Latest / AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers / Episode 009 Lawyer Moms (and Dads) and the 7-Minute AI Solution

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Episode 009 Lawyer Moms (and Dads) and the 7-Minute AI Solution · 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_03: Hello and welcome to another episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Ron Drescher.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm Heather Gardner.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm really excited.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: We have a great guest today, Carolyn Eliphonse, who is a solo lawyer out of Maryland who's been very busy in the small and solo firm evangelist space and in the AI for the rest of us space, which is kind of what this podcast is really trying to be.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: Carolyn, welcome.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's nice to be here.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_03: So, Carolyn, I I found you a few months ago and I reached out and I said, would you be a guest?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: And you said sure.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: And then we kind of moved on and did some different episodes.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_03: But then I saw that you've got an event coming up on Friday, April 17th, which is uh a lawyer moms event.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: Could you tell us like the name of the event and what it's all about?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it's called the operative name for it is AI for lawyer moms.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the impetus for having it was I've been wanting to do a host of workshop on AI tools for lawyers for some time now.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: I do them every few months to keep my skills fresh and also to keep lawyers up to speed on what's going on in AI.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I had seen a whole series of articles about how women's jobs are the ones that are most likely to be adversely impacted by AI because they may be working on a contract or a freelance basis or working on projects at a firm where they don't, where they're not responsible for the client.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: But then conversely, many women lawyers are also deterred from using AI because they feel like it's cheating.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: They feel like they've got to do the work, you know, do it the hard way.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I feel like this is a very dangerous situation for women attorneys to be in.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I felt like having a program that was targeted at women lawyer moms would be something that could be very useful.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: And also because these AI tools are tools that I wish I had when my daughters were little, because when you're raising kids, you're always doing work between the crevices.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: You're sitting and watching the soccer game, and you're, you know, you're looking down at your phone and trying to return emails or waiting at the pediatrician's office.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And now with these AI tools, you can get so much more productive work done in those little pockets of time that used to go wasted, or that you might spend a whole pocket of time just returning one email because it was just that was really the the only thing you could do in that period of time in that time frame.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_03: So let's say you got six or seven minutes on the sidelines of your kid's soccer game before she goes back in there to score her her next goal.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: What what are you going to do now that you have AI tools with those seven minutes?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: So it depends what you know, what comes up or what you have to do.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Recently, a few days ago, I was in a car waiting for something, and I saw something come up on my calendar that I needed to reschedule.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so since I have the AI Claude tools connected to my calendar to my phone, I was able to dictate in to the AI to change, to change the date, to draft an email to the person who was hosting the event, letting them know my apologies, and then to reschedule it.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it was able to do all of that within a minute.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, before it would have taken me the full seven minutes to make that change.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: You can also dictate in ideas that you might have for a brief or for a blog post or for a LinkedIn post.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can do a lot of dictation through your phone and then have AI transcribe it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: You can respond to client emails using AI tools asking them to do to put a response in.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: I guess it really depends like what you're, you know, what you're working on, what your focus is.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: If there's um an issue that came up in a case that you're thinking about, you know, maybe somebody, you have a discovery request and you don't want to respond to it, you can look around for different objections you can make and um, you know, do like lightweight research.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying that this is necessarily you're gonna sit down and do a full-blown response to in um a motion to compel or something, but you can at least get these things going.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then when you get back to your desk, your ideas are preserved and the AI has already started working on some of them.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_03: Let's talk a little bit about the uh the lawyer moms events.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_03: What type of things do you expect to cover in that event?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I just put together the slide deck and the agenda so it's fresh in my mind.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're actually going to cover, we're gonna focus a little bit on two specific tools on perplexity and on Claude.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Claude has really in the past month or two launched a whole series of different tools that really enable it to be a true infrastructure tool as opposed to just like a one-off or a sparring partner.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I still use, I it's not to say I don't use the other tools.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: I still love ChatGPT for different marketing things, but you can really, it's become Claude, especially with the tie-ins to Word, has become more powerful.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of people have kind of been sleeping on Claude.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: I've been using it for a long time because I always found it to be best at writing.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we're going to talk about some of those new tools that have been integrated into Claude and how you can really integrate them into your legal practice.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: So how you can use them more for substantive, for substantive work and workflows as opposed to just using them for automation or for marketing, which is what most people's focus has been on before.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: But again, it's only an hour workshop, so it's really just scraping the surface.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, there's the usual caveat at the beginning about using it safely and what my perspective is on what you need to do to comply with security and ethics rules.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: So, all right, wow, more to unpack.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: What do you feel you need to do to comply with the security and ethics rules?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: Could you give us like a few bullet points?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: So, first of all, I think that it is a, it's really, it requires an attorney's judgment.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think there are hard and fast rules.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: I know there are some people who are purists who say never put any client personal information into any AI tool, whether it's a paid version or a free version, they'll just never do that.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's other other people on the other side of the other side of the fence who are just like, let it all, let it all hang out.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm somewhere in the middle.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think that some of the paid, I've taken a close look at the terms and conditions for some of the paid services and I identified several areas that make a particular system vulnerable.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: So any system you use that you're going to put personal or client information into should really have SOC2 compliance for data security.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: There shouldn't be any training on it.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: You should be able to limit the memory, memory that it saves and also the amount of time that it retains documents.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: But other than that, most of the paid plans that I've looked at have sufficient data protection agreements in place that for most use cases, except for HIPAA and for highly, you know, highly protected or privileged information like trade secrets, you're going to find that those platforms, I think, are sufficient for being able to input at least some information about the particular client, including personal information.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if possible, I would steer clear from putting in social security numbers, but um, and then for HIPAA, there are also certain plans, very higher level enterprise plans that are good for HIPAA.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, like I said, if you're representing an international spy or some company, you know, like Coca-Cola and their trade secret for their product, you don't want to be putting that information really on any kind of cloud.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: You need like 85 degrees of encryption no matter what you're using.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's where the lawyer's judgment comes in in terms of what they can use.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I think as long as there's no training, as long as there's a data protection agreement in place and you can um minimize the memory and data retention, I think that for 95% of the use cases, it's fine putting in client's information, unless, of course, a client instructs you not to.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, if you've been instructed not to by the client, that's something that you either have to abide by or decide not to take the engagement.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's funny you mentioned that because just last week I was on LinkedIn searching for people who specialize in international espionage.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, just a joke.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: That doesn't come up too often in in our podcast.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: All right, so I'm still interested in your mom's events.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: What would you hope that the uh that the attendees of this event would would want to the first thing they'll do, let's assume they're all Flynn Stones level moms, they're all Wilness, and they want to they close their their browser window or whatever platform you're on.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_03: What would you want them to take away, like the first thing they're going to do after they're done with your event?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: I want them to get an understanding of how useful it can be for at least one and more likely half dozen tasks that they have to do every day and just go back to the office and just implement it.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Open up Claude, sign up for it, put the settings in place, and then use it for something.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: And also hope I'm going to be doing a longer program after the workshop.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to be a paid program.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I hope they could sign, you know, they would sign up for that if they want a more comprehensive approach.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I hope that everybody who goes to the program at least takes away that this is now a viable tool that you can use that will save you a lot of time.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: I know it definitely saves me a lot of time, and that you don't have to do anything fancy or know how to do automation or vibe coding or anything like that to really get benefits from it.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: You know, this that whole comment about saving time and being in a smaller solo firm, uh it it's kind of a good segue to a blog post you recently wrote about MSOs for solos and small firms.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, could you could you tell us what an MSO is?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess the acronym stands for Managed Service Organization.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And from what I understand, it has its genesis in medical practices.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's essentially an organization that handles all of the back office work and all of the administravia attend into a professional services provider.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: So the lawyer does the legal work and the MSO does everything else, just like with doctors.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: The MSO does all the billing and the practice management stuff, and the doctor treats patients.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's essentially what the function is.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: What makes it different from, you know, in the past, I mean, lawyers have always used vendors for HR or for billing or payroll, things like that.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: What makes the MSO different is it, I guess I it kind of gets up in your business.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it in administering the tasks, it plays a very proactive role.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: So it might look at the data from your firm and say, oh, I see you do free one-hour consults.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: You should be doing half-hour consults.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Let's set the practice management tool up or the intake up so it's just a half hour, or let's get these cases processed in 20 days rather than 40 days to increase the profit margin.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a much more interactive partner with the law firm than the vendors that we've seen in the past.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: So that's what makes it different than just sharing space with another lawyer and both chipping in to pay for the rental on the copy machine.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right, exactly.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_03: So you use the word interactive.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_03: I would have probably used the word intrusive to describe that.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I guess you have to assume they're the law law firm is inviting it in.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it got like I said, it gets it all up in your business.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know what?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_03: But that kind of leads me to a different question that may or may not be in any way related to this.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_03: But we're seeing on the enterprise level of some of these AI tools that there's a minimum seat license required.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, Harvey's got that.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_03: Claude ChatGPT has it on the enterprise level.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: Claude on the Teams level, on the enterprise level, has it.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_03: Are you seeing any kind of lawyer or user co-op arrangements where people from different organizations share in those licenses?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really smart idea.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't seen that.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not exactly sure how it would work because with teams, you're sharing access, you're not just getting access to the product, but you're also able to share documents back and forth.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Although I guess you can also have settings, you know.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: So if you were sharing with four other family, you know, five family law practitioners of different firms were sharing, they wouldn't want to be able to see each other's documents.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it is an interesting concept.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's the the the products are moving so quickly, you know.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: I know that there's always been the minimum seat for enterprise.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: And for Claude, for teams, the minimum seat, the the total package comes out to about$125 a month.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so for what you get, even if you're just using it for one or two people, I still think it's worth it.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but as the prices go up, you're right, it does become, it could potentially become a barrier to solos or smalls being able to access these tools.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think then either it might be worth investigating some kind of co-op arrangement, or I would have to look at the tools more closely to see what kind of privacy you could have between different firms that are multiple users.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: I do know this account.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: I do know because I have the Enterprise GPT that you cannot see each other's accounts.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot view each other's accounts or chats or documents or hit or memory or history.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe that is.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can share it if you choose to, but I can't see into the other, you know, I can't obviously, because I'm the administrator, but they cannot see into mine and vice versa unless I set it up that way.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then maybe there is some opportunity if these costs continue to go up and it's becomes difficult for solo and small firms to access them, that could be a solution.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great idea.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_03: You know, Carol, you mentioned something that's kind of near and dear to my heart, which is it seems like a lot of the focus by the AI vendor world and also kind of the AI thought world is towards big law and more sophisticated, so-called sophisticated users.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_03: Are you seeing any more penetration by uh the AI powers that be into the small and solo firm market?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: So there are, I mean, uh Clio would probably be the best example.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Cleo has a deal with um with VLX, which is AI-powered legal research and regular research.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: And Clio has also incorporated some different AI features into its product, as have some of the other practice management tools.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like I think my case, I know Filevine purports to have lots of AI features.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of the practice management providers are starting to incorporate AI tools.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: And some of them, I think, like I think with Clio, you can connect it to Chat GPT or Claude and use those tools in the Cleo ecosystem, though I'm not exactly sure how it works.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then there are other, well, there are also other um providers like Paxton and a company called August that again say that they are targeting their they have services for solo and smaller firms.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And there's just the problem is so many of these tools are coming out all the time.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's just hard to um to stay on top of all of them and test them and demo them.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: But there definitely are people who are developing tools.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: I when I was at tech show, I saw a tool called Lexera, which is an AI-powered intake system that's developed by a former small firm practitioner.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: But it's just, it's so hard for them to, it's also really hard for these companies to break into the markets because they can't outspend, you know, it even if they want to promote themselves through a bar association, it's very costly.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they are willing like one provider told me they were willing to offer discounts, but just to get the discounts in front of somebody at the bar, they have to pay the bar to to advertise the discounts.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: And by the time they're all said and done, it they just couldn't make it work financially.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a real challenge for a lot of these companies to get the word out about their services.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: So I just this morning uh recorded and published a new kind of segment for the podcast that I call workflow options, which uh which are product demos.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: I do a product demo and I report on it.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: I ask the vendor to feed me uh a sound bite, which they're all pretty much happy to do.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_03: And and that's that.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm hoping to at least provide some value in the small and solo world to get the word out about products.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and the product that we talked about this morning is really not intended for the legal world, but uh it was called Ivorymind.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a very nice kind of document uh focused AI tool.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, interesting.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_03: So you're obviously extremely well versed in this whole tech AI world.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: How did this come to be, Carol?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been writing the blog myshingle.com, which is for solo and small firm practitioners.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: I've been doing that for 22 years.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the underlying themes of that blog has always been technology or the ability to leverage technology because that's what's really enabled people to start firms and build sustainable practices and do it affordably.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so it the AI was really just a natural evolution from all the tech I've covered before, ranging from cloud-based services to social media to now, now AI.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the AI appeals to me in particular because I like the stuff that you can use to make you a better lawyer.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I kind of hate the administrative stuff.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know all the practice management systems are really important, but I just, to me, that's just like swallowing a bitter pill.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to get something set up and just make it workable and then not have to fuss around with it.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not like a power user of any of the law practice management tools.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: But when there's like a tool like AI where I can improve the quality of my work or where I can do, you know, represent clients who are on a tight budget, that's what gets me really excited.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so I saw the potential for that immediately when I saw the first time I saw ChatGPT.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: Heather was the first person I ever knew to have a paid subscription to Chat GPT.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_03: So I immediately said, yeah, she's got to be the co-host of this podcast.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also as obsessed as Ron.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, no.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_03: I I think you're actually maybe even a little bit more impressed.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_03: So here's something that dawned on me because we use the the Flintstone Simpsons Jetsons framework, which really speaks for itself.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody understands what that framework means.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: And it it I was just thinking about that.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, once upon a I'm old enough to remember when computer came into the practice, and then fax machines, and then the internet, and then like electronic case filing.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_03: And at every stage, there were lawyers who were complaining about having to adapt to this new technology.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: Is AI any different?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_03: Or let me ask you this a different way.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: How is AI different than these other technological breakthroughs?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess you are right.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's not different in that the there's always the the objections for objections first.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I and I'm sure you remember when people refused to use email, when lawyers refused to use email and would only use the old postage stamps or something.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: So AI is no different than being a tool that lawyers first see and they and they fear.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I think with AI, the one thing is that it's it's more effective.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you're an attorney and you decide you just don't like to use social media and you just want to market your practice through analog ways like sponsoring little league groups and speaking at local events, you can run a thriving practice that way because that type of hands-on involvement in the community can get you, can get you very far.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I think with AI, it's just something that's becoming so pervasive that clients are eventually going, client clients are using it and seeing it being used in their day-to-day life.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, any doctor's appointment you go to, they're probably going to ask you if they can use an AI note-taker.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Anytime you contact a bank, you may spend time on the phone with an AI receptionist.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so clients are becoming more accustomed to it and they're starting to wonder, you know, are there things that my lawyer can be doing to use AI to make my case more efficient?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, why did it take them a month to get back to me with a draft of the will when I know that an AI can generate something in 10 minutes?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not suggesting that they're going to start going off and doing it themselves because they still want the lawyer's assistance, but they're going to start to wonder why lawyers aren't any faster with the availability of these tools.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I think with a lot of technology, the push comes from the clients.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the reason lawyers continue to use social media or websites is because clients were responding.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so they went back and did.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the same with AI.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the push is just going to come faster because it's moving so quickly.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_03: I have come to believe, maybe falsely, that there are Flintstone's level clients, Simpson's level clients, and Jetson's level clients, and that really the lowest friction workflows are when Flintstone's lawyers are dealing with Flintstone's clients, Simpson's lawyers with Simpson's clients, and Jetson's lawyers with Jetson's clients.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_03: There are a lot of lawyers on Facebook or Reddit complaining about their clients being too unsophisticated to be able to manage the law firm's work.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Flows, but I think that goes the other way too.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: I think there are Jetsons level clients that would be really frustrated dealing with the Flintstones level law firms.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: Are you are you seeing that kind of friction?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: No, absolutely.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I see it myself.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: I've called a gone to uh law firms that don't take still don't take credit cards.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: I can't, I can't even use any provider that doesn't give me some electronic form of payment because I don't even know where my checkbook is anymore.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll take somebody like three months to get paid, whereas if I can just push a button, they'll get paid right away.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, so I do see that.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then you also see now clients who are coming to attorneys with documents used AI to prepare and asking for feedback.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that's just something that I think is going to become more common, and lawyers have to become accustomed to figuring out ways to deal with that.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: Weren't you talking today about an attorney you know that has a system for dealing with clients who created their own contracts?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: What's what was that system?
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a$10,000 fee.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you create your own contract.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: With Chat GPT, if you bring a ChatGPT contract as opposed to letting them do it for one of their regular fees.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a surcharge if the client comes in with an AI prepared document.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I mean that's that's fair.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: It does, you know, if the client is coming in with it and expecting you to review it and change it and look at it, that does take time and it can take more time because once you know it was prepared by AI, you're gonna be more suspicious of the accuracy.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so you're gonna have to look at it more closely.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you know, so that certainly is a fair approach.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And consumers are building them in GPTs that are untrained, that are low, low level, that really have no real ability to build a valid contract.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no privilege either.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you know, there's all this what I consider to be high-level lawyer discussions about how to prevent clients from doing that.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: But that's never going to happen.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_03: Because you can't prevent clients from using Google to research their cases.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's their case, they're living with it.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_03: Why should they not utilize these intensely powerful tools to further explain what they should expect in the situation?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, again, I use the doctor analogy.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: Whenever I go to a doctor, the first thing I do is upload all my stuff into ChatGPT to say what does this mean?
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so and and I personally like when clients, you know, do that because it shows they're engaged in the case and they want to understand and they're trying to do it in a way where they're taking the burden off you to explain it to them.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, so I I'm I'm sure, and I feel like this is an issue that's gonna work itself out.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like now, you know, the AI tools are very new and novel, and clients have never had access to something like that before.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: So they're all over them.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: And lawyers have never seen something like this before, so they're all over clients that are using it.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're gonna reach an equilibrium where it's gonna become, you know, part of the custom for Chat GPT or to use an AI tool to assist in understanding things.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: You may see law firms offering their own tools to clients so that clients can use maybe a more protected version.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that might be more for a corporate level client than for, you know, a family law attorney or family law client.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: But I I feel confident that these are issues that are all going to work themselves out.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_03: I like that very healthy brand of optimism.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: But by the way, there's no such thing as pessimists anymore, right?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: Optimists, optimists know they're optimists.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: They look at the world through rose-colored glasses.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_03: But if you talk to a pessimist, they'll say, I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_03: So there's no such thing, right?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: There's no such thing as pessimists anymore.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: Well, so this is a good transition to our practice signal segments, where we look at what lawyers in the wild are struggling with, and we do a little bit of a group think to decide if AI can really help this lawyer.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_03: And there's no better source of practice signals than Reddit, where lawyers are anonymous and they can air their complaints without reservation.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: So in this segment, a younger estate planning attorney worries about malpractice risk after clients reject more protective trust structures in favor of flexibility, right?
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we see this.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_03: We see this, you know, well, you go to the estate planning lawyer and they say, well, you ought to move all of your assets into an irrevocable trust for these different reasons.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, there's nothing less flexible than an irrevocable trust.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_03: And clients, especially younger clients, they don't want to give that flexibility.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_03: So she struggles with how much to explain complex options like a Q-tip versus a general appointment trust and whether she should defer to client preferences or push harder for what she believes is safer long-term planning.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_03: So without digging into the weeds of estate planning, Carolyn, what advice would you have for this lawyer to help her sleep a little better?
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, I guess there are a couple of ways that if you're talking about using AI to help it, I mean, first of all, she can use AI to do research to see, you know, what the risks are of her approach versus adopting the client's approach.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then she can also use AI to kind of test the best way to communicate her desired approach to clients.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it can help you also communicate that information.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I guess you can use it, you know, like I said, you can use AI to do risk assessment to do to, you know, to see what type of fact scenarios have been come to pass using the client's approach versus her approach, and then just even do some sort of risk calculation or something like that.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_03: Propel Paralegal is in the center of the milieu of lawyers to clients.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: How would you address a if you were having a conversation with a lawyer who brought something like this to you?
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: I would say similar to what Carolyn did for research, and then use those as well to have it draft emails to the client to help, you know, explain, maybe in lay terms or explain it, you know, in better terms to them.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: You could put together processes.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: There, there are so many things that the attorney could do.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: You could upload whatever the client gives you if you have a secure, not an open toll, if you have a secure AI system and ask it, how could I best assist this client?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: What are some things you could do to help me?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I'm with both of you on this.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_03: And I think one of the uh one of less exciting but really useful uses for AI is client communications.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: For example, you spend 15 hours working on a fantastic brief on some complex legal issue, and you want to send it to the client.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: You send the email, attach please find the brief that was just filed on your behalf.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_03: And the client doesn't understand the brief.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_03: They're not going to read the brief, probably.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe they will read the brief and then contact you with 10,000 questions about it, which is an extremely high friction, inefficient workflow.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_03: One of the wonderful things about AI is you could upload your brief, which of course the AI helped you write, and then ask Claude or ChatGPT, I want you to write an email explaining in 200 words on a ninth grade level to the client what this brief is all about and how it fits in with their engagements.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: That's something that lawyers are not trained to do.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_03: Lawyers don't feel like they have the time to do.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of the times the interaction between the lawyer and the client becomes strained because the client's not seeing the very hard work that the lawyer is doing.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of that is the lawyer's fault because the lawyer's not showing their work, right?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_03: We're back in fourth grade math.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_03: Show your work.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_03: And AI is a very powerful tool for helping lawyers show their work to clients who aren't living in that vocabulary 24-7.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's a practice segment.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: I would love to hear what lawyers out in the wild have to say about that.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: And this takes us to our Flintstones, Simpsons, Jetsons segment.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_03: Now, when we talk about lawyers who are Flintstone's lawyers or Simpsons lawyers or Jetsons lawyers, we're not judging.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_03: We are, in our framework, lawyers self-sort.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's the Harry Potter hat.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: They they know if they're a Flintstones level lawyer, that, that, that they're nervous about even signing up for open.ai.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_03: They know that they're a Simpsons level lawyer, that, all right, you know what, I'll I'll have I'll have ChatGPT or Claude plan my day for me.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but I'm not going to get into like hallucinating cases.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_03: And then we know what Jetsons level lawyers are.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_03: We know that they've tricked up their entire practice in AI workflows.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_03: So the point of this segment is not to describe those kind of lawyers, but to help them see ways that they can level up their practices.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_03: So we've done tips before, but what I thought would be kind of interesting this episode is to talk about resources that are available to lawyers at different levels.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_03: And if you're a Flintstones level lawyer and you're interested in dipping your toe into the AI waters, I recommend Blaine Elkers.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_03: And we're going to put all of these links in the show notes.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_03: Blaine is a friend of mine.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: He has for a number of years been doing 30-day challenges on Facebook to help whoever follows him.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_03: He did a 30-day plank challenge a couple of years ago, which which I thought was great, which I did not do.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: But he's doing now a 30-day AI series challenge.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_03: And he starts from the very, very basic open an account with open.ai, ask a simple question.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: And then day two is go to AI and ask help me plan my day.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_03: And he's been progressing, you know, have it create a picture of me, have it tell my life story, et cetera, et cetera.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_03: So I think for Flintstone's levels, the resource that I would recommend is playing Elkers and his 30-day challenge.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's a great way to introduce yourself to the magic of AI.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: Now I'm going to skip one for dramatic effect.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to go right up to the Jetsons level.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a lot of people on the Jetsons level that are screaming from their ivory towers in LinkedIn.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: And the one that I like, and there are a bunch, is a fellow named Zach Shapiro who mainly posts on X.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_03: Carolyn, you're nodding your head like you may have heard of this guy.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote that viral piece about using Claude to run his whole practice.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_03: The 11 p.m.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_03: meeting.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe this is a different viral piece where he was doing a deal, and the other, the buyer came in and had a whole bunch of 11th hour uh changes, and he was able to use Claude to, you know, cut through that BS and have actually good uh interactions and close the deal.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I looked at I looked him up, and I mean, this guy's got the credentials.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: He's uh he's managing partner at Rainslip LLP.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_03: He's a self-styled AI-enabled corporate lawyer.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_03: He's from Davis Polk, he's Yale Law School, Williams College.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_03: So he's a good person.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_03: If you aspire to Jetson's level AI mastery, I would say you should be following him.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: Now, if you're if you're a Simpsons level lawyer, I strongly recommend that you follow Carolyn Elephants because she's right there in that middle lane with solo and small lawyers.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_03: She knows how to communicate these complex issues and concepts in a way that could help lawyers better understand them.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_03: Carolyn, I notice you're not telling me to stop, stop.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_03: And think, I think for Simpsons level lawyers, following Carolyn would really help up level your practice.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: Heather, any thoughts?
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: I actually had Carolyn's AI Mini workshops for the Flintstones level for a good entry point, especially your uh the one hour that you were discussing, the mom one.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a great entry point for anyone for Simpsons level, and I think we've discussed before, but Bob Ambrogi.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: Outstanding and does a podcast as well.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: And for Jetson's level, Bill Henderson, Legal Evolution, Mark Cohen, Legal Mosaic.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, these are people I follow and keep up with.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're great for staying current.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and you know, all do tech talks, focus on, you know, business transformation and law with AI.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: There are so many great resources.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you are any of these levels, AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers, this podcast is also a great resource.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for that, Heather.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_03: Carolyn, any thoughts about leveling up your AI practice?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there are so many different tools.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a I I actually follow some creators on TikTok who are very good.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's a guy, Nate, I can't remember if he's he goes by Nate, he wears a hat and he's um he's on TikTok.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about a lot of everything from like the granular issues of how the products work to sort of the bigger picture issues of what's going on behind the scenes and what you know what it means when Claude announces like a legal tool or when a company, you know, what the companies are doing.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I think having that business context is useful.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: And um, there's another woman named Sabrina Romanoff who has a whole bunch of free YouTube videos on getting set up with Claude.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: She's very clear um in how she describes everything.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot of basics, but there's so many, I mean, there's just setting up a search of AI on LinkedIn, you can find so many different people because there's so many different voices.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's the people who are doing it for in-house and people doing it at Big Law, and people who are following solo and small.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's so many different um isn't Nate Jones I follow, TikTok.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the baseball cap.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, he's great.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: Very short, informative videos, very practical.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_03: These are gonna be great show notes because we're gonna try to put all of these resources, links to all of them in the show notes.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and Carolyn, thank you so much for being here.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I learned a lot today, and I'm really excited to hear more about your lawyer mom's events.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, is that gonna be recorded?
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: It'll be recorded.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're ready, if somebody's you're registered for it, the recordings will be circulated early next week.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And can lawyer moms come in as Wilmouth Lindstone and leave as Marge Simpson?
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or would they need to take uh further courses?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Can they really get to GD Jetson level through your courses?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: I I think through the workshop.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the workshop is like I said, it's really it's it's focused on people who haven't looked at AI since its launch or who are you know using it very basically, who aren't aware of all these new features that have come out.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, no, I think they can make a significant improvement even within the hour.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: So at least I hope that's what they'll say.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's great.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_03: Once again, Carolyn, thank you.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_03: Heather, always a pleasure.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_03: And we will see you all next time on AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_03: Great.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: Take care.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's it for today's episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see you next time.