Using Casetext for Legal Research

Episode Notes

Transcript

New Solo

Using Casetext for Legal Research

10/26/2018

[Music]

Intro: So you are an attorney and you have decided to go out on your own, now what? You need a plan and you are not alone. Join expert host Adriana Linares and her distinguished guests on New Solo. Tune into the lively conversation as they share insights and information about how to successfully run your law firm, here on Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Adriana Linares: Hello. Welcome to New Solo on Legal Talk Network. I am your host, Adriana Linares. I am a legal technology trainer, consultant, I run around the country helping lawyers use technology better. But today I am here recording another episode of New Solo and it’s going to be great and enlightening. For those of you that are looking for alternative and affordable legal research, tools and services, I think you will enjoy this conversation.

But before we get started, I want to make sure and take a couple of minutes to tell you about my sponsors.

Answer 1 is a leading virtual receptionist and answering service provider for lawyers. You can find out more by giving them a call at 800 Answer 1 or online at answer1.com. And that’s answer1.com.

Of course I want to thank Clio. They are a cloud-based practice management software program that makes it easy to manage your law firm from intake to invoice. Try it for free at clio.com.

Unbundled Attorney is a premium lead generation service that delivers exclusive leads directly into your Inbox in real-time. Looking to get more leads and grow your practice, visit unbundledattorney.com.

Then there is LAWCLERK, where attorneys hire freelance lawyers. There are no sign up or monthly fees, you only pay the flat fee price you set, increase your profits, not your overhead. Learn more at lawclerk.legal.

And LAWCLERK has given us a rebate, so if you put in the code of New Solo 300, you will get a $300 rebate after your first project.

So I am excited to introduce Jake Heller from Casetext to New Solo. Hi Jake. Are you there?

Jake Heller: I am here.

Adriana Linares: Oh, great. You sound good too. So let’s talk a little bit before we talk about Casetext the fact that you were an attorney for a while, right?

Jake Heller: That’s right, yeah.

Adriana Linares: I love talking to service providers and innovators and people in the business who actually practiced law before coming up with an alternative career, which I think you would also probably be a great person to talk to about alternative careers in legal. But before we totally get derailed, like I am known to do, tell us a little bit about where you are from and you went to law school and then you were a lawyer and then you decided to start a company.

Jake Heller: Well, I am a weird duck and I think you will find a lot of us in the legal technology space. I grew up in Silicon Valley and my dad actually started an Internet startup in our garage in 1992.

Adriana Linares: Wow.

Jake Heller: And so way back when. And I think for a lot of kids growing up, you do all kinds of activities with your dad, or your parents or your friends. For me, it wasn’t fixing up cars or really that much sports, it was coding. I have been coding since I was like eight or nine and that’s what I did for my summer jobs, that’s what I did after school, when my friends were playing computer games, I was trying to make computer games and that’s just my hobby, that’s just who I was.

And through a long funny series of events I ended up going to law school. I went to Stanford out here in California and I for a long time was on a very typical lawyer path. If you looked at like my LinkedIn or my résumé, you would be like this guy is just going to be a lawyer for the rest of his life.

But there was that piece of me that still loved building, that still loved coding and that saw a really important need, I felt, in my profession and after a year clerking on the federal courts, after working for government and for a very big law firm I said, you know, I think it’s time to do something a bit different and to start Casetext.

Adriana Linares: I love that. So did you — and so before I ask you a couple of questions about Casetext, tell everyone who is listening who may not have heard of Casetext, exactly what it is and what it does.

Jake Heller: Sure. So Casetext is a legal research tool that is more affordable and more efficient than the other big guys and we were able to do that because we rely on some pretty advanced technology, including artificial intelligence.

(00:04:51)

Adriana Linares: I love that. And so what made you think of Casetext, let me put it that way, because having your coding passion and background and then going through the rigmaroles of not only law school, but then seeing how technology was used in law firms, which is never really that great, no insult meant to any law firm out there, but we are talking about the whole lot of them. What made you think, well, there needs to be some advancements and some changes and some — just legal research needs to be better, how did you decide to do that?

Jake Heller: There were a few things. It wasn’t one individual moment, but there were a few moments that I think were directly responsible for helping form this idea. The first is that when I was in law school I did a lot of the clinics, including a clinic in the East Palo Alto area, which is your relatively low income, and I remember working with solo and small firm attorneys who would literally tell me that they are part of the clinic just so they can get access to my Westlaw password. I was like that is so weird.

For me, as a young, naive student I was like these guys are lawyers and they can’t afford themselves to subscribe to some of the tools that we are being trained to use to get access to the law.

Adriana Linares: Isn’t that amazing?

Jake Heller: It’s crazy. I heard these stories of folks — again, when you are representing people who themselves may not have a lot of money, you may not have enough money yourself or it may not be the most important fixed cost to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to just get access to the law, you may have to go to the library.

I have heard stories of folks who went to the library and got a pass for 20 minutes to use LexisNexis a day. And if you imagine, you have five clients, you have four minutes a day of legal research per person, and I was like that is crazy, right?

Adriana Linares: Man, you better run a lean research machine if that’s all the time you have got, but you would probably hear those same stories today. That’s not even —

Jake Heller: I absolutely do. And so for me I was like — so the first thing that happened was I thought to myself in every other — I grew up in Silicon Valley, right, so I watched as all these old publishing companies were completely outdone by new technology companies. How Wikipedia came and there is no more Encyclopedia Britannica essentially, right, how TripAdvisor came along, Farmers — where Yelp came about and Zagat was completely undone. And in all those cases there was an old publishing company that was too expensive, it was exclusive, right, that was very editorial driven and they were almost always able to be supplanted by better, free technology-based companies, and that was inspiring to me.

I saw the world of information opening up everywhere else but not in law and that was the first thing. It was like why in the world is law one of the only places where information is expensive and hard to get access to.

And the other side of it was not only was the stuff expensive and hard to access, when I practiced, I felt like I had my iPhone, I had all the websites I used on a regular day-to-day basis for fun and entertainment and for communicating with my family and I am like wow, this is the future. I feel like I am living in the present day. And then I would log on to one of these older legal research services and it’s like going through a time portal back in the 1993.

And I said to myself why is the profession that is doing some pretty darn important stuff, right, defending the rights of the falsely accused, making sure that a billion dollar lawsuit is handled correctly, right, whatever it may be, why are we the ones using technology that was so backwards and out-of-date?

And it’s a long answer I know, but there were a lot of things that kind of came together for me to say, you know, I think there needs to be a newer better approach here.

Adriana Linares: I love it. So you built Casetext and then tell us a little bit about how it’s different and what you did differently, because if you think about the giants and the long lifespan that they have had, I think it’s hard sometimes for companies that have been around a long time to update their software, their code, and sometimes it’s even hard for them to just innovate, because why would they bother, right?

So when you decided to do this what were the types of things that you said okay, well, Casetext is going to be different because it’s going to do these things other than the fact that it’s affordable, which we will talk about in just a minute, what are the things that set it apart? As a solo or small firm lawyer, why would I want to go and take a look at Casetext?

Jake Heller: So I am going to start at a very high level of generality, which is we are not them. And I can’t emphasize enough how everything I am about to say is driven by a mindset which is that we know we are not the monopoly, we know we are the David against two enormous Goliaths, and when you are in that position, and I think every listener here could probably identify with this, when you are a smaller, going up against bigger, older companies, you have to work twice as hard, you have to out-innovate, you have to be cheaper, you have to have better customer service.

(00:09:57)

We are not a monopoly and I think actually the newness of us, relatively speaking, we are a five-year-old, almost six year old company, but the relative newness of us, and our position knowing that we are the David leads us to do a lot of the things that we do that distinguish ourselves.

And to be specific about it, one of the most important ways we distinguish ourselves is by innovating on really advanced artificial intelligence technology that enables you as an attorney to find the most on-point cases and other authorities really, really fast, and the technology is called CARA.

Adriana Linares: And let’s spell that.

Jake Heller: C-A-R-A.

Adriana Linares: And it’s an acronym?

Jake Heller: Acronym for the Case Analysis Research Assistant, but nobody knows that, except for the people who listen, because people treat it nowadays like it’s Siri or —

Adriana Linares: Right, I was just going to say that, is she, is CARA a friend of Siri?

Jake Heller: I don’t know if they hang out. We don’t really socialize out of work; she is really good. We don’t want to personify, although we like the idea that CARA also means friend and so it’s kind of like amicus.

But the way that CARA works is an attorney can literally drag and drop a brief complaint or other litigation document from your litigation and CARA will figure out what your litigation is about; the facts, legal issues, jurisdiction, all the information necessary to help you find extremely on-point cases, so that when you do your searches, you are not seeing irrelevant cases from irrelevant jurisdictions about topics that may share the words of your search but have nothing to do with what you are working on, instead because CARA has read your document, it gets you and has context specific or context aware or matter specific research.

And besides having literally everything else in terms of functionality and feature set you would expect from a legal research platform, this one feature really sets us apart.

And the second thing too is if you just try it out, and there is a free trial for 14 days, if you just go to casetext.com, if you just try it out, what I think you will find is that we have really put a lot of attention to the finer details and to design, so you feel like the speed of it, the way it looks, the way that you are interacting with information should feel a lot more like 2018 and a lot less like 1998.

Adriana Linares: Wait, I have two things. One, I want to ask you before I forget, is it only indexing case law and statutes or does it go beyond that?

Jake Heller: That’s a great question. So the answer is it goes dramatically beyond that.

Adriana Linares: Dramatically beyond, I like that.

Jake Heller: Yes, dramatically beyond, think big, right? So we of course have cases and statutes from all 50 states and federal government regulations. Currently just federal regulations from the CFR, but that’s going to be greatly expanded upon. Administrative opinions from organizations like the EIA, for those who do immigration work.

But we also have really helpful content, like briefs, previous work product filed by attorneys in other litigations, like articles. If you have ever googled for a legal question or concept and came across an extremely helpful five or six paragraph explanation by a fellow attorney, we have over 700,000 of those on our website through agreements with, at this point, thousands of attorneys who write this type of content for their own purposes usually and it’s reproduced inside our legal index. So you find all of those in Casetext.

We have databases that we have extracted from the law itself. So for example, anytime a court has ever said it is well settled or it is well established, we have a database called Black Letter Law, where you can find every time that a court has said something is well established, which is super helpful because if you are trying to state a proposition in an argument to a judge, you can say, hey judge, earlier this year this court said it is well established so and so, so why are we even debating about this, this is done. So, lots of different types of information and content on Casetext.

Adriana Linares: And for our listeners, I just want to give a quick visual because I sat through a demo of Casetext with you. Imagine a Google search, right, so where we — you open up a browser and you type in what you are looking for into the input bar, so to speak, just imagine instead of typing in the search term that you are looking for from your desktop or from your File Explorer, wherever it is, where you might have a case that you have looked at, you drag that little file onto that input bar, instead of typing anything, and then Casetext ingests that document, analyzes it and returns the results based on, as Jake said a few minutes ago, what’s actually in the case as opposed to irrelevant texts and terms that might just happen to be similar and possibly related.

So I don’t know if I did a good job there, Jake, but.

Jake Heller: That’s exactly right.

Adriana Linares: Because it’s a podcast I always try to have people visualize. But I think the best thing they could do is you can go to casetext.com and try it for free, right, they can have a free trial?

(00:15:01)

Jake Heller: That’s absolutely right, exactly, exactly. And that’s the easiest way. It’s one of those things where I can talk till my face is blue about how great my technology is, but if I am being perfectly honest it’s something that you have to experience for yourself. And it’s not for everybody, right? Some people are — have used Westlaw for the last 40 years and they are like I am not going to change and fine, that’s fine.

Adriana Linares: Yeah, that’s fine.

Jake Heller: Yeah, that’s absolutely okay. We work with a lot of the most innovative firms, big and small and are really happy with the people who have come to start using us, sometimes instead of West and Lexis and Bloomberg, and especially for the law firms that have all the resources in the world sometimes as well as Westlaw and Lexis and Bloomberg, yeah.

Adriana Linares: But I think that that case of it’s not for everybody and you are always going to have a hold out, that goes with everything in legal tech.

Jake Heller: Yes.

Adriana Linares: When I walk into a law firm and someone very enthusiastic about bringing their law firm to a modern era greets me at the door, they will often say, oh, but then you know there are so and so in the corner, what are you going to do about him or her, they barely use their computer at all? I say I am not going to do anything about them, but you have got 50 other people in this law firm that I can help and affect right away and that one person, I mean they are successful and they are doing their thing, leave them alone, and if they ever decide to open their door and let me in, then I am happy to really push, but like you said, it’s just not always for everyone.

Before we move on to talking about a couple of other topics with you that I definitely want to talk about, which is just AI and law and legal research in general, tell our listeners about your pricing model.

Jake Heller: Totally. And one of the things we pride ourselves on is having transparent, simple pricing. You don’t even have to get on the phone and have a secret negotiation with a sales rep that you have to do with some of these other legal research tools. It is $65 per month if you subscribe annually, if you pay for the year upfront, and $89 a month if you subscribe on a month to month basis, easy as that.

Adriana Linares: And pretty affordable too. A lot of times it’s easy for me and I can throw this now into my sort of toolbox for lawyers to say look, if you are going to move to the cloud and think about services that are going to be helpful to you and you are starting from scratch, for your basic needs it’s about — well, now let’s add on Casetext. So I am going to say for $200 a month you can have almost everything you need to run an efficient law firm.

So that would be $50 for like a practice management program like Clio, it’s about $50 a month, give or take, $50 a month for NetDocuments, if you need sophisticated document management, which I think every law firm does, even you solos out there who think you don’t. $12 a month for Office 365, could be 8 if you are a true, true solo, but you figure $12 if you even have an assistant. And then $15 a month for Adobe Acrobat DC and now about $60, $65 a month for all the legal research, probably 99% of the legal research. Am I overstating that that a typical lawyer needs can get through Casetext?

Jake Heller: It obviously depends on the lawyer and if you need some like niche content that only exists at the basement of some library somewhere, but many, many lawyers.

Adriana Linares: That’s the 1%?

Jake Heller: Yeah, the 1%. I should mention too, a lot of these other legal research platforms have limited plans where you only get a particular state or a particular federal court or whatever, we never do that. You get all of the functionality, all of the libraries, everything for one price. We try to make it as simple and clear and all-inclusive as possible.

Adriana Linares: That’s amazing. Well, good, $200 a month, see everybody, you are ready to go. Law firm in a box and you are secure and modern and digital.

Listen, before we move on to our next segment though, we are going to take a quick break and hear a message from a couple of our sponsors.

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(00:19:51)

Adriana Linares: All right, we are back. I am Adriana Linares and with me today is Jake Heller from Casetext. Before we left off we were just getting a feel and an idea about the amazing legal research product that Jake has built from his father’s garage in Silicon Valley, and now I wanted to ask Jake just a few questions. You know, Jake is a well-known speaker and author and — have you been a legal rebel, Jake?

Jake Heller: I have been a legal rebel, yeah, and may be wear a bandana. It was just funny. This is the ABA — I think you are referring to this ABA —

Adriana Linares: Right.

Jake Heller: — like every year they name certain legal rebels. They made me and my co-founders, but wear these like silly bandanas. I think this is the funniest photo shoot ever.

Adriana Linares: So, I know you in person and I’m pretty sure you’d probably never had a bandana on before that.

Jake Heller: No, I haven’t, I haven’t, that’s true. A Silicon Valley Nerd. I have not, you know. Never had that opportunity.

Adriana Linares: A Silicon Valley Nerd. I love it. Tell me a little bit about just legal research today. You know like trends that you’re seeing, some suggestions for lawyers. You were saying that sometimes on our side channel conversation before getting started that solos and small firms often think about legal research is something that only Biglaw firms really use and afford and they’ve got a room full of associates or clerks that are doing all their legal research, but that’s really changed a lot. So, tell us a little bit about where you see legal research today?

Jake Heller: I see a few interesting things happening in legal research. The first is that as we’re 20-30 years ago and from the 1850s to 20-30 years ago, there are only a few companies in the world that actually had all of the law, and there are other companies out there like Fastcase that really opened that up and it said, you know why is it only that West and Lexis have the law? And starting with them as in the earliest-earliest days they have I think done a tremendous to work towards helping show other companies including ours that just having access to the law, which again is why West and Lexis have held this kind of monopoly. Just having access to the law and that can be a little more widespread and so you’re starting to see companies pop up and start to do more innovative and interesting things with the law now that it’s become a little more democratized.

So, if you are a California attorney I would recommend checking out Judicata. They have a newer, smaller company that is employing kind of really interesting legal technology approaches to the law. It’s only just for California attorneys, at least for now, but I think it’s a really interesting move. Fastcase for the states that have it, Casemaker for the states that have it are also interesting to watch, and I think there’s just more diversity now there ever has been.

Adriana Linares: And what do you think about companies like Ravel and Gavelytics that are doing those sort of research on the judiciary side of things?

Jake Heller: That’s really interesting. So Ravel and Gavelytics and Lex Machina — the Ravel and Lex Machina now owned by LexisNexis are taking an analytics-based approach and what they do is they not only let you find cases, they also help you say, okay, in 30 of the last cases is judge’s scene, they’ve always voted this way, do you think it will be any different? Right?

And so, it might help me make some strategic decisions based on statistics, and I should warn those who want to play around with this, think that saying there are lies, damned lies and statistics. So, sometimes these statistics can be misleading. They’ll be like, well, this judge 85% of the time votes No on this kind of motion.

If you open up those motions you see all of them were filed by like prisoners or something.

Adriana Linares: Right, right.

Jake Heller: My client has a real actual claim here and not just like some random, whatever it is, right? So you have to be careful what they have to dig in, but all that said I’ve been really impressed with those companies and we really see right now more than you’ve seen in the past is you see young motivated technologists who are trying to make the legal practice, and not to be too cheesy but at the end of the day the pursuit of justice, finding the right answer, getting the right information in the right hands. We’re all trying to make that better and I think that’s really exciting.

And, I think the other thing too like you said, I think a lot of smaller law firms and solo law firms, we have over a thousand now small law firms representing about 10,000 attorneys who use the platform; so, this is not true universally.

But a lot of folks I talk to when they hear about artificial intelligence, analytics, all this advanced technology, they think that’s nice but that’s just for big firms like you were saying earlier, and I think one of the most interesting and exciting things that is happening right now is that it’s almost the opposite. When you use better technology you are more affordable, you can scale more, you can reach more people. You can make it so that that people don’t need a lot of training to use your technology. You just kind of get started using it right away. There are all kinds of advantages to the Silicon Valley new technology approach that in a lot of ways cheaper, better, faster, easier to train right, et cetera, really benefits I would say smaller firm attorneys.

Adriana Linares: Oh, I totally agree with you.

Jake Heller: We’re adding a hundred new small firms every single week at this point.

Adriana Linares: Wow.

(00:25:00)

Jake Heller: And I think that’s because — which is not a lot from West and Lexis’ perspective, but for small guys like us, that is so exciting, and I think it’s because it’s almost the opposite. Then I think what some people would assume which is that the most advanced technology makes these cheaper and more accessible, and that’s better for smaller firms.

Adriana Linares: And this goes in general for solo and small firms with all their technology. 15 years ago when I was helping a small law firm put in a practice management program it was, well, you’re going to have to get a server and it’s going to require exchange and you’re going to have the separate server for — like, it was a $10,000 startup cost for three or four lawyers.

Today, it’s so affordable and more secure and easier, and honestly, these small firms can be as powerful and way more nimble than big firms. I say it all the time, and I know, I spent eight years, my career started at Biglaw.

So, yeah, I think that’s good advice so to speak which I don’t know if you were giving it as advice, but it basically comes down to. If you’re a solo or small you don’t have to feel inferior to Biglaw, because honestly, you can do as good a job as they can when you look at things like the cost of e-discovery, if you’re using cloud-based e-discovery service providers and the models that they offer practice management programs, legal research, I mean, you’ve got everything you need these days again in a very affordable and secure way, which I love, not that security necessarily ties into legal research but just —

Jake Heller: It does sometimes and you have to hold the podcast about that, but I can’t agree with you more. I think that like fighting guerrilla warfare, technology is a tool that can be used, it gives you an unfair advantage. As a smaller and more nimble team that is taking untraditional new tactics to surprise your foes who are stuck in their old ways and we hear this all the time from our clients and I’m sure that Clio hears the same, and Fastcase hears the same. Because of your technology we’re able to outdo run circles around our opposing counsel and put ourselves in a position to whip and we love hearing that, and I think that’s the role that technology should play.

Adriana Linares: No, I agree with you. Before we move on and talk about another new role in legal technology which is everybody’s talking about AI, let’s take a quick break and hear a message from our sponsors and then I want to talk to you about practical ways that you see AI affecting those solos and smalls that were both trying to help so much.

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Adriana Linares: All right, we’re back. Are you still with me, Jake?

Jake Heller: I am.

Adriana Linares: Great. So we’ve talked about Casetext, we’ve talked about legal research, and I know that one of your favorite topics and it sort of has to be because Casetext uses a lot of artificial intelligence is AI and Legal Today, and we could read about that and talk about it all day long at a really high level, but what I’m really interested in is talking about day to day and practical examples of how you have seen, how you know, how you experience in talking to solo and small firms as well as building a tool that can be used by solo and small firms, what’s AI mean to the average lawyer today? Or what should it mean? Let’s say what should it mean?

Jake Heller: It is such an important question and it is because – I mean, I should start by saying there’s a lot of confusion about what Artificial Intelligence is? So I want to start with a very quick definition.

A lot of people think AI is like the terminator, some robot that’s going to like know, and speak and do everything and kill us all basically, and that’s not what AI is.

Adriana Linares: I mean, look, if AI was going to kill our jobs so that we could actually just vacation all day then I’ll be all for it. Let me just put that out there.

Jake Heller: I think in the science fiction version of this, that’s exactly what we’re going to get, and that might happen, they may happen in a number of years. I’m not going to rule out but that’s not what AI is today. All the AI means — now what anybody means by AI is technology that approximates some piece of human knowledge or human intelligence.

(00:30:05)

So, for example robotics and AI, if you’ve seen these kind of creepy videos of robots walking around, why that’s AI is they’ve taught these robots to interact with the physical world, the way that we might interact with the physical world. Also like driverless cars can see and react to the physical world just like we do. It’s not all of human intelligence, some small component of it.

And the context of law, it usually means that the computer is able to hear words like verbally and turn that into some information just like humans can read and parse text and extract meaning from that and do something with it. A lot of it is kind of text-based, but the reason why it’s such a confusing term is because you also hear it used with the driverless cars and robots, you’re like what the world? How this is possible? The same technology being used everywhere. It’s all just trying to approximate parts of human intelligence.

So, where is that fit in law? A lot of this is not actually even all that new. In e-discovery, you teach a machine with predictive coding. You say, this is not relevant, this is not relevant, this is relevant; this is not relevant, this is not relevant, and you do that hundreds or thousands of times, and then the Machine says, I get it. The New York Times breaking news alerts in this guy’s Inbox, not relevant. The thousands of documents where they say, I think that we should lie to our consumers about this. That’s relevant. It will take the next million documents and turn that into real information. That’s a real — e-discovery and coding is a real and one of the oldest and most well-established examples of AI in practice today.

Other examples in the legal research are CARA application. It’s able to do things that again traditionally only humans are able to do, read an advanced document like a brief or complaint, extract a meaning from it so that it can say, okay, I understand what this is really about, let me do something with it, and using that to help your legal research that’s another example of AI.

Another example is another legal research company called ROSS. Their claim to fame is that you can just ask it a question and it will try to answer you with Caselaw the thing you asked about, and that’s — understanding what the question really means, is another example of AI. And outside of law for a second, this happens every day. If you ever type into Google search bar, how is “Apple doing today?”, right. A dumb machine would be like Apple, like the fruit, okay, it’s doing pretty tasty I guess, I don’t know, like advanced kind of natural language processing knows that you’re talking about the stock price of a publicly traded company, right?

Adriana Linares: Wait, let’s try that.

Jake Heller: Yeah.

Adriana Linares: Hold on. Hey, Amazon, how is Apple doing today?

Amazon Alexa: As of 11:47 a.m. Eastern, Apple traded at $219.92, up 1.81% since previous close.

Adriana Linares: It’s a good day for Apple.

Jake Heller: It’s a great day and it’s — again, there’s actually two parts of AI there. First of all, taking these weird noises that come out of our mouth and turning that into something that a computer can understand is an enormous feat, very hard. There’s a company called Tallie or Talia, I’m not sure how you pronounce it.

Adriana Linares: Oh, hold on, wait.

Jake Heller: Yes.

Adriana Linares: Before you – okay, no, you tell us first then I’ll do something.

Jake Heller: Okay, okay. So the way that Tallie works is that you just say I’m working on this or that matter and I’ve worked on it for this many hours or this many minutes or I’m starting to work on this matter, and Tallie will be like, alright, I’m recording that for you. It’s a timekeeping device for attorneys using Amazon Alexa and the ability to use my voice and for a computer understand that is actually pretty magical. It sounds like you’re going to have a live demonstration of this right now.

Adriana Linares: Let’s try it. Hey, Amazon, tell Tallie to log some time.

Amazon Alexa: How should I describe your activity?

Adriana Linares: Video production and editing.

Amazon Alexa: How long was this activity?

Adriana Linares: 10 hours.

Amazon Alexa: For which project?

Adriana Linares: San Diego County Bar Association.

Amazon Alexa: I’ve recorded it.

Adriana Linares: Oh my god. I love when technology works.

Jake Heller: Pretty cool.

Adriana Linares: So — I know it’s amazing. So, I love tell Tallie, and what that does, it’s actually connected to my Clio. So I log my time, and yeah, on top of everything else I do, I also produce videos.

So I like to keep track of my work throughout the day and I used to tell Tallie for that, but that’s amazing, right? And she’s prompting me, I don’t even have to remember how to say it correctly. Hey, tell Tallie, tell, log this much time for the — it prompts me until you eventually learn how to say it, but go ahead, tell us more.

Jake Heller: My wife’s sister is also named Tallie, so it’s — I get to get these t-shirts for a technology company, give them to my sister-in-law, it’s like, hey, it’s about you.

Adriana Linares: That’s awesome.

Jake Heller: Yeah, I mean, so you see whether it would be Tallie or e-discovery or legal research or another company that focuses more on bigger firms but I think it will make its way into smaller firms too, a company called Kira Systems and similar companies, they are able to upload thousands of contracts and it goes within seconds. Here are all the choice of law clauses, here are all the – I don’t remember all the different clauses for contracts, it’s been a while since I have been a practice attorney.

(00:35:06)

But, it’s able to take a thousand contracts and say I understand what all the pieces of this are and here by the way, of all the thousand contracts, here are the two contracts that have weird and different clauses here. Super-super helpful.

Adriana Linares: I love it, that’s amazing. So I think there’s a lot of ways that lawyers can without thinking too hard or getting too deep into the weeds incorporate “Artificial Intelligence” or “Weak AI” as they call it sometimes which isn’t necessarily like that deep learning sort of AI, but really practical ways that if you look around things like chatbots which I interviewed Tom Martin from LawDroid in my last episode about that are really affordable and easy ways to start really taking advantage of some of these technologies and I like to remind attorneys that you can use this stuff to help you reduce stress, manage your time, log your time, do research more efficiently, effectively, without having to poke your eyes out, trying to figure out how to reword that search term and I hope that attorneys who listen to this episode really think about reevaluating how they are doing legal research especially if they’ve been really married to a particular product, especially the big ones which — there’s never bashing that we do, but there’s just — I just want lawyers to think about doing things differently sometimes and investigate and learn about new tools.

Jake Heller: Options are good.

Adriana Linares: Options are good. So, Jake, I know you have a very busy day in Silicon Valley today, so I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about this. Before I let you go though can you tell everyone where they can find, friend or follow you and/or Casetext out there in the world?

Jake Heller: Yeah, most important thing is to go to casetext.com, you can actually start using it immediately from the homepage and just sign up for a free trial by clicking that Free Trial button at the top right-hand side of the corner of the screen.

You can find us on Twitter at @casetext, on Facebook at Casetext, on LinkedIn you can find me on Twitter @Jacob_Heller and friend me on Facebook, find me on LinkedIn, I’m a pretty friendly guy, I don’t bite. So hope to connect with all of you soon.

Adriana Linares: That’s great and you are a very friendly guy. Can you tell me real quick about your dog from Thailand?

Jake Heller: Sure, he’s actually from Taiwan.

Adriana Linares: Taiwan, I mean.

Jake Heller: Yeah, the —

Adriana Linares: Way cooler —

Jake Heller: Way cooler —

Adriana Linares: That makes him way cooler —

Jake Heller: No judgment — I have a — all cool, so we — my wife and I were looking for a lab and we went on to a website called I think Petfinder and we looked for a lab in the San Francisco Bay Area and this really unusual looking lab came up where like this guy is super-cute, and we performed to adopt him and everything, and then the agency got back to us and said he’s going to come on a plane from Taiwan. I am really like what?

Adriana Linares: What?

Jake Heller: And it turns out, well, the agency who is a rescue agency was headquartered in San Francisco which is why our dog came up. Dog was actually good in Taiwan. And so —

Adriana Linares: So what, I can get electronics and rescue dogs from Taiwan?

Jake Heller: Exactly, I mean it’s like — and he’s cute and loving and he thinks he’s our brave protector —

Adriana Linares: Oh yes, I am sure he does.

Jake Heller: Scary cat. Yes, so I love him to death, his name is Alex and they call —

Adriana Linares: I was going to ask.

Jake Heller: Yeah, at the adoption agency they called him Happy Alex and so we just kept that.

Adriana Linares: Oh, I love that. Well, my dog voice came out just the tiniest bit there, I’ll keep it inside for the rest of this. Anyways, thanks so much, Jake, I really appreciate that. Please give Alex a dog hug for me.

Jake Heller: Will do.

Adriana Linares: Thank you so much. For all you listeners, thanks again for listening to another episode of New Solo on Legal Talk Network. If you like what you’ve heard, make sure you subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app, and if you happen to sit around on iTunes we’d appreciate a review on there. We’ll see you next time, and remember, you’re not alone, you are New Solo.

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Outro: Thanks for listening to New Solo with host Adriana Linares. Tune in again to learn more about how to successfully run your new practice, solo, here on Legal Talk Network.

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The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders, and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer.

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