Latest / Sharp Strategies Sweet Success / #98 – Building Trust, Embracing AI, and Growing Your Network with Thomas Martin

Transcript

#98 – Building Trust, Embracing AI, and Growing Your Network with Thomas Martin · Sharp Strategies Sweet Success

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Substack is an awesome way to break the ice,
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: which naturally attracts people that have common interests.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you do an experiment because it just interests you and it's fun,
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: but then you hear from the market like, is this interesting?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: And when you get like a nice signal, you're like, I'm onto something.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of those experiments you wouldn't necessarily take because you feel like
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: the success has to be built in, otherwise you're not going to try it.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And there's so much to learn from going out on a limb and jumping and seeing if you can land.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: You are listening to Sharp Strategies Sweet Success.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, everyone, and welcome.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: You're listening to Sharp Strategies Sweet Success.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Tiffany Swedensky, and today I'm talking with Thomas Martin.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: And Thomas, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Tiffany.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pleasure to be here.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for inviting me to be on the show.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was great having you on my show earlier.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: just really excited to have a conversation with you,
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: learn more about your audience, and take it from there.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because I love Substack.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely love Substack.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I have a really hard time getting other people, I feel like as excited as they should be.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Can you talk about how you're using that and how you think like attorneys could use it?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 100%.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been in the legal tech and doing the legal AI thing for 10 years now,
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: but I've been a lawyer for 25 years.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think that lawyers too often,
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: they have this mindset of this transactional mindset,
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: like a one-to-one thing, right?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Where they You think, oh, Substack, interesting.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Will I get clients from it?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like I post a video and then I get a client?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's not how it works.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's usually not how life works too.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you're going out and you're single and you're looking to meet somebody,
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: you don't like walk up to somebody immediately and go,
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: hey, so can they go out on a date with me?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, it's awkward.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like people don't work that way.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: You kind of got to break the ice and get to know people.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the same thing.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Substack is an awesome way to break the ice,
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: which naturally attracts people that have common interests.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a bit fair if Henry Cavill came up to me and say,
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: hey, do you want to go on a date?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: That would probably work, if I'm being honest.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: It would probably work immediately.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we shouldn't get into this, but I hear that a lot about attorneys.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: I try not to put people in buckets.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: I honestly do.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: I try not to treat all attorneys the same,
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: but you do kind of see a certain pattern in the people who go after this career
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: and also people who become lawyers and then open up their own business.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Would you say that that's purely a roadblock here?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, attorneys are just very transactional in how they view things.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Or is it something else?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think most all of it, probably 80% of it is in your head.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's way too many roadblocks that we put in front of ourselves.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's a big problem.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, some of it is real.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it's practical.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's tools you have to use to actually do stuff like this or to write and publish
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: on Substack.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have to get familiar with how that works and how to do it,
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: or maybe just hire people to help you do it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I think they're all achievable.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: You can overcome all of those barriers.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: What would you recommend that they post?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because we did a podcast together and I'm pretty sure you write on Substack as well.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of content do you think attorneys should be making?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you explain that to them?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: How do you say you should be writing articles?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: No, it won't get you clients.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: But how do you fill in that gap?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the thing.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I know the natural groove in lawyers' minds would be,
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: oh, well, I do probate or I do estate planning.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to write or I'm going to have podcasts like this or I'm going to write
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: about things to think about when you put together your estate plan or what is
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: a living trust?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the obvious ways to do it.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying not to do that because some people might just look that up and find you.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I think our example is an example of how you reach people
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: through like adjacent means, like through happenstance, through kismet.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because I focus on legal tech,
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a lawyer,
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I like to think about,
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: but I'm also like a philosophy undergrad,
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: so I like to think about different concepts and psychological things and tricks
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: and stuff.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I just happened upon your post and it wasn't the actual Substack article.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was a clip,
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: like a little video that you put together about the gentleman amnesia effect and
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: the doorman, I forget if it's And so for a lawyer, how does that translate?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: It means you don't directly write about or not only write
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: about your subject expertise,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: but you write about human stuff that you like thinking about
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: because other people might
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's interesting too.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's so true.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, every day I wake up and think, wow, I could be really doing more with that Substack.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just so busy with the actual going on in my business.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: But it is incredible.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you get out of your own way, like you said, and you record a video.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: When I do videos for Substack, most of the time I don't have a script.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: At best, I have an outline where I know what points I want to hit.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I just don't get completely off track.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: But once I started making those videos, each one is easier and easier and easier.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you're right, it does work that way.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: You saw that video shortly after I posted it too.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: You reached out, we're talking again here, and that's how human connections form.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's so important on social media right now.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Historically,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: I've had a tremendously difficult time getting, well,
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: maybe not all business owners,
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: but particularly attorneys excited about social media because there is
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: that transactional mindset.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, how is this going to get me a case?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's, well, it's kind of, Indirect and it happens behind the scenes.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's so amorphous.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to like convince people that that is actually how it works.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of cool.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do socials outside of Substack or are you primarily on that platform?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think the number one place is LinkedIn.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because so many lawyers live on LinkedIn and they're posting about what they're up to.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Of course,
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: there's a lot of posts,
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: you know, humble brags about achievements and stuff like that.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: But every once in a while,
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: you see a pretty like intriguing, interesting post that you dive into.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so I cross post.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Post my Substack articles onto LinkedIn to get people to understand what I'm working
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: on.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And of course,
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: there's Blue Sky X and every other place
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: that I highly recommend either cross posting to or there's different context for it,
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: right?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Twitter used to be somewhat dead for legal tech and now it's really roaring back.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so I love going on there to just people are sharing tea
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: or they're just cool insight that they came up with where they just want
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: to throw it out there real quick.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd say like experiment, engage, be curious and get out there.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: I sighed because every day I say to myself,
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad there's no compelling reason for me to consider X or Twitter as part
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: of what I do for my business.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: But you just made a sound there probably is.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: She gave me more work to do and I kind of hate that.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry about that.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many social media platforms.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: They really are.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: But you focus on LinkedIn.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: That does a lot for you.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: As a lawyer in particular,
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: do you feel like you get a lot of referrals from that, cases from that?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Or what benefit, I guess?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: I guess the benefit really is that's where my community talks and lives and chats.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think the one thing that sucks is that I can't keep up with it.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's too much stuff going on.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Too many people that I like are posting stuff and I don't get to keep up with it.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes if you've been on LinkedIn quite a bit,
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: you'll see that it notoriously now is posting stuff from like two weeks ago,
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: three weeks ago.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure why,
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: but kind of nice that it does sometimes because I'll see something
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: from three weeks ago from like this person I really like and follow.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And oh my God, I missed this.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: So there's just way too much content to keep up with.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: And also,
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: it's amazing how these algorithms put you into like silos,
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: because I was just thinking for my LinkedIn feed,
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: just what I scroll through in the content I see, it is just so much about AI.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sick of it, kind of.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sick of talking about it a little bit.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: I want news about it, but it's every post.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it occurred to me, I programmed it to do this.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: For the last three years, it's basically all marketers have cared about, more or less.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: And So it's just amazing how you can get into these micro niches
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: within each platform and find kind of your group almost and start to build
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: a following there, which I think is just super cool.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's what's really cool about marketing today versus
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: when it was really heavy on SEO, PPC and direct response marketing more or less.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I forget who the author is of this book,
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: but a while back there was a book called Feed a Starving Crowd.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the main concept,
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: as you could tell,
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: is that you find your people that really absolutely have a painful need
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: for what you're offering.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if you could find those people,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then it's a great product market fit to put in business terms.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also, hey,
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: these are people that are interested in what you're interested in and would love
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: to learn from you.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a great dynamic.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that the algorithm could do that for us without us having to do
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: the heavy lifting is a nice benefit too.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: That kind of just occurred to me.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: I should have asked you more about your firm.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: So like, tell me about your firm.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: Where are you guys at?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: I guess, honestly, I just don't know.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's been an interesting journey.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I've been a lawyer, like I said, for over 25 years.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've had my own firm that I launched in 2006,
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: which is called Foresight Legal Group,
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: and one of the first online law firms in the United States.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm licensed in California because I'm originally from California,
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: but the focus of my energy has kind of moved over to legal AI about 10 years ago.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I still run the firm.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: I have some wonderful attorneys that make it possible for me to Just manage
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: the strategy and finances and stuff like that.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: But primarily I've been focused on LawDroid, my legal AI company.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it's been really rewarding.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, 10 years ago, everyone was kind of like nodding off when I would talk about AI.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: It certainly has their attention now.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny because I remember 2018,
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: I did a presentation to a room full of attorneys where I was talking
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: about natural language processing and how Google uses natural language processing
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: to interpret search queries.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's not about keywords.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: I was trying really hard to explain it, probably doing a terrible job in my own way.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so many years later, that's what we're talking about.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's the underpinning to what we have with the large language models today.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really cool.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I had very similar experiences.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's been around for a while,
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: but people seem like just didn't get it until ChatGPT,
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: which is kind of incredible when you think about it.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's when the tools become easy for everyone to experiment with and use
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: and get familiar with.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's about the form, it's about the UI.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's just something about it that makes it approachable and then interest explodes.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I see a lot with the clawed automation.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'll have to confess something.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: I probably shouldn't.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't played around in clawed that much,
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: but I've talked to people who have and what they're setting up and I'm just,
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: oh, user automations.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: You do this, do that.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it's stuff.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Stuff that a lot of people were doing before,
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: but a super small group of people who like actually knew how to code,
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: actually knew how to like program and stuff.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just way more accessible.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah,
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: the interest has exploded with people's ability to engage with it and understand it,
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: where I felt like kind of the same thing with natural language processing.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: It was just hard to get people excited about it.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of, I mean,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: it's kind of incredible how much that single AI tool has taken over in
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: the last couple of weeks.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of neat.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: So as far as like LawDroid and like what, so is it a tool?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a service as coaching?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Could you like explain a little bit more about what y'all do?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Happy to talk about LawDroid a little bit.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: So currently we do a mix of consulting and building.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And especially right now with law firms,
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: lawyers,
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: legal aid organizations,
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: state courts out there trying to figure out how to make best use of AI.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because we've been ahead of the curve for a while,
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: we've learned how to do it and been really blessed to work
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: with many amazing partners who have taught us great lessons about how
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: to make AI reliable, private, secure.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so having handled a lot of those concerns that lawyers have naturally,
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And finding a way through it.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Mostly right now it's building and consulting.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't start out that way though.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's worthwhile for lawyers or your audience to hear this is
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: that it started out as an experiment.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I just built 10 years ago,
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: a chatbot that could help somebody incorporate a business in California
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: by just like answering five questions.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then it created the documents to incorporate.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't do it because I was like, oh, I'm going to put this out there.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to charge X amount.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to make so much money.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was basically I wanted to see if it would work.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I put it out there.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: I believe his name's Roland.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways, someone at Stanford saw it and I got invited to present this chatbot at Stanford.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, wow, there's some interest in this.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the point being is sometimes you do an experiment because it just interests you and it's fun.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: But then you hear from the market, is this interesting?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when you get a nice signal, you're like, I'm onto something.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of those experiments you wouldn't necessarily take because you feel
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: the success has to be built in, otherwise you're not going to try it.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And there's so much to learn from going out on a limb and jumping and seeing if you could land.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: You have to find your way.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a little scary, but...
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: The rewards are great.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: I honestly,
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: I have a little bit of regret not having enough of that time to lay around
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: and what can be done because truly a lot can be done with a lot of these tools and
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: a lot can be probably streamlined.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: I just haven't even gotten to yet.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's an exciting place to be.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: You come out about the same time.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: When I first got started on legal marketing, it was like 2015.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: There was a lot of chatter.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it was out of San Diego,
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: naturally, about basically a bot who would contest a ticket for you.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was mostly parking tickets.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Is this about the same time?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was just after that.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And actually he was my inspiration.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Joshua Browder, who actually at the time was a teenager in London, England.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: my knowing about him came from me having a Google alert
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: for different like things having to do with AI and just legal and technology.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: There was no legal tech yet.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was just legal and technology and stuff.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And his article came up about this kid in London who put a chatbot together
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: that helped people get out of parking tickets.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: By appealing them through a chatbot.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I just,
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: this tells you how nerdy I am,
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: but for me, it was like, oh my God, this is a revelation.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because not only could you automate documents like LegalZoom,
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: but now you can automate legal information.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, wow, if you could combine those two things, we're really going somewhere.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I jumped headfirst into LawDroid.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Didn't it scare you or does it scare you?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Do you just see yourself moving and doing something different?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I guess that's me for sure.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's some fear here and then there's, I don't know.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, how do you think about that?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think that it's very natural to be fearful of it because it's different
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: and we don't know where we're going, right?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the part that's scary.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it does,
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: it plays into that psychology where you're not going to do something
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: unless you're You know, it's going to be successful.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if it's an unknown, well, I don't know that it's going to be successful.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of even more scary.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we're just in a place where we don't know where it's going to go.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And we just need to plan for the best and hope for the best and also find ways
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: of learning what's actually happening.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because the more that we know about what's actually happening and how it works,
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: the less fearful we're going to be because we still can maintain some understanding
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: and control over what's happening.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's unfortunate right now that the control over these systems is in the hands of too few.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the way to get it in the hands of many and more is I think open source systems,
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: open source AI models are amazing.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: What they could do now is just head and shoulders above what they could do a year ago.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: They're doing stuff very close to like foundation models like Anthropic and OpenAI.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you can own those.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: You could download those and you could own them yourself and not have to rent from
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: the foundation model companies.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a big change in how things are going.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think about that a fair bit.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I really like the idea.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And me and a buddy were talking years ago about how we would move to a future
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: where each home has like its own, essentially a server.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: And we weren't talking about like AI agents at the time,
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: but we were talking about cloud storage.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: We were talking about smart devices and things like that.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we just kind of felt like that's the direction we were moving to.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so what you just talked about is the idea
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: of having your own agent using these open source models and fully owning it.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: I love that idea.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And actually,
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: you probably know about this and maybe I'm just telling my listeners,
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: but you can even buy devices where you don't have to depend on Google or Apple
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: for cloud storage.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: You can actually host your own cloud storage in your home.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just it's expensive.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: You have to set it up and Maintain a dedicated internet connection,
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm sure it saves tremendously over time.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I just, I think that's so cool.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Actually,
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: some of the stuff,
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: some of the storage that you can get right now is pretty inexpensive.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Underneath my desk right now, I have a four terabyte hard drive, but it's a solid state.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it's literally like The size of your phone,
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: and it could hold four terabytes, which is a ton of images and information.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you could even hook into it from somewhere else by using the internet.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: These things are totally, oh, and by the way, that costs under 200 bucks.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Totally affordable.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: The local AI systems that are available now,
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: if you wanted to run it on your own little supercomputer,
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: it is a little expensive right now.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's one from Nvidia called DGX Spark, and that one costs around five grand.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: But when you think like back in the day,
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: getting a computer like in the 80s or 90s,
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: so aging myself,
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: it was close to five grand, which back then that's crazy amount of money.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Not too shabby that you could actually have your own personal AI running
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: on your desktop for that.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to have to look at the cloud storage device I was checking out
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: because it was like $500.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like,
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: wait a minute, if they're cheaper, I need to maybe know that before I buy anything.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: But I was born in the late 80s.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I do remember that.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: I remember how expensive it was to get a phone, how rare.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I also, I watched
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Prices Right reruns on Amazon.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not just how prices have gone up for ordinary things,
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: but how something that's kind of cheap now,
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: like an electronic, was actually tremendously expensive.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a big deal that you got it.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, oh, It's kind of neat.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the economics of how much is still super expensive, but like comparatively, not really.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like it has technology costs haven't exactly risen with inflation based on
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: where we were at when we got started.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: So just, I guess, more chips.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's what NVIDIA is doing with more chips.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, those prices are really going to come down like they usually do.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason why is like,
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: if you look forward a little bit,
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: like there's a company right now that's making AI on a chip.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so like that company,
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: once you get AI on a chip,
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: it's going to be so small that You don't need to have like
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: the little desktop version that's five grand.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be that you could have it on your phone or you could have it anywhere.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it's going to be like the couple hundred dollars like that solid state drive is now.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: I really like that idea.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel as you touched on AI security and I'm well,
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: we don't have a whole lot of time,
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: but I would like you to teach me something about that because
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: that upgrades me.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I forgot actually what I was going to spin off and say.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: So let's just go there.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: As far as security goes,
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: what we're sharing with these huge companies and how we're kind
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: of helping them train their models.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: What are you telling law firms?
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: What should they know?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think the number one thing,
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: the biggest win for anyone watching this that you may not know about,
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: but if you have, if you do know about it and you've already done it, good for you.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: But the biggest win I think right now is if you're using ChatGPT or
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: if you're using Claude,
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: you want to go into your settings and then there's one that has to do with privacy
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: or data controls.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a little confusing the way they label it because you'll see a little
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: and I think they both label it the same way.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: It says improve the AI model for everyone.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's a little tricky because, of course, we all want to at some level be people pleasing.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: We want to not be the source of friction or whatever.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: So you see improve the model for everyone.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, I want to help out.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: But actually what that's doing is allowing them to train on your data.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't want that because The risk of training on your data is
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: that it could ultimately become part of their public database, essentially.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you got to turn that off.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if you turn that off, they will not be training on your data.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's at least a big first step in protecting your privacy and security.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's usually the setting I've been around for a while.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's usually the kind of settings I check for when I'm looking in these tools.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: And ChatGPT, yeah, I'm going to have to double check.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: I need to make sure.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: But Microsoft is like that too.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: You have to give Microsoft basically a ton of control over your office space
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: and data to be able to use some of their,
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's called Copilot, their Copilot.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: Creativity features.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: And honestly, these days I'm writing by hand.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want you to steal my intellectual property.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm terrible like that.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: So as far as the AI tools that most law firms are using in-house,
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: ones that are reviewing medical records,
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: ones that are summarizing documents,
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: do you feel like the companies putting those out have a full,
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: are they as secure as they seem?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Or how would you know?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you definitely have to ask questions.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's unlikely that you're going to get them to actually agree to some kind
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: of new site agreement when it comes to privacy security and what have you,
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: but at least to become familiar with what their terms are for how they deal with it.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: So some questions you want to ask them are, do you retain the data?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you're not going to train on the data, but do you retain it?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if you do, for how long and for what purpose?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: OpenAI and ChatGPT,
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: even if you use their API so that you're not using like the consumer app,
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: but you're actually using it behind the scenes with their API,
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: they'll retain it for about 30 days.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: They say that they're retaining it for 30 days.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because there might be some support issue.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that's pretty natural.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that's actually what we do at Logoid is that we have it just in case
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: a question comes up about something in the past, we can look it up.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that's not too bad.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also another option that is different than that called zero data retention.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Or ZDR.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so naturally lawyers would love to have that because you don't retain my data at all.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not always an option through the API.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: You can't get that by default with OpenAI and ChatGPT.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: You have to separately get that with like an enterprise contract.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you're talking about A lot more money to be able to have ZDR.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: However,
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: this is one place where like open source models come to the rescue,
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: because if you use an open source,
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: which could be as powerful as let's say like six months ago foundation models,
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: With a provider like Together AI,
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Open Router,
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: which offer those open models,
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: they usually have by default ZDR, so they're not retaining your data.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: So you look at those different options,
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: you ask questions, find out how they're dealing with the data.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: You also want to make sure the basics,
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: you're not writing your password on a Post-it note that someone else can see,
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: that you're not sharing it through email.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: I know a lot of us do that, don't do that.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that you know who has access and you keep people out that you don't want to see.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Encryption is also a basic one where you want to ask them questions about,
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: when I send you the information, is that through an encrypted connection?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: When you store it and you store it for the 30 days or whatever,
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: is it also stored in an encrypted format?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And what that means is, let's say the bad actor...
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: Breaks into their database, sees your stuff that's stored there for 30 days.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: If it's encrypted, they'll just see gobbledygook.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: They won't be able to read it.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: So you want to ask them if they encrypt their data at rest.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's all these like different questions that feel weird and unnatural
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: for lawyers to ask because it sounds very like techie and data oriented.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: But those are just some basics.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Data encryption, privacy, storage, training, but good questions to ask.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Let's say there's a SaaS tool and it's using Claude API, like I guess Anthropic.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know too much more about how that's being used.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know too like the account they're using or anything like that.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Is that something that's risky?
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: I actually don't know.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Is that something that's like risky?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: Is it probably okay?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: What would you say about that?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: So like a lawyer, it would depend on the specifics of that specific vendor.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: But in general,
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: if they're using, if it's a SaaS legal tech product, they're likely using the API.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if they're using the API,
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: the default is that they're not training on the data,
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: but also the default is they're likely retaining the data for 30 days.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes people don't think about, well, okay, OpenAI or Anthropic is retaining my data, but...
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: How long do you, vendor, retain my data?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a good question too.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: I would also point out,
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of lawyers,
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: they get scared about retaining data unnecessarily because
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: the question should really be, do they, the lawyer or law firm, do you have control?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Control over when you can get rid of the data is the more important question, not how long.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you yourself can go into the app and every week,
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: every 30 days,
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: whatever the pace is that you want to get rid of the data,
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: if you could do that on your own, awesome, you have control.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think the most important part is having control and understanding what controls you have.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I should ask more questions on this one.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the one concerned about security and I'm trying to figure out what questions to ask.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so I guess we're coming up to the end of our episode.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: So like I usually do,
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: was there anything that we wanted to talk about that, that we didn't get to?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one thing is I'm also an adjunct professor at Suffolk Law School.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when I teach my law students,
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: and it's a real pleasure to do that because I get to see things through fresh eyes
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: from the questions they ask and from,
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: frankly,
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: getting to vibe off of their enthusiasm because they still have that excitement
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: and enthusiasm about the world and about everything.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Legal and what it could do and they also have some fear though about
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: where things are going and I think one thing to communicate
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: to people watching is just to try to get back into that that place of curiosity
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: and excitement and enthusiasm for the world.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: I know that a lot of us are just Too busy working,
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: like we're heads down and trying to like check the boxes of all the tasks we need
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: to do.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: But going for a walk,
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: spending some time out in the forest,
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: seeing the flowers,
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: especially right now in the summer when it's so beautiful,
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: like that's, and of course time with family, that's really what it's about.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that I personally worked for too many years, too long in the office and missed a lot.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: So try to keep your own priorities or your time Try to keep your time and investment
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: in time reflecting your own personal priorities rather than it being flipped
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: the other way.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's so important.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Such an important lesson.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm learning it every day, I feel like.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for being on the show.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Where would you like people to look you up and learn more about you?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much, Tiffany, for having me on the show.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's two ways.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: They could look me up on LinkedIn.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's Thomas G. Martin on LinkedIn.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: And also lawdroid.ai is where you could find my company.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks so much again.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks everyone for listening and we will see everyone next time.