SPEAKER_02: I opened it up immediately.
11:51
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's always been open.
11:52
SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a marketplace, it's there.
11:54
SPEAKER_02: Um I do, I did want to be really careful because Claude has its set of legal skills.
11:58
SPEAKER_02: And at one point there was Lovable, the library of skills on GitHub, I think.
12:03
SPEAKER_02: And they changed their name to Love, I believe.
12:05
SPEAKER_02: And I don't know if they sold their skills library to Claude or if they just have some sort of partnership.
12:09
SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure because I think a lot of those skills were donated by other people.
12:12
SPEAKER_02: So I'm not sure what the IP is there.
12:15
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I thought, why are you guys there's so much noise on social media with people saying, look what I can do with AI, look at me.
12:21
SPEAKER_02: I'm doing it for free.
12:22
SPEAKER_02: Good for you.
12:23
SPEAKER_02: You just spent$2,000 of tokens in a month of your time building something and you're giving it away just to be recognized that you're smart, that you're figuring it out, that you're relevant.
12:32
SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of people are worried about becoming irrelevant and they're showing off what they can do and giving it away for free.
12:36
SPEAKER_02: Now, a lot of people are giving things away for free because they just believe in like the open source economy and hope that something good will come of it.
12:42
SPEAKER_02: And that's noble.
12:44
SPEAKER_02: But I do think as I was able to automate my 13 years of experience in a month, the majority of the work that I can do, I realized my value proposition just went way down as a salaried employee because it can be automated.
13:00
SPEAKER_02: And if that's me at that like the height of my mid-career, um, what does that mean for everybody else?
13:06
SPEAKER_02: People are going to be losing some jobs here.
13:08
SPEAKER_02: And when they do, they're going to have knowledge and they're going to be like, hey, how can I sell this?
13:14
SPEAKER_02: So this is a platform for people who want to package up their knowledge and possibly have a way to sell it, aside from just being an employee somewhere.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: Heather and I are both members of NACBA, which is the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: And NACBA's been pretty energetic about promoting AI use amongst its membership.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: And they recently had four very smart, very accomplished attorneys talking about the Claude skills that they've been building and really urging people to build the Claude skills.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: And I know that at least one of them has the desire to sell them.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: How would you recommend that these lawyers find you, create their software so that it can be uploaded and then used more kind of generally amongst the population of lawyers?
14:10
SPEAKER_04: Sold in your marketplace.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: Correct, sold in your marketplace so that it can actually be used by other lawyers.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: What advice do you have for them?
14:18
SPEAKER_02: First of all, you're gonna help me get the word out to them that this exists.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: That's that's why we're here, Yvonne.
14:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thank you.
14:25
SPEAKER_02: And I would say I was so going back to what I was saying earlier, I was very careful in how I structured Council Commons because I come from a very defensive position where I don't want to get in trouble.
14:35
SPEAKER_02: I don't want people accusing my platform of selling tools that are UPL.
14:39
SPEAKER_02: So I kept it limited to I have two channels.
14:42
SPEAKER_02: One is attorney and paralegal, and the other is everybody else, business professionals, right?
14:49
SPEAKER_02: And so you can sign up on Council Commons as a legal professional, in which case I'm gonna verify your US bar license.
14:56
SPEAKER_02: And if you don't have one, then you should sign up under the paralegal uh route, because you might be a lawyer in France, for instance.
15:02
SPEAKER_02: And because our skills will produce things that are maybe for France and that doesn't quite map to what we need in the US, I want that to be very clear for the buyer of what they're getting.
15:11
SPEAKER_02: Like this is a France-based skill that an attorney in France created.
15:14
SPEAKER_02: So they're listing it as a paralegal.
15:16
SPEAKER_02: That's where I'm at right now for regulatory reasons and and also for just for setting the bar for expertise and data privacy and all these other things.
15:25
SPEAKER_02: So there's two channels, and when you log in on the main page, you can see if it's an attorney-created skill intended for other attorneys or not.
15:35
SPEAKER_02: That's something that I'm not seeing any other skills library indicate right now.
15:39
SPEAKER_02: Maybe it exists.
15:40
SPEAKER_02: I just I haven't seen it.
15:41
SPEAKER_02: And I think trust, trust of quality is something that is hindering our community from using skills or agents because they don't know who who created this.
15:51
SPEAKER_02: Are they qualified and licensed to do this kind of work in the area that I'm doing work?
15:57
SPEAKER_02: Is this really a skill for me?
15:59
SPEAKER_02: So our marketplace also has ratings and reviews.
16:02
SPEAKER_02: And the ratings asks very simple questions.
16:04
SPEAKER_02: Is did this tool perform as described?
16:06
SPEAKER_02: And did you modify it at all?
16:08
SPEAKER_02: If so, how and why?
16:10
SPEAKER_02: And that's essentially it.
16:12
SPEAKER_02: So that's not subjective, personal.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: It's more like, was it as is described?
16:16
SPEAKER_02: Simply, and how are you using this?
16:18
SPEAKER_02: And that'll help other people decide if they want to buy the tool or not.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: If I'm a lawyer and I want to build and sell my markdown workflows anywhere, but specifically on your platform, what should I be thinking of when I create that skill to make it more user-friendly and more likely to attract attention of buyers?
16:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
16:40
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I ask people to post high-quality skills, and who is the judge of that?
16:43
SPEAKER_02: We have all different ways to benchmark skills, but mine is fairly simple.
16:46
SPEAKER_02: It's it's the community is going to read it for you, but we also trust that this is something you believe in.
16:52
SPEAKER_02: So each skill that I have created has taken me up to 18 hours to create because I am using it over and over and over again.
16:58
SPEAKER_02: I mean, these MD files are sometimes 20, 40 pages long.
17:02
SPEAKER_02: Like they're just very specific.
17:03
SPEAKER_02: And most of my skills involve math.
17:05
SPEAKER_02: So going through a law from financials and having accurate output and really deep intel.
17:10
SPEAKER_02: So I took a lot of care to build my skills, and I just hope that others do as well.
17:14
SPEAKER_02: And so far, um, the skills I'm seeing are quite carefully crafted.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: So you don't vet them.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: You allow the marketplace to vet them.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: You're a little bit more Google than Apple.
17:26
SPEAKER_02: So I don't want to have people upload their skills and then I get free access to all of them, right?
17:32
SPEAKER_02: I don't want to, I don't feel right about that.
17:34
SPEAKER_02: So the way I vet them is I have AI going through them saying this does perform as described.
17:40
SPEAKER_02: I haven't downloaded it myself, but it'll look at the inputs compared to the outputs and it'll also scan for like prompt injections to say this looks clear.
17:48
SPEAKER_02: So it looks like it's going to do what it says it's going to do, and we don't see any injections in this.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: And I have to verify the bar license of the attorney who uploads it.
17:58
SPEAKER_02: And if that's clear and they've created a bio, then they're approved to post.
18:02
SPEAKER_02: And the way it works is that attorneys and paralegals pay a flat listing fee, and it's low.
18:09
SPEAKER_02: It's$25 for paralegals per tool and$35 for an attorney.
18:14
SPEAKER_02: And they are welcome to, once it's publicly on the marketplace, to share that link wherever they want, market it how they please, sell as many as they want.
18:21
SPEAKER_02: They keep all the revenue of every single sale except for a very small strike fee per transaction.
18:27
SPEAKER_02: There's no fee splitting, and they can use it as a tool to market what they do, right?
18:31
SPEAKER_02: Market their work.
18:31
SPEAKER_02: It's just a platform for them to accept payments, essentially.
18:34
SPEAKER_02: And then the business professionals, there's a fee split.
18:38
SPEAKER_02: It's like I think it's 3070.
18:40
SPEAKER_02: They keep 70, I keep 30, but they get to list for free.
18:42
SPEAKER_02: So there's no risk.
18:44
SPEAKER_02: You list it, and if it doesn't sell, it doesn't sell.
18:46
SPEAKER_02: But at least you have a platform to showcase your automation tools.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: So let's say a lawyer who has created a skill, how should they market the skill?
18:55
SPEAKER_00: Do you want them driving traffic to this website?
19:00
SPEAKER_00: Are there other ways that they could be promoting those skills?
19:03
SPEAKER_00: Do you provide for discount codes or anything like that at checkout?
19:08
SPEAKER_00: How did you set up your uh point of sale system?
19:11
SPEAKER_02: So it's on Stripe, but uh, once something is published, I will just make it a post on LinkedIn saying, hey, we have a new skill or agent or prompt library on Council Commons, come check it out if this is the kind of work that you do.
19:23
SPEAKER_02: In July, I ran a promotion where I reduced the listing fee and nobody took advantage of it.
19:29
SPEAKER_02: So at this point, once something is is listed, I think for now, other than me posting on social media that it exists, it's really up to the lister, the author, to get the word out that their skill or agent or prompt library is now available for sale.
19:42
SPEAKER_02: It's up to them to push it.
19:43
SPEAKER_02: This is just a platform for them to use.
19:45
SPEAKER_02: And maybe in time I'll help market more as part of the service that we provide, but that's not where we are right now.
19:50
SPEAKER_02: Do you have an app as well?
19:52
SPEAKER_02: It's no, we don't have an app.
19:54
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's mobile friendly.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: So do you expect to do some more development down the road on this product?
20:03
SPEAKER_02: Yes, based on feedback.
20:05
SPEAKER_02: I have a peer who's really working on an MCP marketplace, which maybe you want to talk to him later because that's something I haven't touched.
20:12
SPEAKER_02: And I don't think I'm gonna build that into mine.
20:15
SPEAKER_02: But it's it's another step in all of this.
20:17
SPEAKER_02: So I decided to do everything locally close as much as possible.
20:21
SPEAKER_02: So I built Council Commons with Claude, but I use Quen 3.6 on my Mac Pro M5 Macs or whatever it's called.
20:30
SPEAKER_02: I try to do everything close as much as possible because I just don't know with AI and the lack of regulation.
20:36
SPEAKER_02: Like I work with client files.
20:38
SPEAKER_02: I'm trying to protect them as much as possible.
20:41
SPEAKER_02: I just I just feel like a duty of care to not have everything connected online.
20:46
SPEAKER_04: This you're we this season we're doing users and builders, and this is such a perfect website and product, you know, person to have on.
20:55
SPEAKER_04: Most attorneys, and we've talked about this over and over from the very beginning, they don't want to build AI tools.
21:00
SPEAKER_04: They want something off the shelf, so to speak.
21:02
SPEAKER_04: We we say out of the box, right?
21:03
SPEAKER_04: Attorneys just want to, they just want it to work.
21:06
SPEAKER_04: And so does this create another category?
21:09
SPEAKER_04: I mean, this is so this is possibly.
21:11
SPEAKER_02: I mean, you guys have talked about Bernstein stacks, right?
21:15
SPEAKER_02: Right.
21:16
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
21:17
SPEAKER_02: So because I don't have like an MCP connection that I use regularly, I've tried Laverne and some other open source tools that some people have posted to GitHub.
21:28
SPEAKER_02: And because I'm not working with a law firm right now, I'm working with like in the nonprofit space, I don't really need it right now.
21:34
SPEAKER_02: So I haven't gone that far down that road.
21:35
SPEAKER_02: But honestly, once you take like a skill, for instance, and you upload it into your user interface, let's say Claude Skills, fine.
21:42
SPEAKER_02: You just call on it.
21:43
SPEAKER_02: It's easy.
21:43
SPEAKER_02: I don't think it needs to be connected to a million things.
21:45
SPEAKER_02: With the work that I do, I'll take uh 30 years of a firm's financials and excel, and I'll upload that into my closed model and I'll have the skill run on it.
21:55
SPEAKER_02: And I have this amazing report when I'm done.
21:57
SPEAKER_02: Period.
21:58
SPEAKER_02: I don't need to connect you to my email.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Email and everything else.
22:01
SPEAKER_02: So that's my need.
22:03
SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of attorneys are in the same boat.
22:05
SPEAKER_02: They're not so busy.
22:06
SPEAKER_02: This is this is ideal for small to small medium-sized firms, right?
22:11
SPEAKER_02: That don't have an AI expert within their firm building them this whole infrastructure infrastructure.
22:16
SPEAKER_02: It's ideal for people who just want to like expedite how they create a demand letter and that the quality is consistent every time and they don't have to regenerate the prompt and that, but something that they know their peers like and have used.
22:28
SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of the market that I'm trying to reach.
22:30
SPEAKER_04: So you are worried about bleed, even with Stock2 certification, HIPAAC, like in even no matter how secure it is, you're still worried about bleed.
22:38
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
22:38
SPEAKER_04: That's good now.
22:40
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: You know what?
22:42
SPEAKER_00: What's interesting to me, and this is moving a little bit off what I was expecting this conversation to be, is you talked about your background in operations and creating operational automations to help law firms get a much deeper understanding of their financial situation.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: That sounds like that would be really useful for small law firms to be able to implement.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: Do you do you have some thoughts about how you might be able to connect to some smaller law firms that really ought to know what their, you know, uh KPIs are?
23:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
23:22
SPEAKER_02: No, sure, yes, but I just haven't, right?
23:25
SPEAKER_02: Because I created this thing and then went into the to the nonprofit space for a while.
23:29
SPEAKER_02: So if I turn my attention back to it, I would love to speak more.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: Is that do you think do you see yourself in the nonprofit space for the foreseeable future?
23:40
SPEAKER_02: Here's what I want.
23:41
SPEAKER_02: I am so tired of law firms spending more money on overhead like operations professionals and not actually doing that much more.
23:49
SPEAKER_02: There's a limit to how much you can cut your expenses and how much you can expand your client base.
23:56
SPEAKER_02: And at some point, you need to come up with a new product, right?
24:00
SPEAKER_02: And so for a decade at least, law firm leadership has been talking about productizing their services, having something online that that clients can purchase, like download your will template and to your information, like a NOLO, right?
24:14
SPEAKER_02: Of course.
24:15
SPEAKER_02: But when push really comes to shove, they're so afraid of devaluing their services because they can create a will for$2,000 in a couple hours, or you can create one for$99 as a product online.
24:27
SPEAKER_02: And yet, what is it?
24:29
SPEAKER_02: 92% of Americans can't access justice.
24:32
SPEAKER_02: They just don't have access.
24:33
SPEAKER_02: They don't know where to turn to when they need help.
24:36
SPEAKER_02: They don't even know if it's a legal issue.
24:38
SPEAKER_02: And then once they know they have an issue, like they can't afford the assistance.
24:42
SPEAKER_02: So there's this huge high volume, low margin market out there that I don't see law firms reaching yet.
24:51
SPEAKER_02: So if they can start productizing what they do, if they can decrease their overhead spend on the operation side, they can increase their reach to all of these people who could use their products who don't have access to them just yet.
25:04
SPEAKER_02: So there's this huge untapped market.
25:06
SPEAKER_02: And I'm finding that the A to J space is much more open to exploring that, to seeing how they can scale for really low cost to benefit more people.
25:17
SPEAKER_02: And law firms are still a little tentative to go into that space.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: So how could a law firm profitably go into that space?
25:25
SPEAKER_00: Right?
25:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what they're doing is they're ultimately competing against themselves.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: If they offer, if they offer products that pro se clients can access for cheap, why should those clients who now they have such abundant access to justice, they don't need lawyers anymore?
25:48
SPEAKER_00: How do you address that concern?
25:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that concern is is pretty deep in the consumer bankruptcy world where clients typically are very uh stressed about uh having money to afford representation.
26:02
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well said.
26:03
SPEAKER_02: I think there are certain services where it's we're at the point of adapt or die.
26:09
SPEAKER_02: You can go into a firm and say, wow, this this worker's comp practice is really unprofitable.
26:16
SPEAKER_02: They have low rates and the costs are high.
26:19
SPEAKER_02: And it's just we keep them on because it helps round out our firm.
26:23
SPEAKER_02: So that's that's like a loss right there.
26:26
SPEAKER_02: But if you can structure it in such a way that you can sell to more clients at that cost or below, then you can improve your profit profitability potentially.
26:36
SPEAKER_02: So I think firms, a lot of firms aren't looking that closely at their profitability, especially smaller firms and mid-sized firms, to understand, like by practice area or by attorney or even by hour spent, how profitable they are to know where to focus.
26:49
SPEAKER_02: But if they did, that's where they would find where to start with productization.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm perfectly willing to have this conversation evolve from tell us more about the your marketplace to tell us more about how you think you'll be able to use AI tools to expand access to justice.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: How how do you see that playing out in the next couple of years?
27:15
SPEAKER_00: It's a great conversation going on.
27:18
SPEAKER_02: Well, because I'm not a lawyer, but I have been a property owner and a landlord for many years.
27:24
SPEAKER_02: I sold a property last year, and my tenants, I think, really liked me.
27:28
SPEAKER_02: They said so at least.
27:29
SPEAKER_02: And just yesterday, one of my former tenants called me and she said, Yvonne, I hate the new owners, like they're charging me all these late fees, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
27:38
SPEAKER_02: I don't know what to do.
27:40
SPEAKER_02: And so, of course, me not being a lawyer, I think, okay, let me go to this county's like website and and like let me like use AI to see like what her options are.
27:49
SPEAKER_02: And I felt ridiculous because I've worked in this industry my entire career.
27:54
SPEAKER_02: And when it was time to actually find a lawyer to help her, I felt frozen.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: And if that's where I'm at after working in this industry my entire career, then where is everybody else?
28:03
SPEAKER_02: This is pathetic.
28:04
SPEAKER_02: So there's just a huge opportunity for people to have more opportunities to self-help.
28:09
SPEAKER_02: And if if you're not so concerned about your hourly rate and you can find other ways to make money so that you're comfortable, but also help people, I mean, it's just a it's a huge untapped opportun opportunity.
28:22
SPEAKER_04: And attorneys that worry about their bottom line being cut into really miss the point that the under and unrepresented pro se filers are not getting any representation.
28:32
SPEAKER_04: They're not losing that revenue.
28:34
SPEAKER_04: No one's getting it.
28:36
SPEAKER_04: So it's just that people are not being represented.
28:38
SPEAKER_04: So there is a huge, of course, opportunity for access to justice to be affected by AI and already has and will be exponentially, I'm sure, in the next year and years.
28:49
SPEAKER_04: It's a great point, Heather.
28:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm concerned that so much of the money behind AI comes from private equity and venture capital that I just don't see a lot of that filtering.
29:02
SPEAKER_04: What was that, Heather?
29:04
SPEAKER_04: I'm pretty sure it's coming from all those multi-thousand dollar token bills all over all pay.
29:09
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know what?
29:10
SPEAKER_00: I I still I actually think that Anthropic and OpenAI are probably losing money.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: Possibly still.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: But the deep pockets behind them, they're they're looking for profit down the road.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: How is that dynamic going to play out in the access to justice community?
29:29
SPEAKER_02: And that's part of why I started using clothes models because I didn't want to be reliant on philanthropic.
29:34
SPEAKER_02: I didn't want them to jack up my token costs.
29:36
SPEAKER_02: I wanted to have more control over my spend.
29:38
SPEAKER_02: And so far it's been working out quite well.
29:40
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the initial investment in hardware is something, but once you have that, it's not too bad.
29:44
SPEAKER_02: But I did want to go back to something Heather said earlier about the the access to justice space.
29:49
SPEAKER_02: So initially, when I heard about this, because I wasn't focused in this area, I thought, oh, people who don't have any money to spend on legal services.
29:56
SPEAKER_02: None.
29:57
SPEAKER_02: Not true, actually.
29:58
SPEAKER_02: Yes, sometimes it's it's a low-income family and they don't have money or much, but oftentimes there's some.
30:05
SPEAKER_02: For instance, a lot of middle class families can't afford a$20,000 divorce, right?
30:10
SPEAKER_02: So now there's AI tools out there that'll sell you a divorce or a mediation service for$1,500.
30:15
SPEAKER_02: Now we're talking attainable legal services, even affordable legal services.
30:20
SPEAKER_02: So there's that whole market of people who will spend$1,500 in their lifetime.
30:24
SPEAKER_02: And there's there's millions of people who would probably pay that for a divorce.
30:28
SPEAKER_02: That's that's something we can reach.
30:30
SPEAKER_02: And somebody who needs who's in a tenant landlord dispute, for instance, 20 bucks, 50 bucks saves them from going to court, from taking a day off work to do it.
30:38
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's value.
30:40
SPEAKER_02: It's something that they can pay for.
30:41
SPEAKER_02: And that adds up really fast to thinking about how many tenants and landlords are out there.
30:45
SPEAKER_04: And and divorce.com came out way before open, way before AI hit the scene.
30:51
SPEAKER_04: Uh, divorce.com was was out, you know, online before.
30:55
SPEAKER_04: There are lots of ways to do it.
30:56
SPEAKER_04: People we we've talked about earlier how Upsol did it for chapter seven bankruptcy filing.
31:01
SPEAKER_04: So you can there are, you know, opportunities for that to happen.
31:05
SPEAKER_04: One thing I found super interesting on your website that I really wanted to ask you about, and I think is amazing, is you talk about the professional ownership of the legal professionals building this and how it's important to maintain that.
31:17
SPEAKER_04: And I think that's something both Ron and I are interested in.
31:19
SPEAKER_04: So could you talk more about why that's important and what, you know, why you added that?
31:25
SPEAKER_04: And I think it's great that your website actually breaks that down and puts it out there for the professionals putting their products there.
31:32
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
31:32
SPEAKER_02: Oh gosh, so many reasons.
31:34
SPEAKER_02: One is to, I guess, incentivize people to use it, right?
31:37
SPEAKER_02: I'm not, I don't want any ownership over your stuff.
31:40
SPEAKER_02: Also, liability.
31:41
SPEAKER_02: If you have a terrible skill, I don't, I don't want to be liable for it, honestly.
31:45
SPEAKER_02: You really have to be the expert with the judgment layer, bringing this to the market, which I think scares a lot of people from using the marketplace because they're like, what if my stuff's not good enough?
31:54
SPEAKER_02: I don't know, right?
31:56
SPEAKER_02: Because they haven't passed it through something that'll benchmark it for them and they don't know what their peers will say.
32:01
SPEAKER_02: It's like, it's like putting yourself out there.
32:02
SPEAKER_02: It's it's scary, right?
32:04
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't like to be watched when I'm dancing.
32:05
SPEAKER_02: It's the same thing.
32:06
SPEAKER_02: But at some point you create something or you have someone else's tool and you use it enough to say, wow, this really has changed the way I practice, the way I operate.
32:15
SPEAKER_02: This is valuable.
32:16
SPEAKER_02: It's good enough.
32:17
SPEAKER_02: Let me put it out there for 50 bucks.
32:19
SPEAKER_02: And it's probably a$300 skill, but we'll raise the price over time if if we feel like we're getting lots of great reviews and feedback, and the feedback helps us improve it.
32:27
SPEAKER_02: So I think people should take a chance and just put something out there.
32:31
unknown: Yeah.
32:31
SPEAKER_04: And I searched the marketplace, Ron, there are no bankruptcy tools on it yet.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: I searched two for that.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: It's right.
32:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: All right.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: We could talk about Council Commons, we could talk about Access for Justice, and maybe uh maybe we'll do another Access for Justice show or several, and we'll have you back.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: We are gonna do one in a couple of weeks.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: But I actually wanted to transition over to our practice signal segment.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: This is a segment that we have, as you as you know, because uh you put all of our episodes through Claude, to talk about how lawyers in the wild may or may not be using AI to deal with their problem that they're facing.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: They all come from Reddit.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: This week is do I need an AI consultant?
33:20
SPEAKER_00: Is the question.
33:22
SPEAKER_00: So today's practice signal comes from a solo domestic law attorney who wants to start incorporating AI into the practice.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: And the lawyer is looking for something interesting.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: That lawyer is looking for an AI consultant.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: I guess they're looking for David AI.
33:41
SPEAKER_00: Or if they're in Florida, they're looking for uh Lisa Wentz.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: So they want an AI consultant, someone to come in and help them figure out how to integrate all this stuff into actual practice workflows.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: So here's the question: Have we reached a weird point where AI was supposed to democratize technology for solo lawyers, but now they feel they need to hire somebody to help them use this technology that was supposed to make everything easier?
34:14
SPEAKER_00: What do you think, Yvonne?
34:16
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
34:17
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we're always going to need consultants.
34:19
SPEAKER_02: Somebody's always going to need a consultant.
34:21
SPEAKER_02: However, if you just try AI and ask AI to be your consultants, you will get some good answers.
34:26
SPEAKER_02: And that might be a consultant enough for you.
34:28
SPEAKER_02: Um, originally, when I formed Legal Inn of AI, I thought I will be that consultant who comes in and process maps everything and then decides what to automate, where, where the pain points are, the bottlenecks, the inefficiencies.
34:39
SPEAKER_02: And then I thought, who am I?
34:40
SPEAKER_02: I am not a cybersecurity expert.
34:42
SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna do this.
34:44
SPEAKER_02: Like, this requires layers of expertise.
34:46
SPEAKER_02: And I saw a lot of people throwing themselves up online saying, I am an expert in AI enablements and infrastructure design.
34:53
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, no, most of you are not, actually.
34:57
SPEAKER_02: But that's for you to say.
34:58
SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna ruin your fun.
35:00
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I'm not going to be a part of that.
35:02
SPEAKER_04: What do you think, Heather?
35:04
SPEAKER_04: I had a team meeting today and I talked to my entire team of paralegals and legal and uh virtual assistants and made sure everyone was utilizing the AI tools that we've allowed.
35:14
SPEAKER_04: And for those that weren't, I wanted to know why.
35:17
SPEAKER_04: And what I told them was the same thing, you know, that we've talked about and that everyone talks about.
35:23
SPEAKER_04: And that is somebody in the firm needs to know how to do AI.
35:27
SPEAKER_04: And I told them all for years, we all sat in law firms.
35:31
SPEAKER_04: And what was a big part of our job as a paralegal, it was to learn the software that the attorney didn't want to learn, you know, oftentimes to learn to use it, show them what they needed to know, or just to use it.
35:41
SPEAKER_04: They don't even need to, right?
35:43
SPEAKER_04: But it's usually the support staff in a law firm, the operations, the administrators, the paralegals, the legal assistants that are doing that, that are like blazing that path, if you will.
35:55
SPEAKER_04: So I told them all if you guys don't all start using this to the best of your ability and really start increasing your literacy in AI, by this time next year, you may have no firms left to work with.
36:06
SPEAKER_00: Or on the other hand, by this time next year, all of these AI tools may have evolved so dramatically that what you paid$10,000 for an AI consultant for in September of 2026 is meaningless in September of 2027.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: I hope so.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: That would be my concern.
36:28
SPEAKER_03: Have you met an attorney ever?
36:32
SPEAKER_03: I often wonder that.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: I you know, and it's a it's a concern for the the consultant space in AI.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, frankly, I think these solo lawyers would be better off learning everything they need to know about Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: And if they just knew that, and you know what?
36:56
SPEAKER_00: Learn your phone system, learn all the features that your phone system can do.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: And I think that'll probably take you further along for a longer period of time than just bringing AI tools kind of haphazardly into your practice.
37:17
SPEAKER_02: And uh I don't know if it's surprising or or not, but one of the biggest measures of success for a firm is whether or not an attorney picks up a phone on like the first or second ring.
37:26
SPEAKER_02: If they get direct to an attorney, an attorney's talking to them, it's an amazing law firm.
37:31
SPEAKER_02: That's all these attorneys have to do because the client doesn't really know the quality of the output.
37:36
SPEAKER_02: They don't really know what to expect in a case.
37:38
SPEAKER_02: Like it could go in different directions.
37:40
SPEAKER_02: So it's it's that hand holding that they appreciate so much, many of them.
37:44
SPEAKER_02: Some just want efficiency and they don't want to talk to a person, but many still appreciate that that human phone call.
37:48
SPEAKER_02: And as attorneys are worried about where they fit, you still fit there.
37:52
SPEAKER_02: And Heather, as for your company, maybe what you're going to have is you're gonna build a troop of AI coordinators, essentially, who need one attorney to provide the attorney oversight of an AI native law firm.
38:04
SPEAKER_04: I mean, the AI is not in any time in the near future going to be able to do what an attorney does.
38:09
SPEAKER_04: It's not going to be able to execute legal judgment.
38:11
SPEAKER_04: It doesn't have human judgment.
38:13
SPEAKER_04: So I think that attorneys and legal professionals are safe.
38:16
SPEAKER_04: Yes, are we all gonna have to pivot?
38:17
SPEAKER_04: We already have been, we all have been our entire careers.
38:21
SPEAKER_04: You know, so this is just the next, this is just the next big thing.
38:24
SPEAKER_04: It's just bigger than the things we've gone through before.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: Yvonne, I want to close on one last question for you, based upon something you just said.
38:33
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: What is an AI native law firm?
38:37
SPEAKER_02: I think there are shades of it.
38:39
SPEAKER_02: So I think it's kind of between your Simpsons and Jetsons analogy.
38:44
SPEAKER_02: Would that be right?
38:46
SPEAKER_02: So you have, if I have that right, so it's some people who are using AI in various ways throughout their day, maybe to draft something to track their emails and tell them what's due for the day.
38:57
SPEAKER_02: And that's AI tools in there telling them how to proceed with the day.
39:01
SPEAKER_02: Okay, there's that.
39:02
SPEAKER_02: Or there's something more advanced, which is AI is your email monitor and responder.
39:08
SPEAKER_02: And it only triggers an attorney to come in when an attorney needs to come in for attorney input.
39:13
SPEAKER_02: And I don't think many firms are there, honestly.
39:17
SPEAKER_02: So I think a truly AI native one is one that was started recently.
39:22
SPEAKER_02: Cause I think you in order to really change, you have to quit what you're doing.
39:25
SPEAKER_02: And to do that, you have to leave your firm and start over, start from scratch, and try to incorporate as much AI as you can from the beginning.
39:31
SPEAKER_02: I think that's a truly AI native law firm.
39:33
SPEAKER_02: It was born with AI.
39:35
SPEAKER_04: Well, I love that answer.
39:36
SPEAKER_04: It was born with AI.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: I love that answer too.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: Born to be AI wild.
39:42
SPEAKER_00: Yvonne Nath, thank you so much for being here with us today.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh, learned a lot about how careers can evolve if you're paying attention.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: That's it for today's episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
40:01
SPEAKER_01: We'll see you next time.