Legal Technology Innovation

Thanks for having me. A pleasure to be here.

Sure. You know, I've been a lawyer for over a decade and over those years. I've been exposed to a lot of different ways working as a lawyer and have also borne witness to the gap that has long existed between the tech world and the legal world. And I was driven to try to bridge that gap. First, we're learning about how others were bridging that gap myself.

Secondly, through sharing some of those learned lessons from conversations And then third, sharing my own experiences and thoughts as I learned about the space, and all that really just led to this book that I wanted to write help others who like me at one point were trying to learn about the legal tech space and what it means for them, how it can help them and why they should care about it.

Yes. I would define legal technology as this. It is, technological solutions aimed at helping to bridge the gap between those delivering legal services and those in need of legal services, enhanced by processes and people.

So I think collaboration is a cornerstone of legal tech and of just general operating in this dynamic very tech enabled world that we live in.

And the reason why I say that is because there are limits to our own knowledge. We only know what we know, and we don't know what we don't know, and what we don't know is sometimes a lot, sometimes a little somewhere in between. And it's important for us to try to become more aware of the gaps in our own knowledge that we can be more proactive. We can help others.

We can bring more value to our roles and bring more value to our departments that we're a part of. And so that privacy collaboration is so essential to bridging this gap between the legal world and the tech world and why I think that oftentimes we maybe not rarely act this way, but sometimes just by nature of how we act and how we think about acting, our islands ensure ourselves, and that's not a good way to be And so I personally am very driven to try to build relationships with others, to learn from them, learn from their experiences and broaden my own perspectives, And that, I think, is integral to how legal tech works in terms of understanding how these tools integrate into businesses, into processes, and how people are a huge part of that integration.

So I think that's key, Colin, and extensively on collaboration.

I've read a number of books on collaboration. I would say that collaboration, really is defined by a couple of things. One, it's building and growing relationships with others, especially those out side of your business function. Two, it is actually actively learning from others who are working with you from other functions And three, it's working together for a shared goal and consistently engaging in this work together to improve upon what you're working on.

And keep pushing forward towards that goal that is shared by everyone that's working together. And that can take many different forms, but often the form it takes place And the legal context is between, you know, lawyer and client trying to achieve some desired result resolution of a litigation matter, achieving a deal, revising a deal, a partnership, whatever it may be. But at the end of the day, it's not just between two people. It's between different functions that are seeking to enhance the businesses of two, of their, of, of whom they represent.

So That's how collaboration works. I think it's super important, and it's often a skill that is, I think, not often valued enough as by lawyers and legal professionals.

I think that they're often it they often are more proactive and more able to collaborate and ones you collaborate.

Are they as effective as they can be in collaborating with one another? Maybe maybe not. I I don't think I have enough data to really make a call on that. But I at the end of it, I certainly think that collaboration can always be improved.

It's a dynamic thing. It's never static. It's never, kind of, this is always how it's done. So, certainly, I think there's always ways to improve how you collaborate with others regardless of your position.

Depends. I think on the context. There are some some cases, we're sure. I think that you may be thinking you're collaborating, but really, you're just relying on technology to kind of provide that collaboration effort where it may or may not be effective because as I said earlier, at the end of the day, technology and its utility is driven by people.

And so you really have to meet people where they are and that doesn't happen through just interacting with technology alone. So could collaboration be hurt by the rise of technology? Yes. Should it be hurt?

You know, should you allow for that to happen? No.

So if I am a partner at a law firm, and I am completely adverse to legal technology. But I've got litigation support telling me I should do something other than keyword searching, and I've got a provider who is telling me, hey, these analytics tools are so great. Right? You gotta use them.

But I'm partnered who's so adverse to it. How how do you meet people where they are when you've got a situation like that?

So it starts with leading with empathy.

You know, if you've got a lawyer who says, you know, not really a big fan of tech, gram afraid tech, or not really that tech savvy, Take that into account and say, okay, I understand. So let's just start with the basics. What do you use every day to help you in your job? You know, what tools do you like them?

How do you use and build off of that sort of confidence building exercise in terms of helping people understand how they could be using their existing tools better, tools that they know, tools that they're comfortable with. And then go from there as to, okay, well, since you're using those tools, have you thought about adding this, or have you thought about perhaps making better use of this tool or, you know, their add ons have you thought about add ons? Well, what are add ons? Well, let me tell you.

You know, it really starts, I think, with kinda taking things slowly at someone's pace that they're comfortable with, not forcing someone to kind of adapt because you feel like they must. Yes. Change its inevitable. Yes.

The world's dynamic but you have to really not try to force change upon people because people will change if they want to change. If they don't wanna change, they're not gonna change. And they're certainly not gonna change because you're telling them they should be, particularly lawyers. So I think it's incumbent upon vendors and others who are seeking to help lawyers or legal professionals improve to sort of see where they're starting off from and build from there.

And it's also incumbent upon the lawyers as well to be open about what they're comfortable with and what they're not comfortable with because honest they can be transparent. They can be with others about where they are and how they're operating. The more they can be helped to be open to being helped.

So it starts with openly acknowledged gene someone's degree of comfort or discomfort with technology, but also saying, look, I get that you're uncomfortable, but there have been other points in your live surely where you've been uncomfortable would have worked through those periods of being uncomfortable. So this is just another one of those. And as a lawyer, you know, you know, you were bound by your ethical code. And because of the ethical code requires some degree of awareness of technology, if you're afraid of it or you fear it or you are intimidated by it.

At the end of the day, you have to acknowledge that while you may be uncomfortable, you're gonna have to work through it if you wanna be effective as a lawyer because it's not just ethically your duty. So it's also your duty to clients because clients are aware of technology, and they're gonna be expecting you to be using technology that they're aware if it can if it can help them. So, you know, you have to work with them from that point of understanding and move forward And that doesn't mean, you know, giving in and saying, okay. You're afraid.

Well, well, let's just not deal with it because you're afraid. It's more of, well, let's acknowledge your fear and address it head on because that's how you get over fears, typically by addressing it head on.

Have you seen examples where, you know, like, examples where there was great resistance to technology and then something surprised you where, you know, you were able to get folks on board, you know, using these methods Sure.

And this actually isn't necessarily completely technology related to dealing with lawyers related. I once worked at a place where, I was the only lawyer, and I was trying to kinda build better relationships with the sales team. And one of the ways that I went about doing an effort to help them and be more proactive, frankly, and out and see that I was there to help them was I put together educational program where I literally would spend sessions talking through with them and engaging in discussion with them about how it worked, why worked, why I did what I did, technologies that I used to help me.

And that made them see that I was there for them. I was there to help them. And it wasn't just about me and because I wanted to do things a certain way. It was about doing this so that it would help them.

It would help me and I could do my job and help them put their job as well. So kind of where I think it can be very helpful is showing that it's not about you. It's about them and helping them be better at their job and really shining spotlight on them as opposed to you.

It it's an example of sort of legal process improvement, really. And legal designs are all placed into that as well. I mean, there's certainly ways in which it can design contracts or design documents. So they don't look like a block of incomprehensible text, but are more visual, are more interesting, more engaging, but that convey the same information just in a way that is a lot more accessible than traditionally has been done.

Absolutely. I think there are ways to illustrate how technology can play a role, different processes, and then how people can help them move along and move forward. And that can often take the place of a visualization and infographic or quite frankly just kind of making a process more accessible through color coding or what have you. There are all sorts of different ways in which you can use legal design and design thinking to help make things more accessible and more transparent so that legal isn't seeing as some, you know, amorphous black hole that you put things in and don't know what happens to him afterwards.

You're not wrong at all. I think oftentimes there is a sort of shiny key syndrome where you're chasing after technology thinking, you know, it's gonna solve your problem or solve all your problems, and it may not even be the solution that you need because oftentimes you may be, chasing a solution and of a problem, which goes back to somebody I say all the time, which is problem identification is the key first step to doing anything with regards to technology. You have to know exactly what it is you're trying to solve for and why it's a problem. And that means engaging with people and understand why they see it as a problem, how it roses a problem, and what an ideal solution looks like because solution identification as well can help you identify whether technology may be a potential solution or may not be.

Maybe something in terms of resolving a process roadblock that may involve people or having the wrong people be doing the wrong things, or they're not using right existing tools to solve a problem or what have you All of that becomes clear, the more due diligence you do with respect to understanding what it is you're trying to solve for. And I realize that people may want to jump towards the tech, but Look before he leap is what I would say. And looking means understanding your problem first.

Yeah. I think that's a great question. And I would start with doing something that I that I do and have done, which is engaging with others, asking for a few minutes of their time to just understand how they work, why they work the way they do. And once you ask that question, shut up and listen frankly.

Just, you know, listen to them and then follow-up with questions and go from there. That's how I learned about legal tech was engaging with others and having those same brief conversations. And I think that's super important. Now I realize that everyone is as extroverted as I may be.

So in that case, Read their comments, read comments, read blogs, read different websites, go to my site to learn from folks who have done this stuff before. You don't have to engage right away if you don't want to, but engagement is a really key way of learning and ability relationships with others as well.

Think it's a I think there are a couple reasons for that. One is, lawyers are particularly prone to shiny key syndrome, partly because of their limited prior exposure to technology. I think too, I think there's been a tacit recognition and sometimes explicit recognition of the fact that during the AI is here to stay, and it's gonna dramatically reshape what it means to be a lawyer and how to practice.

And last say, I think that lawyers are realizing that fines are all over this. And therefore, they're expecting their lawyers to be all over it as well, and their productivity gains to be realized from using these tools. So in other words, they can make more money by perhaps doing less work as well.

Yeah. I think the disconnect exists, for a couple of reasons. One is, just in terms of accessibility, You can just literally go to the website for chat GPT and start working on it.

Now that may not necessarily be the most productive way because it may take a while to experiment and what have you, but that certainly, I think, an element of that, which also leads to sort of the implementation piece of it as well is that some of these other more sophisticated technologies take some time to implement, which requires change, which requires time, resources, all of that. So it's a matter of time as well. And and lastly, I think it's just a function of, you know, the there is stronger pressure to be adopting AI because it's so ever present where some of these other technologies have been around for a while. There's less pressure because while they're a little more known quantity, they're also older and perhaps may become outdated in lines of some there also what I think is that element at play.

Yeah. I absolutely see it in that go in that direction. I think that's been a long time coming for sure. And I think you know, AI is gonna have an interesting impact, I think, upon the available hour as a financial model.

I think the reason why it's been so resilient to change is because it's easy. It's reliable. It's particularly resilient to different disruptions, including the pandemic, inclines are used to it. That being said, you know, AI is definitely kinda making, I think, folks question, you know, is this really the best way to be billing for this?

Because I know they're not taking as much time as they claim on this because of AI. So it's gonna be interesting to see how things evolve going forward, and it may, let me correct myself. I don't think it may. I think it will impact the hiring of lawyers, the training lawyers.

And again, as I mentioned earlier, kind of what it means to be a lawyer and what work is done by a lawyer.

Well, I think there's a couple things. One is businesses are ever more relying upon data analytics. And if the legal department wants to be valued as a function, they need to be equipped with the ability to be fluent in the language of business, which is data analytics. And that comes with digitization.

I also think that legal departments for the most part need to be able to kind of meet the business where where it is in terms of ability to work with documents, work with data, be digital, because no one wants paperwork anymore. No one wants to sign anything anymore. Nothing thrills me, meaning doesn't thrill me more by having to physically sign something a because my signature was terrible and b, am I supposed to do with the mouse? Was it scan it back or whatever? No. I don't wanna do that. So, certainly, I think digitization is a way to bring the legal department into the twenty first and twenty second century and help it become more seen as an inherent part of the business as opposed to sort of this semi outsider to the business.

Oh, you should hear my rant on the wet signature. We got a pretty one.

So I think you deal with it this way. First of all, reminding yourself that as a lawyer, to be a competent lawyer means at the very least double checking your just like you were in high school, you know, double check your work. So I think that these court cases are less a function of the technology going awry I don't think the technology went awry at all. It was more of these lawyers just not being competent and not checking their work.

The data that is used to train these models, underlying chat GPT and others is not legal specific. In fact, there's very little legal data involved so to rely on it as a source of court information or think that anything that's spitting out at you is gonna be completely accurate, that's just not gonna happen. Now does it make it seem like it is truthful? Yes.

But that's the intent of the way the model was programmed. That's not any kind of, like, misinterpret or, you know, the program thinking for itself. It's literally doing what it was told to do. And so it's up to you to really take anything that it comes that it comes out with with a grain of salt and then double check it.

You know, if the case seems like it's a little bit weird or seems almost too on point, but you probably wanna double check it because it's a case of, you know, something's really are too good to be true. So I think ultimately when it comes to generate AI, have to understand where the early stages of it, the data is limited, and that will change going forward. But particularly for legal use cases, be especially careful because information may or may not be completely accurate. It's gonna come off like it's accurate, but it may not be.

Sure. Well, I'm laughing a little bit as I say this because I don't like courtrooms and want nothing to do with litigation at all, which is why I'm a transactional attorney in some ways. But I think one fascinating area that I have long been excited about has been litigation prediction, litigation analytics and legal research because I think there was a lot of data that's at play there, and there are a lot of different ways to make use of that data to predict the outcome of cases, to help you craft better arguments, help you write better briefs, help you craft better patterns to help prosecute different patent slash IP cases.

So all that, I think, is super exciting to me from a technical data perspective. But, again, I would not want to be a litigator at all or be anywhere near a courtroom with respect to, litigation matter because not my thing, and I don't like being yelled at or being criticized or what have you. So I would like to lose my temper and be thrown in jail for a contempt of court. Joking, by the way.

Joking. Joking.

That is. I have a I'm not sure how I'd feel about litigation funding to be honest. On the one hand, as a business, it makes sense. But on the other hand, I question whether it's simply contributing to the litigation overflow that exists in this country. I don't have enough data or enough knowledge of it to say one way or the other. So I would say I'm neutral on it right now.

Yes. Well, this was back when I was a bit actually skeptical and fearful of technology myself. I and some friends had co founded the company, and it was a website design company, which at the time designing websites was a big thing because websites were a fanciful new thing that very few people had, but needed help with doing nothing really happened with it, but it was definitely a fun thing to do and gave us some exposure to starting and running a business. So that was that was fun.