Biglaw’s Back To Office Misadventures

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Welcome to another edition. Thinking

Chris Williams:

Hey

Kathryn Rubino:

Hey,

Joe Patrice:

Thinking Like A Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from blah blah, blah. I am greeted preemptively I suppose, by both Chris Williams and Kathryn Rubino, whose voices you heard. We are from Above, the Law, and we are here yet again to give a little roundup at the top stories in legal from the week that was or or could possibly

Kathryn Rubino:

be about to be.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Yeah. Everything happens in a context.

Chris Williams:

We’re future leaning now

Joe Patrice:

To some extent.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. For so long it’s been the week that was there an iOS update?

Joe Patrice:

Well, it’ll all be stories that was, I suppose by the time this is published. So it’s always backward looking, but maybe not necessarily as backward. Well now we’re getting into some weird conceptions of how time and present being time.

Kathryn Rubino:

Wimy wibbly wobbly.

Joe Patrice:

Hey, there it is. To save us small talk. There is the small talk sign, small talk. Okay, so how’s everybody doing this week?

Kathryn Rubino:

Terrible.

Joe Patrice:

Oh no. Wonderful.

Kathryn Rubino:

Terrible

Chris Williams:

To balance things out.

Joe Patrice:

I returned from a legal tech conference and got very sick, so I understand. Terrible.

Chris Williams:

Did you get sick from there being too much AI around you?

Joe Patrice:

It was, but more the I and then the I as it’s placed between the letters COV and D. There was a Covid outbreak at Ilta and I was informed of this by email and told I should test and I felt great and I said, well, whatever, but I will test anyway just to be sure. And I was positive

Kathryn Rubino:

And Ill remember before we were recorded last week and by the end you were kind of sniffling.

Joe Patrice:

You did make that joke last week. Yeah, well guess what? About 10 minutes after the show ended, I tested that. I was positive.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. It’s always as if you can be asymptomatic and still spread it.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh my god,

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. No, if

Chris Williams:

Only people knew this in advance

Joe Patrice:

Mercifully it wasn’t all that bad for me, but it was a night of pretty awful coughing before it cleared up again. I can still smell and taste

Kathryn Rubino:

Good for you. You rubbing it in my face.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

As a result of said recording last week, I am now having the covid as well. Oh, there you go. But I did get to watch some really fun college football this weekend, so that kind of made it worth it for me.

Chris Williams:

Only not being able to smell. I’m so excited for you because last time you lost a sense from Covid, you gained a superpower, so looking forward to what new abilities you unlock. So just be clear, Kathryn lost sense of taste, not in fashion, always very fashionable, but taste wise couldn’t taste the seasoning. Came back then discovered that they enjoyed spicy food, which wasn’t a thing prior to them. Correct. So I’m just imagining post this episode of Covid, they’ll get synesthesia and start smelling colors.

Joe Patrice:

This is where we announced it

Chris Williams:

I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful.

Kathryn Rubino:

I didn’t even know to wish for something new, but I like that you’ve opened up my mind to that possibility.

Joe Patrice:

This is where we announced that Kathryn will be taking over hosting duties on hot ones after this,

Chris Williams:

Eating like a lawyer.

Joe Patrice:

So what else is up?

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, I was trying to talk about college football. Agreed. And Florida State played Georgia Tech in Ireland. It’s become a kind of tradition for schools to go to Ireland for the first game of the year and I mean it kind of made sense when it was Notre Dame doing that since they’re called the fighting Irish and I’m not sure why Georgia Tech and Florida State feel the need to do it, but proud we are of all of them and it was very much a barn burner of a game, not expected to be expected for the previously undefeated last season Florida State team to wipe the floor with Georgia Tech and they said, nah.

Joe Patrice:

My confession to the weekend is I spent a very long time on online betting site with my finger hovering over betting on Georgia Tech and deciding that that was a poor decision and I should have you missed it out. I had an inkling it

Kathryn Rubino:

Was a good opening to the college football season.

Joe Patrice:

All right, we’ve been rambling for a while here.

Chris Williams:

I didn’t even get to say my thing.

Joe Patrice:

Fair enough. Did you have a thing?

Chris Williams:

I’m planning a barbecue. That’s it.

Kathryn Rubino:

All right.

Joe Patrice:

For the holiday

Chris Williams:

For the 31st, there’s probably a reason. I just don’t remember at the moment

Kathryn Rubino:

Labor Day.

Joe Patrice:

That is Labor Day, so yeah,

Chris Williams:

Probably I don’t dream of labor. Sure, it’s good

Kathryn Rubino:

Time to announce that because of that holiday. This will not have a show next week. I guess that’s the right way to say it. Because of the holidays,

Joe Patrice:

Everyone’s off and Chris is barbecuing, so yeah, no, so we won’t have an episode that day. US Labor Day, I should clarify. I mean everyone else in the world celebrates it on May 1st, but we are different.

Kathryn Rubino:

So got to be different. Got to have the metrics system.

Joe Patrice:

Here we go.

Kathryn Rubino:

You did that on purpose

Joe Patrice:

I did. So let’s begin talking about one of the bigger stories for us last week legally was in big law there were a couple stories about big law that we thought were of interest, but one big one is that Latham has sent out a message to its New York attorneys at the very least potentially others is telling them that even though they have up until now not really had an in-office policy, they want to return after Labor Day to start coming to the office at least three days a week and beginning in January they will be mandating that they be in the office four days a week. Now we’ve talked a lot about work from home policies here at Above, the Law, so things to note, there’s multiple vectors, there’s a graph of work from home policies. This is a four day, not a three day. Three days still seem more popular among big law, but this is a four. So this is a four day, but this has no mandatory days as in don’t everyone comes in on Monday or anything like that. It’s four days and up to the associates, but I

Kathryn Rubino:

Think that once you’re at four days, there’s no necessity to mandate a particular day because by the math there’s got to be be a lot of overlap some days where everyone’s there.

Joe Patrice:

I agree with that. What I’ve said though is so there’s three and four day vector and there’s a flexibility, non flexibility vector and even among the non flexibility vector, there are some firms who have anchor days where they just dictate you can do whatever, but everyone has to be here Wednesday or whatever. And then there are some who are three days and they have to be Tuesday through Thursday or something like that. So this is a four day, which is more putting it out of step with the rest of the market, but it maintains some degree of flexibility, which is better than some other people in the market who are at three. I personally have argued that as a lawyer, as somebody who did that job, I would care more about the flexibility than I would the number of days. Well,

Kathryn Rubino:

I just think that once you get to four, I don’t think that it’s really flexible anymore,

Joe Patrice:

But it is though you can, especially if you’re somebody who for instance has childcare issues, you can say, oh, Wednesday’s the day that I don’t need to get a babysitter or Thursday’s the day that I choose to do to schedule all my appointments, personal appointments, whatever. You can utilize a day for yourself. Obviously you’re still working, but you can utilize a day to do those things that staying at home allows you to do if you have flexibility. Whereas if you are mandated to come back on Tuesdays, if that’s the day that your babysitter can’t work, then you’re out of luck.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think it’s interesting that they foregrounded the sort of short term three day and then moving to four in January where I wonder if he just had done the three day and then kind of applied pressure for the fourth if it would’ve been just as effective and less controversial.

Joe Patrice:

Well, this is the part that actually in some ways I think the more controversial point here is not even what’s happening with the associates, it’s the questionable decision making that goes into rushing this decision. What we heard from is that the reason why they need to have this three day trial session is that they currently with their non coming into the office policy are out of office space. They have people sharing open cubicles. Now if you are already in that position, three days to try gauge what you need, office-wise make sense, but assuming that you will be in a position to have a four day system soon is a little ludicrous because as Kathryn’s already pointed out, a four day system means you have a lot of overlap. There are multiple days where everyone is in the office and that’s a problem if you don’t have space for people in the office.

In fact, the memo that was sent out telling people to come back in, hyped up the collegiality and everything as one might expect, but among the collegiality points it made was consider instead of taking a call alone from your office, inviting other associates into your office with you to take that call or maybe all going out for coffee or lunch. And all I could think was yes, you’re artificially creating reasons why people bundle up or leave the office. If that’s where you’re at workwise office space wise, then maybe just don’t bring people back to the office yet until you get a news floor or two.

Chris Williams:

I just feel like there should have been an asterisk that was like, you’ll have no choice other than to do this. Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. That’s what it felt like

Chris Williams:

But they framed it as but they framed it as you have the option to

Joe Patrice:

Congratulations, you will be able to eat out for lunch, preferably between the hours of

Kathryn Rubino:

We have a strict schedule so that we can make sure everyone has somewhere to a chair. Yeah. I feel like this is going to devolve into one of those situations that where people have their chair and they just push it from room to room as this is a more secretive deal than I’m on, so I’m pushing it into a corner so I can take this call, but I don’t want to lose my good chair. If I go to the bathroom for too long it’ll be gone.

Joe Patrice:

Nobody likes the term hotel. But look, if this is the world that we’re in, we need to start either deciding that everybody comes back to the office all the time or we embrace hoteling because otherwise the overhead costs of maintaining an office for everybody are just ridiculously too high. If you’re going to have this kind of a schedule, you need to start thinking about restructuring your office in ways where there are more communal workspaces and such, which we’ve talked about a lot of firms leaning towards more conference rooms, more like war room sort of situations and do that and move from having individual offices to more of a space where you check in and today I’m in the office and I’m going to use this space. But if you do that, you can’t have everybody in the office at the same time because that obviates whole point, we’re at a point of halfway measures that defeat the whole purpose of having the policy in the first place

Chris Williams:

By whole telling. Is that interchangeable with WeWork or is that a particular jargony? Different story.

Joe Patrice:

It is a jargony term, a hotel policy, an associate at the firm and whatever, and you set, you go onto a product like mathematician for instance, which there were other ways to do it before, but mathematician is a pretty good product for doing this. You go in and you say, you know what, I’m in the office on Tuesday and it says, you know what? Great on the 38th floor, office five is available, you’re going to be the person who works at a 38 floor office five for the next three days that you say you’re in the office and then after that you’re going to leave and somebody else will move into that office. It’s a way of structuring it. So you basically like a hotel, you use the office in a predetermined checked in period and then leave and that way the offices can be repurposed.

Chris Williams:

Do they do the laundry? I mean

Joe Patrice:

Some firms do.

Kathryn Rubino:

I know that this is necessary and I know that as a result of sort of technology, this is possible, but you really think about this image of partner offices with reams of red welds with documents and files and it was a very kind of musty paper kind of a smell associated with law firms and this just puts a real fine point on that is gone. Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

Well part of it is that the paper’s largely gone so you don’t need it.

Kathryn Rubino:

The technology has

Joe Patrice:

Advanced, the books are largely gone, so you don’t need that. And the meeting with clients is largely gone because for very good confidentiality reasons, you don’t want your clients roaming around the office. So you meet them on a designated floor that has all the conference space and they go into a conference room, you chat and then you move on. So you don’t need that giant office with a couch.

Chris Williams:

Also, the partners are salaried now.

Joe Patrice:

Well that’s an excellent transition. Let’s not make that a good, let hold that transition. Let’s instead do another big loss story and then we’ll get to that transition. So before we go to a break, let’s transition to, you had a story, Chris about Millbank,

Chris Williams:

Right? So Millbank, they recently gave, they invited their summer associates to come in a little bit earlier to work, so the start date was September 16th to 18th or so, but they’re inviting them to come in working

Kathryn Rubino:

Early. I think it’s after early. Yeah, I think it’s right after Labor Day, right?

Chris Williams:

Yeah, it’s a little blur. It’s like third. Yeah. My take on it is I’ve been in that position where I had a job and I was just waiting to work, so this would’ve been a godsend. I have nothing better to do. I can only watch so much YouTube, I might as well get

Joe Patrice:

What I took away from. It was an interesting, it’s a welcome contrast to the last few years when we’ve seen firms push out delays. Hey, you’re supposed to start, we’re not going to actually bring you on for several more weeks, which we’re a product of whether it was the financial condition they were in or what have you. The firms did not want to have to bring on and onboard a bunch of first years at the date that they promised, which can be a real problem because you get to a certain point and in the year and loan repayment kicks in and those stipends that you got over the summer for bar prep start running out, you still have to pay rent. Those delays were people kind of blew them off because the eventual salaries were so good, but they really suck for those few months. And here we now have a firm operating from a position of real strength and saying, you know what? You can even come in early. We can find room for you, which

Kathryn Rubino:

Well more than can find room want

Joe Patrice:

You

Kathryn Rubino:

Need would appreciate the extra hours that you can be billing for that extra two weeks or 10 days or whatever it is. And I think that also, I think you’re right Joe, that it is a position of strength that Millbank is playing from, which is very obvious. They are still the only major big law firm that did summer bonuses. Those are not unrelated stories in my mind.

Joe Patrice:

Millbank has really emerged for a firm that had been a very top tier firm back in the days and in my years had fallen a little bit off, but they have really stormed over the last decade back into being a compensation leader, somebody who actually sees a bright runway ahead of them and isn’t afraid to reward people for it, which we saw they’ve been first movers on salary increases they’ve been unafraid of. We characterize them as salary increases, they characterize them as cost of living adjustments, but either way it’s

Kathryn Rubino:

More than their competitors are doing,

Joe Patrice:

Which has been useful and now they have summer bonuses. They are asking people to come in early. Millbank has definitely signaled to the market that they are in the position of strength

Chris Williams:

And I think my takeaway from the message, it’s a short paragraph, but it seems to be legitimately optional. Not iron gauntlet, velvet glove, optional. They stress about at least three times, you don’t have to do this, but if you’d like to you

Kathryn Rubino:

If you have a vacation planned, that’s cool.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, me, which I think especially for associates, it’s important to have that as a sort of way to feel off the cultural of the firm that you’re working at because there are some places where it’s like, sure you get four weeks off vacation, but if you take those four weeks off, you get to leave as well. So

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s nice to know that you get more than four.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, you get however many you like until the rent comes, but yeah, it’s nice to know that. It’s nice to get the feeling that optional is actually optional.

Joe Patrice:

Homer, the plant called. They say If you don’t come in Friday, don’t bother coming in Monday. Woo-hoo. Four day weekend. Yeah, okay. Still in the big law world a little bit. Wilmer Hale, another one has fallen Wilmer Hale, one of the holdouts in having a full equity partnership tier has now finally Succumbeded as a lot of other firms have over the last several years and added a non-equity tier, which is the transition Chris had a little bit ago about now, partners being salaried, so there is a salaried tier at Wilmer Hale, the firm says they need it for the purposes of attracting, promoting and retaining talent.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, I thought that’s what partnership was for.

Joe Patrice:

Right.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, I think that we’re seeing a tremendous number of firms either change their partnership agreements or add this additional level of partnership because the top the biggest rainmakers are suddenly able to attract even bigger numbers and they have been historically that $20 million number has been thrown around a bunch and if a firm like Wilmer Hale wants to be in the game and try to get those tippy, tippy top equity partners, they need to structure their entire firm around that possibility. And that means they don’t necessarily want to lose people who don’t have that book of business but are talented attorneys, but they can’t be paying them at the same level.

Joe Patrice:

I think where this tier really comes in, there are two places, a cynical and a less cynical place where this tier comes in. The cynical place is that those 20 million partners who built years of relationships in m and a or whatever are 75 years old and refusing to retire and make room for other people and hand over their business and that refusal to leave has created a situation where now firms are like, why share the wealth with these younger people? We can pay them a lot of money, but nonetheless, non-partner money and we can continue running the firm till we die. That is the cynical read and I think there’s a little bit of that, but the non-cynical read is, especially in transactional work, one partner often doesn’t travel by themselves in litigation. You’re a great trial lawyer, you move over to some other place and you get new associates there and work with their platform and do what you do m and a level, a lot of these folks come as a team.

There’s the rainmaker with the relationship and they have bank person and their 40 act person, their tax person, and the client knows and trusts not the head as much as they trust the head and the team that they have cultivated. And so when the lateral market comes for them, they don’t come for one. They come for lifting that whole team of five or six partners and moving them over. But a lot of those partners, because they’re part of a team are non-revenue generating. They’re just part of the team. And I think if that’s the world you want to play in as far as poaching talent, a non-equity tier comes in handy because you can start paying the tax person 1,000,005 or something like that, something that’s not maybe what the actual actual partners equity profits per equity partner would be and make them non-equity and work like that. I don’t think that’s a really good way of running things, but I understand it.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I mean I think that we’re seeing this happen more and more because the lateral market’s so hot right now and people are willing to make the move and they’re willing to go over as a group. There’s not as much sense of, well this is where I started when I graduated law school and this is where I will retire from. And the partnership agreements that have been in existence since those days have to adapt, have to change,

Joe Patrice:

And in-house drives, a lot of this too in-house has gotten more sophisticated. There was an era where you hired the firm that you’ve always hired because you always knew them. You had all those relationships and those relationships still exist, but there’s increasingly more nuance to it, more ability to pull the trigger and move to someplace else. There’s also more ability to stick with individuals rather than the firm itself. So everything’s gotten a little bit more granular as the data and analytics have improved in-House has more operations level understanding and it makes a situation where individual lawyers are more important than firms and that drives a lot of us.

Chris Williams:

How do you think, well, that’ll change the clout or need for big firms in the future. Imagine there was a point where you imagine one individual, you go into a firm, you grow up within the firm, be a partner, but what you’re talking about seems like you go into a firm, you become a member of a particular clique that has enough power to do whatever they want. You can lateral or maybe even start a boutique. Do you think that changes the market value of older firms?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I mean it definitely has. I mean I think they face increasing competition, especially from the boutique level, but it also has an effect of intensifying the power of that top elite tier because if you’re leaving Latham, you’re not going to anybody but another one of those top 10 firms probably. And unless you’re starting your own thing and at that point it just,

Kathryn Rubino:

And that happens less with transactional side work than it does with litigation.

Joe Patrice:

Sure, sure, sure. The boutique part, yes. But yeah, it creates a situation. I analogize it to professional sports. You don’t get a situation which will help understand. Yeah, exactly. You don’t get a situation where somebody in a potentially lower market, less championship worthy team can throw a little bit more money and poach somebody. The value that these folks have and the iterative potential of them moving multiple times means that there’s more incentive to stay in this powerful click and just shuffle deck chairs around that. And you see the city report that just came out suggests that, and I mean I haven’t dug into the cross tabs of it, but it certainly suggests that the AM law one through 50 have had a big push in the first half of this year and they’re starting to distance themselves yet again from the firms that are a little bit lower, which the Thomson Reuters institute’s LFFI had suggested over the last year or so, the opposite had been happening in the countercyclical cycle that we were in. The lower firms were actually doing a little bit more for growing demand because there was price pressures among clients, whatever. But now, at least according to the city report, as things get better, the ability of those top firms to shuffle talent and just keep spiraling themselves further and further away from the rest of the pack is accelerating.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I think that we’re even seeing more striation like it used to be top 100, then the second hundred and then it kind of developed into the top 50 and then the second 50 and now I think we’re even seeing top 25. I think that their financial story for those top 25, maybe it’s 30, but probably 25 is a different reality than firm 40.

Joe Patrice:

I think that’s right. Okay, we’re back. This one is

Kathryn Rubino:

The rent is too damn high.

Joe Patrice:

That is true. Those of us of a certain age, remember that that was a mantra in a New York mayoral election. What was his name? Jimmy McMillan,

Kathryn Rubino:

Is

Joe Patrice:

That right? Yeah, I believe that. Yeah. Had made that the mantra of his campaign. It was very fun, but also true. I true. I believe our

Kathryn Rubino:

Former co-host, Ellie Al went as him do a Halloween party back

Joe Patrice:

In the day. I can guarantee that he did. And with that, yeah. Anyway, the rent is too damn high. As it turns out, there might be a reason the rent was too damn high. And that is the subject green landlord

Kathryn Rubino:

Collusion

Joe Patrice:

Of an antitrust suit that has been brought by the DOJ and several state attorneys general against a tech company that existed to gather rent information from landlord clients as well as public information and then it would run that through an algorithm and spit back at the landlord’s, here’s what your rent should be so that you stay above, you can win the competition and you don’t have the risk of a tenant potentially moving to somebody else. What ends up happening, of course with this algorithm per the complaint is that the algorithm artificially drove prices upward by keeping basically the entire landlord industry under one roof and using this data to collude and make sure that nobody offered a lower rent so that everybody, all tenants were stuck in a situation like this. The complaints suggests that this algorithm has been massively pushing up rents above where they would normally be in a competitive market. The algorithm has had some, now this is where I would defer antitrust wise, it had some features to it that rather than just providing anonymized data for instance, it would give the landlords the option to let the company auto accept thing where the company would just set the rent, meaning that the company had all the data

Kathryn Rubino:

With all the information,

Joe Patrice:

Non anonymized, had all the information, and they would set the thing which basically outsourced collusion.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, they’re going to be assuming all the allegations and the d oj complaint bear themselves out. This is going to feature heavily in antitrust textbooks. In this case it is the most modern because legal tech can be used for antitrust purposes. I think that there’s that aspect to it, so it’s very modern in that sense, but still very old fashioned in the, everyone gets together and sets a price to the detriment of the consumers in a very real way and also in a way that kind of speaks to people in their heart. And I think that antitrust and monopolies really historically in this country took on a storied image and this is real evil, this is really bad. And why things like the baby food antitrust cases from the nineties and stuff became a big deal because it’s like, oh my gosh, this is what we need. This is a basic human necessity and you’re messing this up for us and this is literal rent. This is people’s ability to live somewhere that is being cynically driven up by a group of interested actors working together. I mean, it has all the hallmarks to me, assuming again that the allegations in the DOJ complaint are accurate.

Joe Patrice:

So to that point you say, if all these things bear out, which transitions us to the other point, well, is there any evidence that would possibly suggest this? Yes. And most of it is being written by the company and the landlords themselves,

Kathryn Rubino:

Bless their

Joe Patrice:

Hearts. The complaint was probably most interesting for, to quote a one antitrust expert who posted a clip from the complaint on Twitter. Imagine the face of a DOJ lawyer who got the emails and just hit control F price fixing on the off chance that somebody might’ve said that. Instead, what they had were emails from the landlords saying stuff like, I love this. This is classic price fixing not the thing that you’re supposed to put in there. There were slide decks from the company itself saying, look, we don’t do this because that would be illegal smiley face, which is not a great look, especially because they did do the thing in question. They also used terms like rising tides, lifting all boats. They use terms, getting competitors to work together is our goal. These are all not great things to be saying if you are trying to avoid antitrust enforcement.

Chris Williams:

But it’s great for a TO readers.

Joe Patrice:

It is a fantastic lesson in way

Kathryn Rubino:

Very little makes me wish that I was a practicing attorney again. But that joy when you are looking through scads of documents, trying to figure out what the theory of the case would be and trying to piece it all together and then you come across this kind of flaming hot doc, that joy of that capture of that moment. There’s some good moments in being an attorney.

Chris Williams:

I just want to be a crow in the Courtroom on that day where somebody’s getting a question. And what did you mean here on page 37 when you said, fuck the Sherman Act? Why do you know what that is first? But also

Joe Patrice:

I gave some flack too. There was a recent story where a former antitrust lawyer was talking about how yeah, you shouldn’t let the people have a paper trail, which is partially true. You should, as a lawyer advising clients, not necessarily tell them that they’re obligated to create bad evidence for yourself, but in that instance, he was saying this after there was a lit hold, so not great,

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s different.

Joe Patrice:

But that case that he was talking about was the Google case. And one of the issues in the Google case that they got chastised for that he was defending was there for decades now have been certain buzzwords that investigators know to look for in documents. And Google had advised everybody to use new terminology that weren’t those buzzwords, to mean those buzzwords in order to not trigger the search that might show that they were doing something wrong, which theoretically is legal, it’s just a little shady. But in this instance,

Kathryn Rubino:

That line between shady and good lawyering is fine.

Joe Patrice:

Sure. But in this instance, no one sent the memo that you don’t use price fixing, you use canoodling or whatever the new term would be. It’s also interesting, this is an algorithm case because to be legal techie about it, part of the thing that happened in the Google case that allowed people to uncover what was wrong even when people were not using the right terminology is e-discovery platforms are now out there that can do use algorithms to do sentiment analysis and context analysis. And they can go through and say, you keep using this word, which we’ve never heard of before, but you keep using it in context that’s suspicious. You keep using it in context that seem like exactly where you used to use the word collusion. So that seems like this might be of interest to the DOJ and it just shows that there is a good value.

Chris Williams:

That is great. I’m glad you said that. AI can do what now? That is massive. I’m glad you mentioned it. You skated over something fucking huge.

Joe Patrice:

No, AI can absolutely do all that. And not even generative ai. That’s what old AI did, like

Kind of regular tar sorts of stuff. Elevated for a little bit from

Chris Williams:

That is old AI a year ago. How old is old in this conversation?

Joe Patrice:

EDiscovery has been doing this sort of thing for like 10 years. Okay. The sentiment analysis and contextual stuff is a little bit more nuanced. They have gotten a lot, that’s what I’m talking about.

Kathryn Rubino:

And it kind of depends too, how well you train the product.

Joe Patrice:

And one of the things that the generative products are bringing is you don’t necessarily need to do all the training. They can start figuring stuff out on their own faster, which is valuable and that’s, but those are incremental increases rather than exponential ones off of what AI has been doing for eDiscovery.

Chris Williams:

Now, I’m not AI Brain, Joe clearly has these talks more than I do, but from what I gather, AI doesn’t actually use words. It’ll break down what we see as words into little numbers, like bits of information, blah, blah, blah. We shouldn’t be very far off of AI systems being able to communicate with each other, price fix and have whatever the things be hidden behind some sort of proprietary language that will prevent. So you wouldn’t even need to circumvent, you just have them having the conversation and making you money.

Joe Patrice:

Well still, yeah, humans have to be involved and that’s kind of what was happening here. But it’s just to show that AI is going to be on both sides of these fights. But yes, AI operates in kind of a transformer model where they take things, turn them into basically vectors and then can interpret those vectors. I

Chris Williams:

Love that the explanation made it more confusing. Go on.

Joe Patrice:

Honestly, I saw a great presentation on it and it is very confusing, but that’s all that, but yeah, that’s where we are in discovery. Don’t take notes on a criminal conspiracy as Stringer Bell once said in the Wire. So with all that said, let’s wrap up. We’ve had an eventful show. You get kind an extra long show since we’re not going to be around next week. You’re welcome. See yeah. So with all that said, thanks for listening. You should subscribe to the show so you get new episodes when they come out. You should leave reviews stars, all that’s good stuff. You should be listening to the Jabot Kathryn’s other podcast. I’m a guest on Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. You can also check out the Legal Talk networks panoply of shows. Or maybe, actually I shouldn’t say that. Myriad of shows I guess because Panoply is like a thing. Whatever. You should check out all those things. You should be reading Above the Law, you read these in other stories before they come out. You can follow us at the various social medias at ATL blog at Joseph Patrice or Joe Patrice at bluesky. At Kathryn Rubino. No, no. Kathryn one Kathryn. Rubino is at Kathryn one and Chris is at Rights for Rent. And that pace is everything. Alright,

Chris Williams:

Peace.

Joe Patrice:

Bye.

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