Democratizing Law: Generative AI, Ethics, and the New Legal Landscape

Yeah. Thanks for asking me. I'm looking forward to it.

So 8am is a company that provides all the tools that professionals need to run their businesses. Lawyers, it's one vertical. Accountants is another vertical that they serve, and it helps them from client intake to getting paid, everything they need to do to run the law firms. And 8am acquired my case during of in the middle of the pandemic in twenty twenty two, along with companies that we had acquired in the prior two years, which included Docketwise and CasePeer.

And so the legal companies that are sort of under the umbrella that 8am is the team behind my case, LawPay, Docketwise, and Casepier. And I've been with my case since two thousand twelve. I was employee number one. So this is the third acquisition where my case has kinda landed in with this great company, and they rebranded in just last month to 8am from Affinipay.

Well, you know, there's a number of different KPIs, is what we call them in the tech side of things. You know, key performance indicators that firms should look at metrics. And it starts with creation of invoice to collection. I mean, that's a pretty obvious one.

And, you know, the ways that you can speed that up are by ensuring that the whole process is smooth, that the clients have multiple ways to pay, especially when you're looking at smaller firms, which is the bread and butter of the companies under the 8am umbrella. But, you know, the more ways that you make it easier for clients to bill them on your end, like the frictionless ways to ensure that time tracking is easy, whether it's mobile time tracking, It's easy for your attorneys to get the time built and then get it invoiced to the client with the option for digital payments with a link that's provided, whether you text it to them or email it to them depending on their preference.

Then they can just click that link and pay really quickly using ACH or credit cards through LawPay. So easier you make it for the clients to pay, the faster you're gonna get paid. It also just streamlines that process significantly.

It's just like you said, the larger firms have sort of siloed functions. So they buy software for each siloed function. So it's, you know, CRM and, you know, client intake and billing and case management and eDiscovery. They silo all those functions out across different software that then has to hopefully communicate with each other.

But when you get into the smaller firms, they really want all in one solutions where pretty much everything's wrapped up. With integrative capabilities, they become really important because size of the firm and the practice areas very much determine the workflows within the firm. And so oftentimes, they're gonna need certain integrations that will help customize the software to really fit their firm's needs. But you tend to more towards all in one solutions just because it's more economical for them, and they don't need to silo it.

And honestly, it works better. You know, larger firms should be doing that. There just aren't always platforms available for them to do that with everything built in. And there's a lot more complexity, the larger a firm gets too.

So that's part of it.

Well, ideally, lawyers should be using legal specific tools for those very reasons. Right? So when a legal provider provides AI software or AI functionality, they're gonna understand your workflows. They're gonna understand the ethical obligations. They're gonna do the work on the back end to create guardrails that will reduce the inaccuracies. At this point, nobody can fully get rid of them. But they're gonna reduce them, and they're gonna make sure that the prompts are adjusted in a way that you get the exact results you want, that are as accurate as possible.

I always tell lawyers that what they really ought to be doing is, once they decide that they want to understand and use AI, potentially, you know, use ChatGPT for a week with non confidential information, just to kind of understand what it can do. And then talk to the companies you're already working with. Talk to trusted providers that are providing practice management billing and all the other tools that your firm uses, and find out what the roadmap is for AI implementation. Because at this point, everybody is building it out into the products.

More likely than not, because you're already using those tools, you certainly trust the providers. But they're also going understand the workflows within those tools and hopefully be providing and implementing AI that's going to fit into those workflows and make those workflows even more efficient. And so, that's what I always tell people to do initially. And then, once you understand the capabilities of AI and the roadmaps of the companies you're already working with, there may be some gaps. And at that point, you can look at other legal providers or potentially, you know, consumer grade GPT tools for certain types of things that don't require confidential information, for example.

I author our legal industry report. This is gonna be our fifth year. It's coming out in twenty twenty six. And this report is a report that sort of focuses on current trends, and then also different ways lawyers are using technology in their practices.

And the questions change every year, but since generative AI came out, two years ago was the first year that we had generative AI questions, then last year. And then this year, the survey is just data is starting to come in. So it's interesting to look at it from last year where you had about thirty three percent of the respondents, and we had over twenty eight hundred respondents across practice areas, but certainly more in the smaller firm space just because of the nature of the audience that we're targeting. But about thirty three percent were personally using generative AI tools regularly, and then there were just different data points about how frequently depending on, you know, the individual user.

But then only I believe it was twenty four percent of law firms. You know, twenty four percent of respondents actually had AI available in law firms that they were using. At that time, you had people that were using it more on their own rather than approved by law firms, and there's a lot of reasons for that. Part of it is just firms hadn't adopted it yet, or else they're in the process of choosing tools.

And so people were just using it on their own. And that was an increase from the year before in terms of the percentage. Not significant. I think it went from twenty eight to thirty three.

I haven't looked at the data recently, but it was a bit of a jump. But this year, the preliminary data that's coming in is showing that almost seventy percent are saying that they're using it on a regular basis personally. And then the firm numbers are a little lower, and I can't recall those off the top of my head because I haven't looked at the data in the last few days. But again, that's preliminary data.

But compared to any other type of technology, like, you know, wrote about the cloud in twenty twelve when nobody was using it and tracked it over the years through all different industry reports. And leading into the pandemic, only about thirty three percent even though were using the cloud, even though it had been out since, you know, I wanna say two thousand seven is when, like, Amazon EC two came out, but Amazon's cloud services. And then it was after the pandemic that you actually got over fifty percent, you know, and suddenly, everyone started using the cloud. There are still holdouts, but that was a long rate of adoption to get from.

Finally, we got to around a third, but it took ten years, you know? And then the pandemic pushed everybody into it. With generative AI, it's unlike anything I've ever seen. You know?

You're seeing rates of adoption that are exponential just as the tech is advancing exponentially. So it really has the potential to be disruptive. The problem is that the actual use cases the accuracy rates are reducing the ways that people are actually using it. And if accuracy was better, they would be using it in more impactful ways, I think.

Well, the information that they have access to is going to change. We're in the honeymoon phase of generative AI right now, and already there are signs that OpenAI, for example, is going to start doing the exact same thing, you know, promotional responses, paid responses. And there's already indications of that. They have job postings for, OpenAI does for people to help create that whole ad program.

So, like, the honeymoon's almost over, and we're gonna get to this point where it's just gonna be the same that you have on the Internet at this point with sponsored results at the top. So I think that's where the legal specific software does start to come in. And my answer to this would have been different a month ago before I saw those ads, and it was pretty clear where they were going. But because that's where they're going, the quality of the information that's going be available to legal consumer is not going to be as good as the quality of an information that legal professionals are going to have in their own legal software.

And that's going get rid of the ads, right? Because you're paying a premium for the software, and so you're going to get accurate results that are not the sponsored results showing up first. And so and, you know, you can imagine the sponsored results are gonna be and whatever else instead of just the actual information for the consumer. So they're just gonna get booted over to those sites again and end up paying for some of that information.

So like I said, a month ago, my answer would have been different. But now that the honeymoon's pretty much clearly almost over, I think that's where the value of both the legal specific tools are gonna come in for lawyers and also where it's going to it does democratize it to an extent, but it's not going to do it at the rates that we think it might, I don't think, because of that trend of where we're going with this.

Well, their obligation has not changed since before technology came around. Their obligation is to carefully review submissions they submit to the court for accuracy, regardless of who prepared it. So if a first year associate prepared it, if a law student intern prepared it, if a paralegal prepared it, if they prepared it. Before you submit it to the court, you've got to ensure accuracy in those submissions.

And so when I was a first year associate, when I'd come out of public defenders and was in this law firm, I didn't know civil. I didn't know what I was doing, and they would carefully review these memos that I provided to them. They would pull the cases. They'd read the cases because they didn't know whether I knew what I was talking about, and they didn't wanna submit something to the court that was inaccurate.

And then as time went on and they realized that I was becoming a competent civil litigator as I became used to civil litigation, they were more able to rely on my output, and I think they would primarily just if I wasn't sitting in their shoes, but I think they got to the point where they would just review the brief to see if it made sense. I don't think they were pulling the cases and reviewing them because they were assuming that I'd reviewed them based upon their knowledge of my prior work. But it got to that point. And so with generative AI, your competent your basic competency requirements require you to ensure the accuracy of that work.

You have to review the submission. You have to assume it's a first year associate that does know what they're doing, and you have to review the argument quality itself, the data that backs up the argument, the case law, pull the cases and make sure they exist. And then you have to do what you always do before you submit it that, you know, you may have pulled all this research together two or three weeks earlier. You go through and you make sure all the cases are still good before you submit it to the court on the day you submit it.

You've got to do that. And, you know, and even the day before you go argue it, you have someone or you do it, you double check those sites to make sure they didn't get overturned in that, you know, two weeks from the submission to the court to the argument of it. And that's just basic competence. And, lawyers seem to think I think there's financial pressures, there's client pressures, there's, you know, all sorts of pressures that people have on them, billable hour pressures that make it so that they're just trying to do things faster.

I just always say that generative AI is exposing the ugly underbelly of legal practice. Like, it's always been there.

Thanks. Thanks for having me.