Latest / Paths of Curiosity in an AI World / Q2 - Power, Law, and Civic Life: When Algorithms Govern Your Life with Jennifer Leonard, JD

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Q2 - Power, Law, and Civic Life: When Algorithms Govern Your Life with Jennifer Leonard, JD · Paths of Curiosity in an AI World

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Passive Curiosity in an AI world where we explore the parents' careers through the lens of AI.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, less than 10% of Americans who need lawyers can actually get one.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that number hasn't moved in years.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Leonard thinks AI might finally change that.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get curious.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Most of our listeners have never thought about what it means to be a lawyer in an AI world, or that the legal profession itself is being completely rebuilt right now.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: What does your work look like day to day?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love this question.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: And because I think about these things all the time, maybe I sometimes assume that everybody's thinking about them.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: My work day to day, I own a company called Creative Lawyers, and we work with all different stakeholders in the legal profession, including law firms, corporate legal departments, courts, law schools, to think about how AI is impacting the profession, what it means for the economic business models of law firms in particular, but also the educational models of law schools and what skills we need to be teaching lawyers at all levels, particularly the junior levels, in ways that are different than we've approached legal education in the past.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I spend all of my time thinking endlessly about these questions.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: I have some answers for some of them, and many of them don't have your easy answers yet, but it's an exciting time to be working in legal.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: So could you maybe walk us through your path from where you were as a student to where you are now?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was a long and winding road.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes when you look at somebody's bio, it looks like it's really well thought out and they intended to be where they are, and nothing could be further from the truth.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: In my case, I graduated college right at the end of the 90s.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And at that time, a lot of people were going to law school, particularly liberal arts majors, which is what I was.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea was you could do anything with a law degree.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: So if you like school, you should continue going to school in law school.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly what I did.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: I found the law school education experience very challenging as compared with educational experiences I'd had in college and high school in ways that I think have changed for the better for a lot of today's law students.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I really, I really didn't thrive in a law school environment.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: I found it like very stressful learning conditions.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then I came out and worked at a law firm, which was very similar in the level of stress and anxiety I felt.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so I left the law firm pretty quickly and worked for the City of Philadelphia's law department, which my husband calls the emergency room for lawyers.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Any legal issue you can possibly imagine comes through our doors.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you're really tasked with figuring it out even when you're very junior, which led to me learning a tremendous amount about being a lawyer in all the positive ways.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then I went back to my alma mater, which is Penn Law School, and built their first law student professional development program.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: So trying to teach law students the things we didn't learn in law school, like how to build relationships, how to work in teams, how to leverage technology in your practice, how to think about business development even from day one.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I loved doing that, that work.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I was also teaching a class at the time on law firm business models, and I found that they're very, very durable and they don't change a great deal.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I was really curious as to why, as a profession, we're so slow to change.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so I eventually became the chief innovation officer at Penn and got to meet all these amazing thinkers from Wharton and the School of Engineering and the School of Design and Penn Medicine that really opened my eyes to new frameworks around innovation.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And after COVID hit, I really had changed a lot.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: I had little kids at the time and it was a really stressful period, but also a period of growth, like trauma-induced growth.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I decided I just couldn't go back to my life the way that it was before.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I decided to take the leap and start my own business, which was something I always wanted to do.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're now in our third full year of being an independent company, and it's been great.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's been really, really different from being a lawyer, but also gives me a platform to help lawyers in ways that draw on my prior experiences.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back at that incredible journey now, what was one thing you wish someone had told you when you were a student's age before you committed to any particular path?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: I thought a lot about it.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought about the time at which I was a law student and the advice that I was getting.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think for that time, I graduated in 2004, all the advice was pretty good advice for that time period.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like if they had told me then what I would tell law students now, it wouldn't have made a lot of sense because the world was very stable relative to what it is today.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: If I were to give myself advice, knowing like how the world would unfold over the subsequent 20 years, what I would say is don't be so afraid to take risks with your career.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's a big thing that a lot of my generation of lawyers struggled with, which is I don't really like what I'm doing.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I were doing something different, but it feels so risky to try anything different that I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: And now we're in an era where that's less of a concern.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: People are moving around, especially post-COVID, and because of AI, people are taking on like really cool new jobs.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time that was not really the case.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: So never be afraid to take a risk, as long as it's a thoughtful risk, and know that whatever happens as a result of you changing, if you're changing what you're doing, it's probably because you're not doing what you love to do and want to be doing with your degree.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you make a change, that was a good thing.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: It got you out of that environment.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: It may or may not work out.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: If it works out, that's incredible.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: If it doesn't work out, you've learned something else about what you don't like to do.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually think it's as important to know what you don't want to do as to know what you do want to do.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: So that's and also the other piece of advice I wish somebody had given me is spend more time talking to people who are not lawyers.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you spend too much time in any bubble, you develop a warped sense of the world, and that's certainly true with lawyers.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I wish that somebody had told me those things.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: That is some great advice.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Before AI arrived in legal practice, how did lawyers do their work?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: And what changed when AI entered?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's an amazing question.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was a new lawyer, I was a litigation associate.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: And as an associate, I also realized like I'm conflict averse.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea that I became a litigator is tells you how much I understood about myself and different career paths.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: But as a junior associate in litigation in a large law firm, what we were doing a lot of the times involved processing discovery.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: For those who aren't familiar, if somebody sues somebody else, um, and we were always on the defense side, you engage in discovery.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: So you try to find out everything you possibly can about the case on both sides, and both sides exchange voluminous amounts of documents and other things that the lawyers sift through and then try to build their case around.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in 2006, when I was working in this space, what that entailed was me in a conference room with like potentially hundreds of bankers' boxes of documents and sitting at a table.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: I kid you not, Acadia, sitting at a table, my lonely self, just like flipping through document after document, saying relevant, irrelevant, privileged, not privileged, and then creating Excel spreadsheets of all of those documents manually and saying these are the most important documents, these ones are irrelevant, these ones should go on our privilege log, and doing that over and over and over again.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's mind-numbingly boring.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and as a junior, you really don't understand at all how this connects to a real case.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's just such a micro part of the representation that it's not a great way to think about developing a holistic approach to law.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is how lawyers have always been trained, especially in law firm contexts.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Public interest is different for reasons I'm happy to describe.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: But the idea has always been that it's an apprenticeship model, meaning that you spend a lot of time at the side of a partner learning the ropes by doing these rote tasks that have relatively low levels of risk and no client contact.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now that AI is here, and even before AI was here, I mean, even when I left the law firm in 2008, we already were starting to see a lot more movement toward e-discovery and using technology to do a first pass of documents.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the work was offshore, and different things happened, especially post-financial crisis in 2008, that made the profession a little bit more tech infused.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: But AI completely changes the game.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is a technology that doesn't just automate something, isn't an algorithmically designed deterministic output, as those prior waves of technology were controlled by the lawyers, they were relatively easy to understand, and they really just made an analog process digitized.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: AI, totally different animal, probabilistic in nature, capable increasingly of being a co-intelligence to lawyers to help them think better, to develop new ideas, to go through all those bankers' boxes that took me weeks and weeks to go through in minutes and surface insights from them.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so the biggest question that the profession is facing right now, there it's sort of twofold.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: One is how do lawyers continue to make money delivering their services in a world where they used to bill by the hour, still bill by the hour, but things now could take minutes.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: And secondly, and more importantly, how do we teach new lawyers the skills that we all learned in a changed world where we're not gonna have the luxury, if you wanted to find it that way, of sitting in a room for years.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's luxurious at all, but we're not gonna have the time and the runway to help new lawyers develop an understanding of the building blocks.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like they are going to have to add value much, much earlier and in different ways.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody yet has come up with a really good solution for what that means.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Some of our listeners might be hearing that AI will replace lawyers, so don't bother going into law.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: What is your take on that issue?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I think AI will replace some lawyers, but I actually think that the number of lawyers could stay the same or grow for a few different reasons.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: One is our system of justice and system of laws is so badly constructed that right now lawyers are only addressing a little under 10% of the total civil legal needs of the American population.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: 10%.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like that is atrocious, and that's a market failure.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not only an access to justice gap for low-income Americans, which is problematic already, but it's essentially everyone.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: I make a decent living, but if I had a legal issue, I would find it very difficult to come up with the money to hire a lawyer.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the case for virtually everyone and small and medium-sized businesses as well.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: So we have an enormous amount of blue space to grow into and no shortage of problems facing those organizations and individuals.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think the whole model is likely to shift as a result of the democratization of knowledge and access to intelligence.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know that the world of people making millions of dollars being a lawyer will be a path that is super viable in the future.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think that's a bad thing, actually.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's great to be able to make a decent living and engage your mind and help your clients solve problems in ways where you're not expecting eventually to be a master of the universe in some way, shape, or form.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I have a colleague who is older than I am who would say that when he went to law school, nobody expected to be making tons of money and they were like delighted if they did.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: But now that situation has inverted where people expect to be making big money out of graduation and are disappointed if they don't.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's also true for a tranche of schools, not every school, but yeah, I don't think that we'll run out of a need for lawyers.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I also think it's the most exciting time I can imagine going to law school.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: If you think back to that question you asked me about when I was younger, nobody would have told me to be entrepreneurial because that would have been stupid advice.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like the legal profession did not welcome entrepreneurial thinking.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: But now, because of all that blue space, your generation and people going to law school now have the ability to make moves and build their careers around new technologies in ways that were not possible before.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really, really exciting.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, your opinion is not that AI will completely replace lawyers, but can enhance them to address much more of the population's legal needs.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, and I also think it will change the way lawyers work in a lot of ways that will be more of a parallel to the changes in healthcare.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Doctors and all sorts of healthcare professionals have been using technology for some time to augment what they're doing.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're getting all sorts of AI-infused readouts of mammograms, of x-rays, of all sorts of things.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's very rare to meet a doctor who would say, I don't think we should be using this.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I think we should go back to the time when I just use my little brain to figure out what the scan said.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in legal, the same thing should be happening.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like, we should be embracing these technologies to figure out how to augment what we're doing and develop new ways of doing it.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: The challenge is that for many seasoned lawyers, the mindset shift necessary to think that way is difficult after a career of being conditioned as a lawyer in the old world.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I think for those who are leveraging it to do really bold things and for those who are thinking simply about how to make them better at client service and delivering value, it creates enormous opportunities.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: I do think for those in the profession now who are above a certain level, if they are not going to figure out how AI amplifies their performance, they will increasingly find their phone not ringing from clients who've moved on to those who do.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: AI can be scary, but you hold a slightly more optimistic view.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: You've mentioned how it can be a leveler for small firms and solo practitioners.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Say I'm a student who wants to practice on my own someday.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: How does AI help someone without a massive team compete?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is another example of something that has changed in my lifetime as a lawyer.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: I remember sitting at lunch with my associates at a firm, and like many of us were frustrated by the kinds of work that we were doing and wondering why we went to law school in the first place.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And our answer was always like, we should start our own law firm, like the four of us or the five of us.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: We should get together and launch our own practice.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was just like wishful thinking at the time.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: It was like a dream, like when all of your friends in college get together and say we should run a bar or a restaurant together.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's not really ever gonna happen because of a variety of reasons, but mainly the capital needed, the people that you need, and your lack of funding to support that.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's also an element of the knowledge that you need to do that.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: But now I'm a small business owner.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm on a team of two with a few part-time colleagues, and we have been able to 10x the number of things that we can do as an AI native company.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: We run all sorts of projects through Claude.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: We ask Claude for first passes at different programming that we're thinking of developing, ask it to pressure test it, use it for administrative tasks.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think the sky's the limit for solo practitioners who want to market their business in a more efficient way, figure out where the business might be in the first place, think through my different service lines and how I could augment my revenue, how many clients I could grow.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine the world as it exists today as a solo practitioner trying to serve a handful of clients and doing all the admin yourself or having some admin help.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like that is a world that I hope goes away for those practitioners because they're as talented as big law lawyers, but they're digging out of a hole every day to some extent to make it through the day.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it has huge capacity for small firms and also for plaintiff side firms that are suing big companies, and those companies hire large defense firms, and they have tons of associates to throw on a case on the defense side, and the plaintiff side doesn't.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you're able to leverage AI to level the playing field with those gigantic firms, I think you'll get better, more just outcomes and happier practitioners on the plaintiff side.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you think AI can make law practice more equitable?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: If we shape it correctly, yeah.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: From one of our previous guests, more grossman, we talked about how judges are starting to use AI tools.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: Should a student be worried about that?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me more about why they should be why you think they might be worried.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: AI can often get things wrong and can maybe lose some of the humanity in law.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: So should someone who's a lawyer be worried that some of the reasons that they would like to bring up may not be as effective, or maybe the right judgment might not be made because the AI doesn't take into account the human aspects of the trial.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great question.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, there's a really interesting study that just came out of the University of Chicago Law School, and maybe you've seen it already, but it compares, it created an intentionally sympathetic defendant in a criminal case, and had the defense counsel argue to human judges, AI judges, and law students, and this is an older version of Chat GPT, so you know, query whether it would change with more advanced models.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: But what the study showed was that the AI was less inclined to give a lighter sentence even.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Even in the face of sympathetic facts, and that the law students were less likely to give a lighter sentence in light of those facts.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the human judges with experience on the bench were more likely to be swayed by the sympathetic facts and reduce the sentence accordingly.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think you're highlighting a really interesting conversation happening in the judicial arena, which is to what extent do we want human input in our outcomes?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I could see both sides of this case, frankly.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: One is you absolutely want human input because if you hear the stories of the litigants, you're in a better position as a human being to really contextualize and rule accordingly.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: The counter-argument is do we really want people who are able to be swayed emotionally making the decisions, or do we want a strict interpretation of the law meted out evenly across all situations by an AI?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: I would say your colleagues and your listeners do not need to be worried about this for the short and probably medium term.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that is because the judiciary is relatively slow to change.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think there are a lot of slow-changing actors in the legal ecosystem, but I think it would go law firms, judiciary to some extent, and then law schools.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think the judiciary really depends on the judge, and many judges, for the reasons that you cite, are not yet comfortable leveraging AI in their work.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that will be true for a while.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: I do think, too, that the human skills that may be evident in things like oral advocacy or briefwriting before a court, whether that changes in the way that we with the court system or not, those elements are still going to be the human superpowers in an age of AI.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: The ability to take complex facts and tell stories about them, the ability to empathize with different actors, including your clients, the ability to persuade, they're all going to be really valuable and even more valuable skills, even if the way that we meet out justice is different.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: So if a student is seriously considering law school right now, what's the one thing nobody tells them that they most need to know?
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: That is such a good question.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um I would say one is just how significantly changed the way that you think can become in law school for good and for ill.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: So as a sort of aspiring lawyer, you're learning to think critically at a level that even really strong critical thinkers have not thought at.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: They are going to throw all sorts of questions your way that make you curious about the way that you think in the first place and receptive to all different possibilities of thought.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the challenge for some lawyers, myself included, not all lawyers, is that if you take that new skill set and that new way of thinking and apply it internally and use it as a mirror on yourself, that can become damaging to you.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: So in my case, for example, I was learning to critically think, I was learning to look at a situation and see all the risks and the flaws and all of those things, but I was also doing that to myself unwittingly, where I used to have like really high self-esteem and felt really good about myself.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was reflecting that way of thinking on myself of, oh, I got that question wrong in class.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: That must mean like I'm not a good student.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Here are the flaws with everything I did today, and it can lead to anxiety.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I think what I would say is as you go into this exercise, recognize that this skill set that you're developing is essential for you to be a lawyer, but it's also essential for you to be able to separate your analysis of a case or a matter or a transaction and your talent and worthiness and value.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: That is such an interesting perspective.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is something students really need to hear.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Looking into the future of law, what does the legal profession look like for a student just starting out today if nothing changes?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what could change if the right guardrails get built?
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think the future of law, if nothing changes, will look very similar to the last hundred years of law.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, let me amend that.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna say like the last 50 years of law, because there was a huge migration upward in legal services toward corporate clients starting in the 70s, and that has continued to be the case until now, where corporations have the most power to use the legal system to their advantage because they can afford lawyers, and many, many cannot.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um it also strikes me that there's like this curve, this U-shaped curve in career opportunities for new lawyers, where you've got the big law firm associates making hundreds of thousands of dollars and then very little, and then public interest lawyers making much less money than big law associates.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that gulf in between is the biggest shame for our profession.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if nothing changes, that gulf will remain.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think if something were to change for the positive and we shape AI responsibly, and by the way, there's no group that I trust more to shape something responsibly than lawyers.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like we are the responsible nerds in the room in a lot of cases.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like as people are barreling forward, we're the ones to say, let's shape this with deliberation, let's shape it with thought, let's make sure that we are avoiding the worst risks and maximizing the opportunity for the best outcomes.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I think if those things happen and we're able to expand the clients that we serve, I would like to see that U-shape dip get much, much smaller so that there are lots of different opportunities for lawyers to start their career doing things that you and I can't even think of on this podcast today with job titles that don't exist today, but will become incredibly relevant.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, don't require you to be practicing law necessarily.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: You could be AI engineer, you could be a strategist.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: There are so many different things that you could be where we've traditionally thought go to law school, must practice law.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Looking in the next 10 to 20 years in the future, what types of new jobs do you think will emerge because of AI?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that there's a great article from the New York Times that was like 22 new jobs that are created because of AI.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not a legal-specific uh writing.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: So there's nothing in there about lawyers, but I have looked at it and adapted the thought to legal.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: There are so many different skills and roles required to leverage AI well.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember just a couple years ago having a conversation with somebody who was taking a job in AI in a law firm, and she was worried about having the word AI in the title because it was so early.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And she was, is this gonna just be viewed as trendy in a couple years?
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: And like it seems goofy when people look at my resume.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: But now I don't hear anybody having that concern.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like being the head of AI strategy for a law firm is a very big deal today, and that's at the very top, of course.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I think people who are systems designers, people who are AI auditors, so going in and verifying the outputs of AI, almost like a fact checker, editors of AI output, like learning the voice of wherever you're working and applying that voice to what AI has produced, who span different uh departments or practice areas and are able to help translate from one practice.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like if your IP practice is like really barreling ahead with AI, which I've seen to be a trend, they are further ahead than say your litigators might be.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody who can learn from the IP team what they're doing and exactly how they're doing it and help translate that for litigation practitioners, I think will be incredibly valuable because right now people are finding insights in their practice, but they don't have the bandwidth to go explain that to the other practice areas.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I think a lot of roles will be created where it's both understanding the technology, but more importantly, being part of change management efforts and translation across different parts of the organization.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, like these chief AI strategists' roles are being paid now like Rainmaker partners.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: What type of skills do you think will matter most for the next generation at the intersection of law and technology?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think being able to think like a systems designer and understanding from a macro point of view how everything connects together and where technology can be infused to make the process better.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: I also think metacognition will be a really important skill, really understanding how you learn best, because I think the AI era, for better or for worse, is going to be an era where there's a lot of self-educing.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's very hard for organizations to keep pace and to deliver customized training for people.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so, understanding from the start, I use Nobook LM to upload case law and statutes and I understand them well in a podcast form.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then I understand how it's appropriate to use that as like a way to get up to speed on something and when it's not.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I don't work well in the traditional way of learning where I enroll in a class and it takes me six months to complete it, or I need that kind of commitment.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like I know for me, I have to sign up for a certificate program, or else I'm just gonna let it fall by the wayside.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I think metacognition is really important, systems and design thinking also, empathizing with the users that you're trying to serve and designing solutions accordingly will be really important.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: And how to collaborate better.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: Collaboration is not really something that is emphasized in law school the way that it is in business school, but this is an era that really demands collaboration, um, which are a whole host of human skills.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, in a lot of ways, my answer is not that different than it would have been 10 years ago.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: It just has more urgency because of AI.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: I really like that perspective.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: What's an unexpected skill that's been crucial to your work that people might not typically see?
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: An unexpected skill.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know whether this is a skill or not.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: You could tell me.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think the ability to be authentically humble about things and open to sharing things, like I'm not a huge fan of sharing on LinkedIn like really personal stories or things that are like TMI.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I do think that by getting more comfortable at saying, like, oh, law school helped me develop anxiety, or I am not suited to be a lawyer in this practice because I'm not good at spending hours and hours on one task, like I need to be busy all the time and different things all day, has allowed me to attract people who feel similarly but didn't really have an outlet for it.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think not trying to, it goes along with the advice question, not trying to be somebody that you aren't, which I did for a very, very long time.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: And once I decided, like I was just too tired to do, probably when I had kids, I was just like, I can't, I'm too tired.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then I started being myself more, and the more I was myself, the more success in the way that I define it came my way because it was authentic and I wasn't like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's such a simple idea, and yet somehow so challenging.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's really, really hard.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: The profession, and I think that AI will change this.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think the profession is changing, but like the tendency to compare yourself to everybody else because the career paths were so linear and not diverse, it was very, very easy to be like, I work at this law firm, but my classmate just got a job at this amazing law firm, or my classmate got a a clerkship with a federal judge, and I could never get a clerkship like that, therefore I suck.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that that kept me back for a long time because basically what it does is you're like a bunny who's trying to become a cat, and you're always gonna be a bunny.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Trying to be a cat is not gonna work, but I tried to be a cat for a very long time, and then eventually it just got exhausting.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't help you get further by trying to be other people, but it's very, very hard to get away from in a profession that is insistent on having hallmarks of success.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: You co-host a weekly podcast tracking this space in real time.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: What's the most surprising or relevant thing you and your co-host have covered recently?
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: So yesterday you're catching me at a good time because we recorded two episodes in person, which we never get to do because we're always all over the place.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so yesterday's conversation was with a really fascinating thought leader and legal.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't know about him, I encourage you to follow him on LinkedIn.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: His name's Jason Barnwell, and he's the chief legal officer at a company called Agiloft, which is dedicated to AI-infused contract life cycle management, which may sound really dry until you listen to Jason talk about it.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: And Jason's an MIT educated engineer before he went to law school.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: So he sees the world differently than most lawyers do.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I love listening to him talk, he basically talks in frameworks.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like, here's how to think about something.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I find it so much more helpful to have somebody explain the world in frameworks than here's one thing we're doing in our legal team that matters.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like big picture, what is happening in our individual practice lives, what's happening to the profession, what's happening to our companies.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: So talking to Jason was a really, really cool episode.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: And we talked to him about his experiments with open claw and creating all of these agents and the wins and losses he experienced as a result.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, say a listener is interested in the legal profession, what's one concrete thing they can do right now to start finding their way in?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: Great question.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, in terms of finding jobs, that can be really challenging.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think that it is becoming less challenging by the minute.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'm on LinkedIn all the time, I see constant job postings for every level of AI support.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Again, networking outside of your legal community is essential if you want to do something really unorthodox.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: And unorthodox is the name of the game going forward.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Go through your LinkedIn or your high school yearbook or college friends and find somebody that you think is doing something really interesting and very different from legal.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Set up a Zoom or a coffee with them, talk to them about what you want to do, and be equally generous to them.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: Ask how they're doing, if you can help them in any way.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the combination of that networking diversification and the emerging roles that are coming out are really helpful.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would not rely alone on your career services office to be able to point you to all of these emerging opportunities for lots of reasons, but mainly because they're just emerging so quickly and it's an unknown landscape that many, and I say this as somebody who was a career counselor for law students, like many career counselors are not yet connected with those networks.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: So you really need to be a self-starter in that regard.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: So before we wrap up, I know we mentioned one of your episodes already.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Are there any books, podcasts, or other media you would suggest?
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the book that I love is Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollock.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a great way to think about AI that's not tool specific.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of podcasts, I would recommend two that I listen to all the time.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: One is called The Artificial Intelligence Show, and that airs every or drops, I guess, every Tuesday, every Tuesday morning.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: And those guys are from marketing backgrounds, but they're really great about updating you about the state of the art of the technology and what it means for work and careers.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: The other one I love because I think it's but also very entertaining.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: The hosts are very funny, is the Hard Fork podcast, which is the New York Times tech podcast.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's not only about AI, but technology generally, and I think they're really, really engaging to listen to.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I learn a lot from both of those podcasts.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much for joining us today on Paths of Curiosity and bringing a more optimistic view on how AI is changing the legal profession.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Acadia.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: This has been so much fun, and I hope it's helpful to your listeners.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: This has been Paths of Curiosity in an AI world.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: Exploring careers through the lens of AI.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: Until then, stay curious.