The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Jim Sullivan on Leveraging AI for Legal Work: Efficiency, eDiscovery, and Innovation
Join us for an exciting chat with Jim Sullivan, founder of eDiscovery AI. We dive into how AI is transforming the legal industry, making tasks like document review faster and more efficient. Jim shares practical tips for small firms to leverage AI in daily practice, from drafting marketing content to handling large volumes of data.
Whether you're a tech newbie or a seasoned pro, you’ll gain valuable insights on integrating AI into your legal work. Tune in and discover the future of law!
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA.
Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
We've always been proud of the tools we give lawyers to create the law firms of their dreams. We know exactly what modules you should, software you should utilize, and the strategies you need to employ to build a law-firm that is a cash-generating machine. When someone initially becomes a GLM member, you can bet that they're joining for the tactics and tools that we offer.
That's something we're doing, where it's basically reviewing records and it's extracting you know the name of the patient, the dates, you know what type of service are provided. We're doing the same with contracts. We're extracting the parties, the dates and things like that and it's about refining it until you get a good result and then you know kind of reiterating that and using that, going forward and having that library of tools. But overall I think that the biggest value to this for a small, a small practicing attorney is using it as a day to day assistant, having it just help you with everything you're doing in the day. For example, you mentioned creating social media marketing things. You know, if you're looking to create social media posts for your you know Facebook page and you're looking for ideas, go to chat GPT and say, hey, I'm an attorney that does this and this I'm creating some. You know I wanna create some marketing materials, some ads. Give me ideas to brainstorm. Give me 10 ideas for you know social media posts to make.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show where we ask the questions why aren't more lawyers living flourishing lives and inspiring others? And can you really get wealthy while doing only the work you love with people you like? Many lawyers are. Get ready to hear from your host, ben Glass, the founder of the law firm Ben Glass Law in Fairfax, virginia, and Great Legal Marketing, an organization that helps good people succeed by coaching, inspiring and supporting law firm owners. Join us for today's conversation.
Speaker 3:Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass. Welcome back. This is Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where each episode I get to interview someone inside or outside of legal who's making a ding in the world. Today we've got a foot in both spaces. Jim Sullivan is an attorney small practice but he's also the founder of a company called eDiscovery AI. He tells me he is in the technology all day, every day. So I wanted to get Jim on the podcast to just talk.
Speaker 3:I think most of the folks who listen to our podcast and my son's podcast and hang out at Great Legal Marketing like we're interested. We want to know, jim, like how do we work in our zone of genius? How can we leverage technology? What we find hard is that every 34 and a half days, something new is coming down the pike. Right, we ignore the bar journal, the standard bar journals that are putting out all the warnings about technology. No, we want to know more. Like we will figure it out. And we love talking to people who know a lot more about this than we do, because every time I get to have a discussion with somebody like you, jim, I learn something I don't know. This is really curious. What's next?
Speaker 1:So welcome and thanks for coming out sometime. I love that Sometimes you get something new in every 32 days and you got to learn even faster. But there's so many cool things happening that aren't just cool as much as they're practical. They're able to solve problems that we've had and it's nothing like I've had a problem for years that I'm trying to work out and now here's a solution that just can easily nail it. So really excited to just talk about what options are out there, what things can be done.
Speaker 3:It is amazing, and before we went live, I've looked at a couple of demonstrations of even the audio technology to do intake and I'm like, no, this will never work. That sounds crazy, but I listened to it and I, holy cow, this is coming for us. Anyway, you're an attorney and you're the founder of a technology company. Talk to us about that. We're always interested in folks' journeys. What have you done in your past? What were you interested in when you were in high school? How did you get to today? Yeah, I'm a tech nerd.
Speaker 1:I went to college for a computer science degree in math. I got out. I went to law school but it was a little bit non-traditional Not a lot of computer science degrees in law school, just a couple. But I actually got into eDiscovery right off the bat, using technology to facilitate doc review to make that doc review and discovery process easier. As data volumes expand, we get more and more data. You have a production. You have to turn over all your relevant documents. It's getting to be a huge task and human labor is just not up to the task of reviewing these large volumes.
Speaker 1:So for about 10 years I spent working with using machine learning, predictive coding to facilitate doc review. Then I left to work with my business partner running our own tech company. We were building automations for small businesses, including law firms, as automations like generating all your intake documents automatically by filling out a simple form with the core information, as well as working with a lot of service industries to automate things. And with that we were using AI a lot and it clicked that. You know what AI is such a great use for the legal industry, specifically e-discovery space, but in addition to that, so many use cases in the legal field that are able to solve problems that we weren't able to solve before. I saw this opportunity, excited about the potential, and had to jump in to say let's just work with lawyers. Doing technology and solving problems using AI tools right now are absolutely the biggest thing that's ever happened in our lifetime, bigger than the internet. This is going to be the biggest game changer we see across the board.
Speaker 3:It's interesting because of the lawyers across America there's still a huge subset. They're very traditional listening to the state bar. Surprisingly, as I go to some events what I call normal lawyer events, jim there's people that they may have heard of AI. They know nothing about any use case for it and a lot of them are just afraid. Even, of course, stories are just and that can cause me pain because it's a little bit overdramatic, and I'll tell you why because as an attorney, there's really two things that you need to be aware of when using AI.
Speaker 1:The first is hallucinations, and we talk about hallucinations. We talk about everyone knows that the attorney that filed something that was using citations that weren't real, and that's everyone has this fear of. Oh, ai is going to lie to me. Ai is going to create information and I just it's important that people understand what the truth is, and the truth is that AI will absolutely hallucinate, depending on different use cases. You're having it generating content. That's the situation where you're at highest risk for hallucinations.
Speaker 1:Now, it's not going to do it a lot.
Speaker 1:It's not going to make a mistake very often, but it will happen from time to time, and the solution is very easy. The solution is, before you use anything that AI generates, you read it and make sure that it's right. If you do that, you won't have problems, and it seems to me that if there's anyone out there that thought that they could have AI write a brief or a motion or a document for them and hand that in as their own without reading it, that is a problem that you should not be doing, and I think that most people know that. You're never going to be able to go to a judge and say, oh, it was wrong, but it's not my fault because AI did it. If you treat AI like you would a paralegal or an intern, where it's helping you, but you're still responsible for the final work product, which we all know, the bar is very clear you'll never have a problem. Read what AI creates before you use it as your own work and that problem simply will never happen.
Speaker 1:It'll never be an issue, and we'll talk a little bit about the great use cases for it and what you want to consider with doing that. But getting to the second piece is there's also the privacy and security element of it, where we want to make sure that your client data is retained. And now this doesn't always. This isn't always happening. If you're just saying I need to generate some ideas for me no client data, no private information to use, not a problem, but it is worth the 10 minutes it'll take to make sure that you're doing it properly. And this is no different than anything that has been happening for the last 20 years, where you can't put client data into free tools.
Speaker 1:You've never been able to put client data into free tools. You've never been able to put client data into free tools. You probably never will be able to put client into, because if it's free, that's using your data for something that you don't know, or you've got to review the terms and conditions very closely. So, with AI, pay for a service, make sure that it's the setting of sharing data is off and you're safe. That's the only thing. But it's the same as don't put client data into Google Translate. Don't put client data into any free service. You have to use it.
Speaker 3:Grammarly, right. We're using AI and a lot of people are using free AI, all the way down to the spell checker, right. So those two things Read what it creates before you use it as your own.
Speaker 1:So those two things read what it creates before you use it as your own. Make sure that you're just using a legitimate enterprise level version, not your free service, that they're going to use those two things 99.9% of all the concerns gone.
Speaker 3:What I have become fascinated with and I'm trying to learn more about really is this it's the science of engineering.
Speaker 1:Cool, to be honest, it's interesting.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about that for a bit, because what I continue to discover is the quality of the quality of the response you get is dependent on the communication you give first. So it's your responsibility, but that is a fascinating world and I'm happy to see people that are creating videos and white papers and you guys have some at your website on prompt engineering. But let's just talk about what that means and why lawyers, jim, should be paying attention and if they're going to learn anything about AI, like for me, that's the first place to go. How do we ask better questions?
Speaker 2:or do better instructions.
Speaker 1:That is exactly what lawyers are good at, and I work in the past with using technology and e-discovery where we're using a lot of machine learning or training models. It's very complicated, it's very confusing, it's difficult to understand and it's not something that most attorneys know well. Keyword searching is the same way you have to format terms. If I was going to put a list together, say, traditional analytics tools, what professions are most qualified for is like lawyers are going to be at the bottom in a lot of these tools Building, understanding, machine learning, understanding those models, not high. When I think about who is best at using human language to describe what they're looking for, lawyers are going to be right near the top and this is exactly right in their wheelhouse and we're seeing it when we're working with clients.
Speaker 1:Lawyers are really good at using words, describing clearly what they want, and that's all the prompt engineering is. You know, for the most part, we're working with clients and we're providing them some guidance of kind of some guidelines for how to write their instructions, but it's coming really naturally to everyone, especially lawyers, because it's so natural to describe clearly. It's very much like writing contracts when you need to be very clear in what you're saying no ambiguous instructions and just a direct, direct instruction. That's all it is, and that's why we're seeing attorneys being so successful at it. Where it is something that other fields, if you're using a ton of words or you're not describing things clearly, you're going to have problems.
Speaker 3:So we don't do a lot of e-discovery but we look at a crap ton of medical records right and figuring out chronologies and diagnoses and patterns like that, and we're starting to develop a prompt library and building that database to teach in our case, chat GPT, just, for example, to teach it more and more about who we are, what we're asking, what we really want. What would be the right way to do that, to build. If you have a particular thing that you keep coming back to technology for but you want to make it better and better every week, is it, for example, chat systems?
Speaker 1:It's about having a free discovery.
Speaker 1:What we're doing is we're summarizing documents or we're reusing prompts that are generating really high quality summaries and things like that. For medical records, you might want to extract relevant information. That's something we're doing where it's basically reviewing records and it's extracting the name of the patient, the dates, what type of service are provided. We're doing the same with contracts. We're extracting the parties, the dates and things like that and it's about refining it until you get a good result and then reiterating that and using that, going forward and having that library of tools. But overall, I think that the biggest value to this for a small practicing attorney is using it as a day-to-day assistant, having it just help you with everything you're doing in the day. For example, you mentioned creating social media marketing things. If you're looking to create social media posts for your Facebook page and you're looking for ideas, go to ChatGPT and say, hey, I'm an attorney that does this and this. I want to create some marketing materials, some ads. Give me ideas to brainstorm. Give me 10 ideas for social media posts to make. I want to write blogs for my website to generate and boost my SEO. Write 50 ideas for blog entries that a criminal defense attorney would be considering and then even say, once it writes all the ideas, they say I like that blog entry about writing about what to do. When you get a DWI, write me a 3000 word blog or whatever word count. Blog about that. And now you're still going to want to read through it, edit it and refine it. It's creating a first draft. Or, even better, sometimes just say create an outline of a draft for what I'm going to do. And that's the process that you can use for everything.
Speaker 1:If you're writing a motion, you're writing a brief, you're thinking of arguments. You can say I have this case about X, y and Z. What are some arguments I want to consider when making this claim? What are some arguments that the other side might make? When I'm making this claim, we'll talk about hallucinations. So what if it's going to make up one of the arguments is not a good arguments? You'll be able to at least understand and know some ideas that might not have been there Idea generation, brainstorming and then writing the first draft of these things.
Speaker 1:So if you have to write a motion, a brief, you can say describe what it is you're looking for, describe the background, the fact pattern, and say write a draft or a brief for this. Now you're going to get something back and it's probably going to get you about 90% of the way there. But you know what? There's not really any risk because worst case, you look at it and say this isn't what I wanted and I it takes in two minutes you can get a draft and you can assess whether or not that draft is going to save you time, and I'll tell you what.
Speaker 1:It's probably going to save you time most of the time, and that's the use cases that we're talking about. We're not talking about relying on it, having it do all your work for you. We're talking about having it do something to get you started, and that writing blogs, writing social media posts, writing motionss and generating ideas for arguments, generating ideas for social media posts and blogs all are things that it is really good at and just helps make your day a lot easier and helps what you're doing provide a fast result, and you're going to get extra things. It's going to make arguments that you might not have thought of, and not all of them are going to be what you want to use, but it's going to give you some ideas that you did not have previously. What you want to use, but it's going to give you some ideas that you did not have previously, just if you had a paralegal sitting next to you doing the exact same thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you're riffing on ideas. One of the things I do when I'm brief writing is I come back and say take that paragraph I just wrote.
Speaker 1:A lot of times what I'll do is I'll write something just off of my head, just throwing out something and I could even record it, and just me talking about stuff and say, listen to this recording and you write a paper that's going to basically say all the arguments I said, but just say them better and say it more clearly, and you can say it right in a certain style or format. Write it in a very professional style. Write it in a funny style, so, depending on whether it's a blog, a social media post or brief, and that gets to the prompt engineering where the very you know, one of the most important things is just describing to the AI what style do you want the output in. Write it like a sixth grader. Write it like a senior level attorney. Write it like a person who's trying to be funny for a blog that's going to get engagement.
Speaker 3:This is probably a really simple, stupid question, but what's the tech stack for voicing it? Because I haven't found a way to do it without sending the voice, the audio, to a transcription service. First back to ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:I don't use audio a ton, but the ChatGPT app on your phone does have audio, where you could click basically play, and then you can talk, and it does it.
Speaker 3:Oh, there's that. Yeah, there's the mic, it's the microphone you'll be able to just talk directly to it.
Speaker 1:And then the issue then is now it's going to create it on your phone. You're going to have to get that from your phone to your you know, computer in all senses, but depending on if you have a mac and iphone, it syncs.
Speaker 3:Okay, all right, cool. Let me ask you this, because this would be a use case. So one of our practice areas is a niche inside of ERISA and for 20 years we have written briefs and motions on the same thing over and over again and new cases come out. So what would be the? How would we think about saying here's our last 24 months of summary judgment motions on this topic? I want to teach you my style. I want to give you it's our Westlaw, but it's us right, it's our version. Is that as simple as loading multiple PDFs up and saying I want you to write the intro to this next brief and here's the data points maybe dates of coverage, things like that and just go look at our intros?
Speaker 1:No, and that's a really great use case. I just always say it's if you had a paralegal sitting next to you, what would you need to provide that paralegal with information?
Speaker 1:to help them do their job better and if you want them to match a certain writing style, say yep. Here's some examples that I've prepared in the past that you can use as a basis, which I think everyone probably does when providing guidance to a paralegal. The only limitation that you're going to have to be considering is you can't load an unlimited amount of data into the large language You're probably going to be at about. If you're using ChatGPT the latest version, it, If you're using ChatGPT the latest version, it's probably going to limit you to about 250 pages of text. So, yes, you can, but it's not infinite. You can only load in 250 pages of text, that's not a small number.
Speaker 1:Some contracts get longer than that.
Speaker 2:But for the most part.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's a really great use case and not something you would struggle with at all.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about some other practical uses for the solo and small firm.
Speaker 1:Yeah, marketing. A lot of small firms are mostly marketing. I always said that was one of the biggest problems of being a solo practitioner is you become a marketer, not a lawyer. Creating social media content, creating blog content that I would recommend using is just a draft that you then finalize. One thing that we do for some of our customers that were making social media posts is just say generate me 25 days of social media posts related to this topic. Use this writing style you want to either be funny or serious or what type of format you want and it will generate a bunch of posts that you can load up to post to social media every day for the next 25 days or whatever you have. So the social media, the marketing piece, is really powerful.
Speaker 1:The second piece is that ability to draft content draft motions, briefs, whatever and whether or not it's a draft, or whether it's creating an outline or even just creating brainstorming ideas, that is just so powerful to say I am dealing with this case. What are some arguments I might want to consider? What are some arguments the other side might want to consider? Write me a first draft outline. Write me a complete draft that I can use as a starting point that's going to get you started on those cases so much faster. We are using it for some automations, to generate and create documents as well. You have your criminal defense attorney, you have a new person incoming, you need to create your certificate of representation, your welcome letter to your clients, what forms you need to file for that first initial appearance, and things like that.
Speaker 3:I would say another use that seems to be quick, easy and simple is, as these firms grow, they need policies, they need procedures, they need to start documenting the Ben Glass Law way of doing things, and in the past that's hard because it's just created more work for typically the founder lawyer, right? How do I outline every step that we use in onboarding a new client? But that's an area where ChatGPT is very smart and helpful, because legal is really no different from any other business and you need written business systems, and so getting first drafts, second drafts and you need written business systems, and so getting first drafts, second drafts and third drafts of that One thing.
Speaker 1:I find myself doing a lot more and I'll say this because we do have a legal department that does a full analysis, so I can not be responsible myself for doing it.
Speaker 1:But when we have contracts, one of the very first thing I do is I paste it in and say review this contract about X, y and Z, give me a general summary of what it's talking about and tell me if there's any clauses that are unusual or something that would stand out as not being typical, and now I can get a quick understanding of that contract. Again, we have a legal team that's doing a full analysis, so I wouldn't recommend doing that if you're the only one looking at a contract, but gets you where you're looking for so much faster. Where you're looking for so much faster understands, even if you're going to review a full contract and then use that as a secondary step, being like is there anything that jumps out here as a clause that's unusual or something that would be something I would want to pay attention to. It's really good at just saying this clause is a lot more restrictive than what we usually see in these types of contracts and really helps you understand contracts really well.
Speaker 3:I'll give you another use case is here we record all our incoming and outgoing phone calls and so lawyers think they know what a potential client is saying and the ideas that are running through that client's head. But typically that call is being handled by someone else who's doing your intake and so taking these recordings, getting them transcribed and then asking GBT or some AI software like what question? Like what are the top three questions that caller after call after caller is asking, and then developing marketing. Jim, that answers that. Because we lawyers think we're so smart we use words like truck accident litigation lawyer, like no client in the world has ever called looking for a truck accident litigation lawyer.
Speaker 3:I guarantee it they were in a car. They get hit by a truck. It's a car accident still. But that's another way. Because for the solo and small firm, like monitoring what's going on in your phones is important If you're going to listen to the calls, that's time consuming. But setting up protocol and then asking the problem did my team ask this question? Did they go down this checklist and you're telling the computer listen to this call or read the transcript, boom, it's another thing.
Speaker 1:I love that same thing with. Like you know, if you have to produce relevant documents and you have a whole bunch of voicemails you want to say are any of these talking about this? Or you have call center recordings or things. Really good use cases.
Speaker 3:The other thing is uh, so at the end of our consult calls with clients, we're able pretty quickly now to turn on a report. Here's what we talked about, here's the issues, here's our recommendations, here's the questions you asked.
Speaker 1:Here's the next step and saying basically generate a follow-up email that I should write outline what we talked about in the next steps. That would be a really great use case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, read it first. Definitely don't.
Speaker 1:And it's like a lot of our automations were built around like it would generate something and it would send it to an attorney and there would just be a button that says approve, edit or decline and they click approve and then it will send out. But we want to make sure that they always have that chance to see it, read it and determine whether or not it's what they want to send.
Speaker 3:Hey guys, this is Dan. If you like what you've been hearing on this podcast not just the marketing and practice building strategies, but the philosophy of the art of living your best life parts. You should know that my son, brian, and I have built a tribe of like-minded lawyers who are living lives with their own design and creating tremendous value for the world within the structure of a law practice. We invite you to join us at the only membership organization for entrepreneurial lawyers that is run by two full-time practicing attorneys. Check us out at greatlegalmarketingcom. So let's talk about eDiscovery AI. Is this your I don't think it is your first technological venture.
Speaker 1:We were just talking about the different things we've been working on, and probably about five organizations, ventures that we've either been working on in the past or now in progress, but this is definitely our biggest and most exciting and current focus because of the AI technology. There's just so many things coming out of it that I think are going to be fantastic going forward technology use. There's just so many things coming out of it that I think are going to be fantastic.
Speaker 3:Going forward as a founder and a visionary. You probably wake up, as I do, with only about a million ideas by six o'clock in the morning. How do you work to figure out, okay? How do you work to get to focus? Like all right, I've got all these ideas to get to focus? Like all right, I've got all these ideas. This one is worth doing. And now help me not be distracted by the 999 I just set aside over here. I'm curious about your personal habits or disciplines about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll tell you my secrets.
Speaker 1:The first thing I think is really important and it's something that we've always prioritized here is number one is stay in your lane. I get ideas all over the place and it's we know we discovery. My experience, our team's experience, is really focused on the discovery. When someone comes and talks about something that's outside, that's really cool. It's just important not to see that shiny object and get distracted and be going in a bunch of different directions. So that's one of our primary focuses with this business early on was there are a lot of AI solutions that we can build and there's a lot of needs out there, and we could go into all sorts of different things. But because we have this expertise and this is our core knowledge, we want to make sure we stay in our lane, and I think that's important for just any business that you're doing.
Speaker 1:The one, the big thing with AI in this is that, yes, those ideas just come and there's new technology, new options every 34 days, and every one of them is here's a new idea, here's a new problem I can solve. My secret is I bought the house next door to my house. I use that as my office and then when I wake up at two o'clock. I have an idea that I'm not going back to sleep until I see whether this is viable. I can improve our processing speed by 10% or I can make an efficiency. I just get out, I trudge next door and I work on it until I figure out something good or bad about that idea. It's one of those.
Speaker 1:I don't know about you, but there's no going back to sleep when you're sitting there and thinking about something that you want to do. The downside is I live in Minnesota, so in the winter it's like trudging through the snow next door. But that allows me to be able to take advantage of those ideas. And I'm really a guy that is, I come up with ideas in the middle of the night and I need to try them out. Or usually I'm working on something on a night or weekend and that's really when the ideas start to come, because one of the things that happens a lot with an organization like this is just so much time is spent on meetings, on calls, that you don't get that creative thought that processes during the day a lot more. You really need to find your groove and everyone's got different.
Speaker 1:I just talked to a friend of mine that's saying yeah, I wake up at five o'clock in the morning, that's when I get things done and me personally I use it's either I I'm working on something at 8 PM and then I look up and it's two in the morning and I just realized that I went into a zone or wake up in the middle of the night and end up having to just be like I got to solve this now, so I think it's incredibly fun. It's something I wouldn't trade for anything in the world, but yeah, if you don't have a plan there, you're going to lose a lot of sleep.
Speaker 3:Who have you surrounded yourself with? What does your team look like? Do you have assistance besides your technology?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know I have the benefit of working in eDiscovery for 10 years, so I know a lot of people that are really good at doing what they do in this space and we are really focused on using it for doc review. There's eDiscovery is a huge field. There's collections, processing, productions all everything out of the sun where we're focusing on this one niche and it just the fact that I was in the space doing this exact thing for so long really deep venture people that are really good in this space.
Speaker 1:So I like to surround myself as a small organization, it's really important that you hire good people. Nothing is worse than the cost and the investment of hiring someone that ends up not working out. I say, like, why would I hire someone off the street when I already know who I like working with and who's good at doing certain things for the most part. Obviously, some things are outside of what my previous experience was, but so that helps a lot. And then the previous ventures we worked on. We've really built a really great team of experts across for marketing, web development and all the tech stuff. So that goes every business you have is going to need a website, it's going to need marketing, it's going to need graphics, is going to need that.
Speaker 1:And so we have a really great team that we've been using, that we've been growing over time and developing and really fine tuning to get to the point we're at now, and that's fantastic. I do have an assistant that helps me with a lot of just the day-to-day stuff, but for the most part it is that those core teams that are getting a lot of that work done and making sure that we're working smoothly, and I think that and one of the benefits that a lot of people aren't going to have is just that experience working with thousands of people in the field that you can pick which ones are the best.
Speaker 1:But being able to have a curated team of people that are knowledgeable about different things is really important.
Speaker 3:With the speed of change in the world today. Again, here we are, middle of 2024. What is the average Mr and Mrs lawyer running a small practice? And you are part of a small practice and you are part of a small practice, but you are inside that tech bubble, tech world. But what are the rest of us? Do you think to keep up? Who do we listen to? Who do we read? Because there's a bazillion. I get pitched. Every day. There's something new out there and what happens is we find that technologies like case management systems, like they're really good at the thing, but then they see, oh, this company is doing this, so now let's bolt that on here too, let's bolt this, and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's not so good. But who should we be looking to Jim to help, like the paradox of choice, like that's a really good question and honestly, it's tough.
Speaker 1:I want to be a lawyer and say it depends. Number one I think that everyone learns in their own way, and me personally. I'm never going to learn with someone talking to me about something I'm going to do, and so I think doing is absolutely the first step for everyone. Using ChatGPT, using Cloud, using whatever tools you have. What I recommend to people is go to ChatGPT, pay $20 a month for the professional plan and try it, and the very first thing you can do is, if you have a kid, sit down with your kid and have it write a story.
Speaker 1:A bedtime story for a kid Say write me a story for a nine-year-old girl about dragons and princesses, about a magical land, and watch how it creates things. And read that story to your kid and maybe say, okay, now I want to write part two about that story and maybe have a whole chain of stories that you're working with on your kid. The other thing I do a lot with my kid is have it create pictures. You can say draw me a picture of a unicorn jumping over a rainbow. Draw me a picture of this.
Speaker 1:Have it go with the stories if you want, but then you start to see what it can do what it can't do, what it's good at, and that's the kind of experience that you need to understand, because what triggers me, anyway, is I have something that I'm doing in my head and I think, oh, that would be really good for this problem I had, and it triggers this thought of I can do that. I bet it can do. This other thing that I need that I have is a real problem. So understanding how it works is that first step to getting that brainstorming open, because, as a lot of the small firms, you're doing so many roles that there's not just like a one size fits all for any firm. You're not going to be able to say here are the things that your firm needs to know about AI and do it. As much as you just know what tools are out there so you can see what they can do and you can figure out how they can fit into your system.
Speaker 3:And just don't be afraid of it, because again it can generate something and you don't have to do anything with it.
Speaker 1:You don't have to send them pictures you can have it write pictures for you and pictures from a small firm. A lot of people have to create content for websites for blogs. Having it generate images for you for websites for blogs, having it generate images for you, having it generate graphics, is a huge, is another huge value add. But, yeah, have it. I mean, my kid loves just describing things and having it created it's and you can have it make coloring books. You can have it do anything. That piece is just the way that you can get comfortable with technology at. I want to say low risk, but true is it really doesn't matter if it performs well or not and you can decide if you think it's going to help you or not based on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because I'm also using. We're traveling to another town, I'm going to be here, I'm going to be at this hotel and give me some ideas of restaurants nearby that have live music.
Speaker 1:I think our traditional search is going to definitely change and Google even has AI results as the top now. So they know what's going?
Speaker 1:on. It's really great at generating code for programs, so if any tech nerds out there if it could only generate code, it would be the best tool of our lifetime. The other thing, just thinking of other use cases that we have, it's just so idea generous. The one that I do enjoy is I use it as an arbitrator of disputes as well. If I'm having a disagreement or we're talking about something and it's not a fact-based dispute as lawyers like to argue about things.
Speaker 1:You can get that as your second opinion, or you can get just a judge or an arbitrator.
Speaker 2:It's easy and.
Speaker 1:I know that we've even heard of judges using it to determine outcomes of cases. That's another use case where you can say this is my case, what do you think the outcome is going to be? And at least you get an idea that it's another opinion that you can decide whether you want to consider or not. To getting back to how you want to use it, there are. If you're not really a person that wants to have a hands-on approach, going through and learning online is probably your next best approach, but working with someone that's knowledgeable is definitely a way to do it.
Speaker 1:Our last business what we really did focus on with working with small businesses, including a lot of law firms we were their tech solution and how I described what we offered is we were that tech nerd that everyone has. Everyone is like my nephew fixes my phone or my cousin makes my website. I have this guy that whenever there's a tech problem, I just call him, and so we like to say that we were that tech nerd for a bunch of small businesses where, if you need a website, call us, we'll make you a website. You need a blog. You don't have to understand anything that's going on, it's all done for you. So that was what our selling point was, and it still works really well. I had some people call me saying they have websites. I had some people calling me they wanted to use AI to create social media content. I had some people calling me saying that their computer popped up, saying they have a virus. What do they do? And everyone has that nerd that they work with. Use that person as your guide.
Speaker 3:It's very good. Yeah, I ask it questions about my Garmin smartwatch and the software that goes with it. If you want to learn about it, ask it. Say I want to learn about AI.
Speaker 2:What should?
Speaker 1:I do.
Speaker 3:Because it's going to know better than anyone, yeah, and it types it so much faster. What's the other thing? Is that, just for so, we went through the world of voice, dragon and dragon dictate right back in the day and how frustrating that was. And today it's wow, we I'm older so I can young ones here that back in the day we didn't do five drafts of motions because someone was typing them with carbon paper in between, so we didn't do that stuff. But today you get a new idea, plug your emotion in it, rewrites it, make this a heading boom, fixes all that stuff. Let me ask you this eDiscovery AI. Who is your avatar? Client, like? What type of firm or problem? I could guess, but since I don't do a lot, ediscovery, yeah, I don't even know what I don't know.
Speaker 1:Our core clients are going to be your large Fortune 500 companies that are doing large scale litigation.
Speaker 1:They're your large companies that are having huge lawsuits and they're having to deal with collecting millions of documents to hundreds of custodians in some cases and really need a solution that allows them to call through a very large volume of documents very quickly.
Speaker 1:Now, that's our core base and that's who a lot of them are, but we are working with a number of smaller attorneys that basically have a small collection that they need to identify, either to review documents that are produced to them or review documents to produce to an opposing party.
Speaker 1:So, regardless of the volume, we definitely work with just about anyone. It's just that most people that are having the problem that we're working on is going to be in those cases that are the larger cases with large volumes of documents and a lot of problems to solve, where I don't know about you, but my first case that I worked on as an attorney doing I needed to produce documents to the other party. I just went through and I sorted through a couple hundred docs in an hour or two and I identified what we needed and produced what we had and it wasn't really a large problem, but we are finding that some of those smaller firms are encountering a case every now and then that has a significant volume of discovery to review and we can move through and identify what's relevant and not relevant to do a large volume. Documents in minutes.
Speaker 1:If you had a million documents that you need to review and determine what to produce. We could scan through that and identify everything you need within 24 hours or less.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so those young contract lawyers who used to go to sweat boxes to review and code manually hundreds of thousands of documents like they. So there's still.
Speaker 1:there are 45,000 interview attorneys in the US and it's still. The leading solution is to brute force, using humans to classify documents is to brute force using humans to classify documents, but the reality is today, computers are far better at performing that task. I have never beaten the AI in reviewing any volume of documents, even my own emails from my own companies. It still finds things that I miss.
Speaker 1:It just is a fact that classification of documents is something that computers are very good at right now and humans have a number of shortfalls that the focus, the time they working, needing to sleep, needing to eat, getting distracted, all of those things that makes the squishy humans not nearly as good at certain tasks. This is one on that. It just is not going to be competitive in the long run and it's going to take some time because the legal industry moves slow and we're all conservative and making sure that everything's in place before we jump to adopting any new tech. But the writing's on the wall and in the end it's just inevitable that we're not going to be using humans to review large volume of documents, to classify them in the future. We are going to use humans to identify what we need to use in our trials, exhibits, depo, prep and prepare for our cases.
Speaker 3:But that exercise of looking through documents and classifying them, yeah, and that's really. There's a pain for their creativity, their problem solving, and so, at the end of the day, this is freeing you up to do what you were born to do, I think, which is, in our case, like solve problems for clients in an efficient way. You do have a number of white papers and other great articles at the website, so why don't you tell folks where they can go to get those? I don't know if you have anything else you want them to do, but feel free to All. Right, this is my pitch.
Speaker 1:We are primarily focused on basically identifying and classifying documents. Ediscovery is the best use case, but anytime you need to, if you have a ton of contracts, you need to extract data from large volumes of documents, audio files, images, any of those. We love hearing what your problems are and we can offer potential solutions. That's what our real focus is. We are working with companies. We're working with a social media company to identify inappropriate content and images. We're working with a construction company to identify potential safety violations in security camera footage. So if you're not wearing a hard hat and you're walking by that security camera, someone's going to get flagged saying we identified a person that's violating one of your policies and AI is doing that recognition to do that.
Speaker 1:So it's certainly our use cases outside of eDiscovery that we love going after. But I just say, if you have any large volumes of data, you're trying to basically automate a process. Love to hear what your problems are and the best way to do that is our website's ediscoveryaicom. I'm available on LinkedIn. I'm very responsive to people that are there. You can either go to our website, read what we do, reach out there, reach out on LinkedIn. Love to just hear what the problem is you have so we can see if there's any solutions we can offer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, very good, and these are the sort of things that get you running in the middle of the night from your one house to your other house, and I truly enjoy that.
Speaker 1:This goes back my whole life is. I want to hear problems and I want to come up with cool ways to solve them.
Speaker 3:Very good, jim Sullivan, thanks for spending time with us today. The website is ediscoveryaicom. The company is ediscoveryaicom. This has been fascinating. It's another step in our journey of learning about AI and how all of us can make our lives better.
Speaker 1:Thanks a lot for having me. I love talking about this stuff.
Speaker 2:Thanks, man. If you like what you just heard on the Renegade Lawyer podcast, you may be a perfect fit for the great legal marketing community. Law firm owners across the country are becoming heroes to their families and icons in their communities. They've gone renegade by rejecting the status quo of the legal profession so they can deliver high quality legal services coupled with top-notch customer service to clients who pay, stay and refer. Learn more at greatlegalmarketingcom. That's greatlegalmarketingcom. That's greatlegalmarketingcom.
