Legal Skills of the Future

Welcome to the show, Mike. Hey, thanks for having me. Good to be here. Well, we are excited to have you here and talk to us about this very important topic.

Absolutely. So started better part of my career working at big law firms in New York City.

Actually started my career as a paralegal in the nineties. Got involved in some of the big class action litigations of the time.

During my days at Skadden, spent about ten years there, and then came across a really good opportunity to lead a department at Strickett Strick and Lavan. So went over there, became director of litigation support slash eDiscovery, whatever you wanna call it.

Started teaching at some point at a small college in Arizona.

From that, I decided to write a book. I wrote a book called Project Management in Electronic Discovery.

Then I started my own consulting practice after leaving the firm, and then in twenty nineteen, this opportunity to run assets came along, and I've been there from the outset with ACEDS. I helped design the original exam twelve years ago, so it was an exciting opportunity, and I needed healthcare benefits. So that's kinda the career journey in a nutshell.

Maybe longer than that, I forget. I was trying to be generous and nice and just say eight but it may be even longer than that. We lost three years of the pandemic. So That that is true. So there's probably that.

So really, like most things, it arose out of necessity.

So two things were sort of happening at the same time.

I was involved in legal matters, that got me to think about. And this started many years ago.

If you think back to the early days of eDiscovery, nineteen ninety nine, two thousand two thousand one, If you think back to those days and how sort of immature the process was back then, like, we didn't even have the e d r m model yet. So nobody had a framework.

And I'm working on these massive class action securities litigations where you know, there's forty five law firms and different jurisdictions, and we've got review teams spread all over different continents looking at you know, back then, thirteen terabytes of data was a lot of data.

And nobody envisioned this, and so I'm thinking about how we're doing this. We're still scanning paper documents, four thousand boxes on one case. Scanning these documents, to get them into a review platform, so a lawyer in Russia could look at them. Right? And I'm saying there's gotta be better ways to do this stuff and I saw I just started looking at project management as a tool.

As a process, as a structured way to approach the workflows that, to me, became second nature because I'm doing it every day, to the rest of the world, really, they weren't thinking about it. And fast forward through, you know, the years through the development of the EDRM, and the improvement in the technologies, and I'm still thinking about this, and now I'm teaching. Right? I'm teaching paralegal and litigation support, and actually, you know, graduate level lawyers on these processes, and there's no book. There's no text.

We're cobbling together articles from, you know, back then, you know, legal tech news or whatever the precursor to the LTM today, blog posts, you know, whatever we can get our hands on for reading material for students, and Frankly, the board at the university where I was teaching small paralegal school, Brian University in Tempe, Arizona.

The advisory board approached me and said, Mike, you've got time on your hands. Why don't you write a book?

And so That was twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, three years later the book came out.

Yeah. No, for sure. And I'll tell you exactly when it was. So we had to do service lists, to a massive list of law firms, counsel on both sides, and the court, of course. And it never occurred to anybody to like use a macro in Microsoft Word.

To do that. Right? A mail merge, a simple function.

But when you're talking about forty five fifty different organizations that have to get the same piece of paper or the same deliverable, Like, it's a no brainer.

Someone's actually typing forty five different labels, that's insane.

Guys, put a bunch of envelopes in the printer, and let's do this. You know what I mean?

It's two thousand, I think, two thousand, nineteen ninety nine, two thousand, that we're doing this. And I'm saying just efficiency. And and what happened really is I got acquainted with the world project management. I began studying it.

I began reading about it. I joined PMI. I looked at the certification, and I said, you know what? This is gonna advance my career, and frankly, I never looked back.

I went from being a paralegal to a project manager, to a trainer, an office leader, and then a director with a seat at the leadership table at a major law firm, all because I had a project management certification and years of experience working at law firms.

They get back. I mean, it's just It's logical. It's normal. I think that's the human part of the human condition.

If you're fortunate, give something back.

What does the client want in a legal matter? A successful outcome. How do you get there? What are the inputs? What requirements?

Do you need?

What is done look like? One of the most famous questions ever asked by a project manager.

What tools, what resources, What techniques do you need? What are the best practices? And then what are the outputs? The outputs are it could be a legal brief. It could be a verdict and a jury trial.

It could be just a motion or an argument or settlement negotiations, whatever they are. You can equate the five project management process groups to almost anything, and that's why you see project management in finance, in publishing Absolutely.

Look, I'm wed to the legal business. It's you know, there's no divorce coming anytime soon. I don't think. And it's definitely got its problems in terms of diversity, and those are challenges that kinda They go beyond the notion of project management.

I was fortunate to have a leadership role and influence some of those policies and practices on some level, at least certainly with respect to my team, and I try to do that to this day with my team at ACEDS.

But you know what, I never set out to fix the legal business. The legal business is gonna be fine whether my book or I exist.

I just find that for me and for teams that I work with, finding efficiency, finding cost effectiveness, finding good solutions and offering good outcomes, that's really what project management is all about. And I don't care what role you play in the legal business. You can make use of the tools that are talked about in my book, and you don't have to use my book. You can study project management anywhere, and you'll learn the same things.

Should be a first year class. Should be right along with legal writing, research.

Because a case is a project no matter how you look at it.

And if you take that case like you do in project management and you break it down, if you decompose a case, you break it down into its parts.

You begin to see how things are very similarly done. They may be slightly bespoke because of the client, because of the issue, because of the law, the applicable law, but at the end of the day, there's a complaint.

There's motions.

There's discovery. There's settlement. There's trial. That process is consistent throughout all legal matters. Certainly on the litigation side, transactions are obviously a little bit different, but they too have a framework.

Right? And so all I'm proposing is that there's a framework that you can use to make your work more efficient. And why would you do that? Because clients want it that way. And I think that's what's lost on the legal industry.

There's this massive debate going on. It's actually been going on for a long time on getting kinda sick of it.

It's called this notion of the duty of technology competence.

It bothers me because the ABA made a statement more than ten years ago, Forty states have adopted that statement as part of their state bar requirements, and yet we still have lawyers to who are not technologically competent.

It bothers me that we've gone this long. It's my life's mission to actually change that. And if you look at some of the core values that a sense of spouse is one of those things is just advancing technology competence in any way with it we can. You know, eDiscovery is a very niche industry.

It's a small part of the legal business. Important part, necessary part, expensive sometimes, it's not just about that. And, you know, the other side of the coin is, you know, financial skills. I really think lawyers need better financial schools.

Not so much those corporate lawyers because they tend to gravitate towards that finance side, but litigators don't understand finance. And that's important. Those are important skills.

So you bring up a great question, which is, you know, does that even include Excel? Right? So when I give CLEs and webinars and I write, which I have, prolifically, as that marketing department knows, about that very thing that you said you're you're sick and tired of. Right?

Because this is what you're passionate about too. You ready? I got the solution. I wrote a piece -- Right.

-- about this for Bob Ambrogi's blog, and law next. And it's gotta start in the law schools.

The law schools have got to start teaching technology like they do, some of that black letter law that, you know, all these law school graduates come out of school with, that's great. I need my lawyer to understand the legal concepts, principles, where to find the law, and all that great stuff.

But I also need them to be technologically competent because there's no aspect of life today that is not touched by technology.

I just can't think of one. I mean, unless you're writing on a pad with a pencil, you know, in the middle of the woods somewhere without WiFi, I mean, there's technology involved.

So the law schools really have to step up here and make a core part of the law school curriculum, I don't care what we call it, frankly, but, you know, legal technology. Let's just go there. Right? And I should reframe my position. Right? It's not that I'm tired of it. I'm gonna keep doing what I do.

I am tired of people that don't get it.

And I'd love to have that debate with anyone who thinks otherwise because they're just not gonna win no matter what. I'm gonna take it to my grave.

Technology is the future, and those who don't get on board are frankly, they're gonna be left behind, and we see it all the time.

So, you know, I don't I don't need to call out the gravestones.

It's interesting to me, you're focusing a lot on the law school, and you're saying that's the answer. I kind of view that as as well. And I'm wondering, what do you think some of those important legal skills are for lawyers, for future lawyers, leaving law school, this coming spring, if you were to say, Listen, as a new graduate, If you're gonna be successful, these are three things you gotta know.

Mhmm. Three is not enough, but let me see.

You'd have a basic understanding of how computers work.

And by that, there's a lot of things going on there. Right? So what is a computer? What does it do?

Where is storage? What's an operating system? Some of the basics. Right? We teach this in our training and certification programs.

Understanding you don't have to be an IT infrastructure expert, but you need to have a basic understanding of where things are. And that goes beyond the computer. It goes into the cloud as well. It goes into social media.

It goes, where is that information? What is that information? What if you needed that information, how would you get to it? Right?

Lawyers do things based on evidence. Right?

All these things I just mentioned, those are potential sources of evidence.

How can you be a lawyer and not know where to go get the evidence?

That's the first thing they need to understand. Then they need to understand some broader concepts around sort of the development of technology, the timeline for how things developed, and now we're using these artificial intelligence, machine learning, tools to do things, again, more efficiently. Right? And I totally support these things, but it's not like understanding where a computer comes from.

And concomitant with that. I love using that word. Don't ask me why. I learned it in law school.

Concomitant with that, you need to understand, you know, as the rule speaks to, the risks, the benefits, and risks. So what's wrong with AI?

Is there bias? What's an algorithm? And an algorithm for anybody doesn't know, it's really just simple, it's rules. It's instructions to a computer to perform certain operations or calculations.

But, those operations, those calculations can be biased. Depending upon who created that algorithm, it's important to understand what are the risks of using one of these tools. And you pointed out an example earlier, going into a coffee shop and using a WiFi and exposing your information.

That could be a client's information. So it's understanding all those kinds of risks and when, you know, cybersecurity is a big deal today. Privacy is becoming another big deal today.

Understanding some of these basic concepts, you don't have to be an expert in all of them. And I always say if you're not an expert, go find an expert and hire them. Right?

I've actually read case law. Like, there's a regulation in the New York City courts that lets a lawyer bring their, you know, IT guy, for, like, you know, generic IT guy.

To a hearing to explain things to the court if the lawyer him or herself cannot explain it. Right? So if you I have done that many times. Yeah.

No. If you're not if you're not equipped to do it, get somebody on your team who can do it. You know, this this is not rocket science. I'm not talking about anything that people shouldn't understand already.

First, I should start with I don't ever see AI replacing lawyers ever. Subject of many, many blog posts out there. Yeah. Right. Right. I don't ever see it happening.

Human beings have the ability to reason. They have a way of approaching logic that is not like a computer. Computer is very black and white. It's binary.

And until we have artificial general intelligence, which I don't know anybody who's saying it's coming anytime soon, sir. I think not in our lifetime.

But you can't take I forget somebody wrote about it recently. There's some components to being human that a machine can never replicate. Empathy.

Right? That is the one.

That ability to reason. So, like, I'm always gonna need a lawyer to say, you know, an AI too may say, here are your options. But ain't the lawyer to make the final call.

Right? And that's true even in the AI applications that we're using today. At the end of the day, I imagine some cases, it's fine to produce all the documents without a human looking at them, but I could make the case that that's malpractice.

Right? Someone should look at this stuff. Absolutely. Have you played around with any of the open source AI tools where you can ask him to write a brief on something, and it I haven't, and I'm avoiding it because it feels right now I think I was reading in New York Times today, feels like a toy right now. It feels like a kid's toy right now, like it's not I don't I don't know what to make of it, but these generative AI tools that are starting to come out are they frighten me a little bit because I don't know how to distinguish.

And that deterring that test.

My new policy since I'm not working at a law firm.

I get up after the sun. I and I generally I've really found a way to sort of get my internal clock in tune with the universe. I wake up. The sun starts to shine. It comes right in my window. It wakes me up. It's really cool.

I'm told it's healthy.

Nonetheless, almost right after my first sip of coffee, I've got my iPad open. I'm reading the Times. I'm reading all the legal publications.

The General Counsel publications, Law Technology News, the blogs of Craig Ball, of Doug Austin, the ACEDS blog, Mike, I won't tell you that I get up many hours before the sun, and I give you credit.

I won't say that I've read it every time, but when I when I do glance at everything. And right now, in between Craig and Doug's sandwich BDO insides. Okay. It's always fascinating talking with you and my hope is that all of the listeners of today's podcast walks away learning a number of things because there certainly were a good number of nuggets that came out of this this conversation today.