2025 Year in Review: Generative AI, access to justice and law schools

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to the ABA Journal Legal Rebels Podcast, where we talk to men and women who are remaking the legal profession, changing the way the law is practiced, and setting standards that will guide us into the future.

Victor Li:

It is hard to believe that we’re already at the end of 2025, but here we are in many ways. This year was a continuation of trends that we saw in previous years, greater adoption and integration of generative AI into legal practice and tons of money flowing into the legal tech sphere. It’s gotten to the point where many experts and commentators have wondered if we could be seeing an AI bubble and what could happen if that bubble were to burst next year or soon thereafter. It was also a year where we saw more loosening of the traditional bans and non-lawyer practice and ownership of law firms. We also saw changes in bar exam and attorney admissions as California’s new proprietary remote exam flopped and D Nevada formally adopted a new three-pronged licensure process that includes an exam, a performance test, and supervised practice. All in all is shown to the legal industry, usually known as a state, conservative and risk averse profession is undergoing a period of rapid change and transformation. My name is Victor Li and I’m the host of the A b ABA Journal Legal Rebels podcast. Today’s guest is Nikki Black. She’s the principal legal insight strategist at 8:00 AM and is the regular columnist for the A B ABA Journal Above the Law and the Daily Record, such as with the last couple of years. She’s here today to talk about the year. That was welcome back to the show, Nikki.

Nicole Black:

Thanks. Looking forward to it.

Victor Li:

So for those of us who might not be familiar with you, just tell me a little bit about yourself and your background real quickly.

Nicole Black:

Yep. I am an attorney. I practiced law for about a decade here in Rochester, New York, primarily in the litigation space, and I’ve been in legal tech since about probably 2005 is when I started blogging, and I was employee number one for my case in 2012. That’s the law practice management software. And my case went through a number of acquisitions over the years, and in 2022 we landed at our home at 8:00 AM which is the team behind my case law practice management, software, law pay, payment processing, and also docket wise and case peer, both of which are practice management tools for immigration and personal injury respectively. And my role has always been serving as the bridge between lawyers and tech externally, educating lawyers about how to use tech through writing and speaking. And then internally I am akin to an analyst who works cross-functionally across multiple teams. I sit on the product side, but I work with other teams and help them understand the legal industry lawyers and help them roll out the products and the messages that we need into the market.

Victor Li:

Wow. So employee number one, I think I’m like employee number 5,000 for the A BA or something like that, maybe even more. Hopefully that’s not my ranking, that’s just my number. But let’s talk about AI first since that’s what’s been dominating the headlines just even the last few years. So you pulled together a lot of data for eight AM’s legal industry report, and you’ve written about it at length. Can you talk about how widespread AI adoption is amongst lawyers and how they’re using it?

Nicole Black:

Yeah, the 2025 report, which came out earlier this year has some interesting data that shows that amongst individual users, you had 31% of the respondents were using ai. And if I recall correctly, it was 24% of law firms and the percentage of individual users that were using it was up somewhat and law firms had actually declined by a percentage point or two, but I don’t really think it was statistically significant. It’s going to vary a little bit year over year. And what’s interesting is I’m analyzing the data for this year’s report, I’m writing about it, and those statistics have significantly increased in terms of user, individual users and also law firms that have adopted these tools. So it’s going to be really interesting. I am in the process of analyzing that, but the data alone tells a really interesting story that the levels of adoption for something that was only just released in the end of 2022, that was three years ago through the roof compared to historically any other type of tech adoption in our industry.

Victor Li:

And how are lawyers using it? Are they mainly using it for drafting memos, doing legal research and things like that? Are they doing it for more involved things like actually with helping prepare strategy and things like that?

Nicole Black:

Well, it’s interesting you still see, even with this year’s data, they do definitely lean into, especially when you’re talking about general use tools versus legal specific stuff where you don’t have to input or queries where you don’t have to input confidential information, so brainstorming, but you can brainstorm without having to input confidential information. And that can run the gamut about what you’re brainstorming about. So there’s definitely brainstorming. There’s a lot of drafting of correspondence. We even see that in our own software. We have AI tools rolled out within the software. Lawyers definitely like to draft correspondence and smaller documents for sure. The more complex the work becomes, the more likely they are to turn towards those legal tools that are custom designed for that specific use case. So you definitely see them conducting legal research more often with legal tools, which definitely makes sense, but also if you’re going to legal memorandums again, which include legal research and accurate or need for accurate citations. So you definitely see them using legal specific tools more often, both where you’re talking about confidential information or requiring really accurate output. Certainly there’s still hallucinations, but the most accurate output possible. And also for tasks that are custom designed for legal, they’re going to use tools that were developed with that purpose in mind.

Victor Li:

And I’m asked you this question before, but considering you’ve written a book about cloud computing and you’ve been talking about that for many years and things like that, are you surprised at just how quickly the legal industry has embraced ai just seeing as how long it took for them to embrace cloud computing? Even some people still haven’t, even though they might be using it without their knowledge. How has that degree of adoption surprised you?

Nicole Black:

Well, social media before it as well, you look at social media or cloud computing, but with the cloud, it took until post pandemic, most cloud tools rolled out in their infancy in 2007, 2008. And it wasn’t until post pandemic that you saw more or close to 50% of the profession using those tools from years, it was just kind of stuck in about a third of users around from 2015 on. With that, you’re talking more than a decade to take our profession to get to more than 50% of legal professionals using the cloud. Generative AI has just been unbelievable. It is been three years and our data from our current report, and you’re also seeing this from other people’s reports as well. It’s helpful to analyze data across multiple surveys because that gives you a really accurate reflection of use case. But we’re seeing more than half the profession is using generative AI tools, and that’s unbelievable for something that’s only been around for three years. So it knocks everything. It just blows everything else out of the water. And it’s kind of fascinating to see it happen, and it kind of feels like everything else with generative AI in the world when run now, everything just feels like it’s spiraling out of control a little bit.

And so it’s interesting to see that rapid level of adoption.

Victor Li:

Yeah. Yeah. I think for me, I think the reason why, because look, I mean, we report on these things and we’re surrounded by a lot of people who understand technology and are tech savvy, but even for me, it’s like whenever I put stuff in the cloud or whenever I use cloud tools, there’s a part of me that’s like, oh, what if someone hacks into it? Or, oh, what if I’m putting stuff out there that I shouldn’t be? And I think that’s a natural reaction, especially for lawyers. There’s always that fear that, oh, what if I put this confidential information out there and it gets hacked and then I’m screwed kind of thing. So I kind of understand the reluctance or at least the slow adoption for cloud computing, whereas I mean, there’s still obviously concerns with AI and making sure you don’t put confidential information and things like that into these tools, but it’s much more intuitive, it’s much easier to use. And I think that danger element isn’t quite there as far as confidential information goes. So there are other dangerous aspects of it, which we can talk about as well, but I think that’s probably a big reason why too, because there isn’t that same level of, oh God, what if I put this information in the cloud and then someone gets it?

Nicole Black:

For sure. I think that with cloud computing, that fear in some ways was misplaced because I’d been arguing for years that the cloud was more secure than what most lawyers had going on in their offices. And at this point, cybersecurity professionals are saying the same thing that the large companies, and it’s the large companies, not some guy with a cloud server in his basement, which happens sometimes with lawyers when they use local IT people, but when you’re talking about Amazon or Google, their business is the cloud and they’re going to have security measures in place that are unlike anything that most law firms can afford. So unless you’re talking large firms, some of the largest of big law. So I think that that was a little bit of a misplaced concern, but I do understand why people feel better when it seems like it’s in your own office and therefore more secure than just out there somewhere.

But

There are also issues with, there are a lot of issues that are misunderstood in terms of some of the challenges with using generative ai. It’s just that it is so easy to use and it solves problems so quickly that people are more incentivized to use it.

Victor Li:

And so let’s talk about some of those problems. And we have for a while, we had sort of a recurring segment on our Friday round table with Bob Ambrogi about lawyers behaving badly or lawyers misusing ai, I guess. So this year obviously we saw a lot more of that where we had lawyers getting in trouble, law firms getting in trouble for either citing cases that didn’t exist or not using the tools correctly and then putting it in their filings. Obviously the answer might seem obvious to you, but how can lawyers use this stuff properly to avoid making those kinds of mistakes

Nicole Black:

Review output and don’t assume that it’s correct. And that’s what we’ve always been telling them. It’s an issue of competence you’re supposed to do though with every submission to the court. But one thing that I’ve seen popping up in a few of the recent stories and also some sanctions orders from courts is people are using six tools at this point trying to ensure that it’s accurate, that the citations are accurate. They’ll use Westlaw or LexiNexis Nexus or Vincent, one of the big legal research tools, but then they’re also using generative AI to help draft, and sometimes it’s legal specific generative AI tools, but they’ll have six tools that they’ll then cross-reference everything. And it’s kind of like the game of telephone I feel like is what starts to happen when you’ve got them and you going on that the AI is just amplify the errors that the prior AI made, and they start assuming facts not in evidence for lack of a better descriptor. And then it just, some of these poor lawyers seem to be doing, it’s like overkill, and then they end up with errors, even though that seems like they tried really hard to prevent it. And so it’s hard to figure out when something like that happens, what were they supposed to have done? You don’t really know the order in which they use the tools.

You don’t know what they use them for. They just have a laundry list of tools that they used. So I think you need to, especially when you’re talking about legal research, use one of the top legal research platforms and understand whether you’re using a legal research tool or whether you are using one of their AI generative AI drafting tools too. You got to understand what tool you’re using, how it functions, and how accurate that they’re claiming that the output is. I think it’s becoming more complex now than it needs to be in some ways. I think the answer of just check your work sometimes, I’m not sure if that’s even the answer anymore because when you use all these other tools, if you’re using that many tools, it starts to seem like it just snowballs out of control

Victor Li:

And it kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing because I mean, the whole point of using these tools was to save time and to be able to take back some of your day to do other things. And so if you’re spending all your time using these tools and just cross-referencing all these what Claude said or what Google said or what copilot said or what chat GPT said, then you end up probably spending as much, if not, maybe just a little bit less time doing that than if you had just written it out yourself. I mean, I think the best analogy that was given to me was just kind of treat, just like you said, use one tool, one reputable tool, and then treat it like you first year associate or a summer associate. I mean, no partner is going to submit a memo or a motion or whatever, a brief or whatever sight unseen by a first year or by a summer associate. They’re going to check the arguments, check the citations, things like that. They’re not just going to turn it in, so just treat chat PT or whatever the same way. And then that should obviate a lot of the errors. I mean,

Nicole Black:

I think probably what you would need to do, I am trying to think through what I would do at this point as a litigator drafting a motion for summary judgment with a memo to support it. I think I would do the research on one of the larger legal research platforms, just the research itself until I found cases that cited the propositions that I needed. And then I would probably turn to a legal specific tool that assists with drafting and then outline maybe with that research there for every point that I want to see, and then have it help me draft the language of it more, fill in the gaps with the language of it, and then go back and look at your original legal research citations and make sure that the tool didn’t change somehow. I think that’s what I would do and just use two tools if you’re drafting and legal specific tools at that. I am not sure why you wouldn’t use legal specific tools for drafting legal documents at this point.

Victor Li:

Yeah, no, I agree with you on that. Well, let’s talk about age agentic ai because sort of the new hot buzzword that we’ve been hearing a lot this past year. How would you describe it and what do you think is the outlook as far as age agentic AI going forward?

Nicole Black:

Well, agent AI is this idea that you have, and I’m not going to use technical languages. I’m definitions. I don’t have them in front of me, and I’m going to use it, describe it the way that I would describe it, which is it’s essentially this idea that you have multiple different AI tools that work together. And oftentimes what you see in legal software is you have an interface, generative AI tool that then will reach out, take the user’s query, determine what they’re trying to accomplish, and then check what other tools are either integrated with this one or do they subscribe to that the software provider already owns, and figure out which ones are going to solve that problem and pull the information from those different tools to answer their query. That’s how you find it happening in legal. But when you expand beyond legal, the way that you find it happening is it gentech AI may mean that you have an AI browser, perplexity has it open, AI has it.

They all have different AI browsers that they offer at this point. And then you tell the AI browser what you want to accomplish. I want to come up with an itinerary book, a trip to Italy this summer, and I want to focus on wine and food, and it has access to all of your accounts and all of your sign-ins, and it can then go out into the internet and it can plan the trip with your input, and then it can go out and make reservations and buy plane tickets and do all these things on your behalf, charge it to your credit cards and accomplish all these tasks on your behalf. But when you find this within legal, it’s not going out there and doing those things for you as much. It’s a little more constrained of an agentic AI that gets the information you need, but then you make the strategic decisions and it doesn’t practice law on your behalf. And that’s where we all would get into big debates on Bob’s show about this, but whether legal agentic AI is truly agentic AI as described in sort of the broader context,

Victor Li:

Because I feel like lawyers would freak out if they really used it, like how you described for setting travel itineraries, buying tickets and stuff like that. And this gave that level of autonomy to a legal specific platform or software. I think lawyers would freak out, and I think that people would, whereas there might not have been as much pushback for just regular generative AI tools, I think there would be a lot of pushback for ai. I think that would scare a lot of lawyers.

Nicole Black:

I think it definitely would on that level, I think. But the idea of it just choosing the software tools to which you already subscribed that are legal specific acting as an interface and then going to each of those, which each have their own agent that pulls data for you and then provides it to you, whether it’s in a report or whether it just is a narrative form, but gives you the information that you need to accomplish whatever task you’re trying to achieve. I think that that’s a little bit different. And in that more controlled circumstance, it can be a really valuable tool, and that’s what everybody’s talking about. But I don’t think very many providers have executed on that concept yet.

Victor Li:

And I think it’s still early. I mean, look, it’s still early for generative AI too, right? Only three years. But no, I think it’s still early for Jet ai. I think it’s still very much in it infancy. I mean, I think lawyers will probably be sufficient. They’ll be happy enough with the tools that they have right now and might not want to explore a KI as much, at least not until they realize how much they could speed things up and make things more efficient. But yeah, I mean I definitely see a much more longer adoption curve for that just because of what’s involved. But that’s not going to stop companies as you alluded to. I mean, these companies are already all trumpeting their H genetic AI capabilities and things like that.

Nicole Black:

Well, I think what’s also going to happen with that is the same thing that happened with AI in 2017 and 18 when people were initially saying, oh, we use ai. It’s this great thing, but then lawyers are really reticent to use it. So they stopped talking about AI and just talked about what you could accomplish with their software. And I think you’re going to see the same thing with a agentic ai. I think you’re right that lawyers are going to be reticent to use it and that I think the companies are going to pull back on that a little bit. Instead, just talk about what you can accomplish when all of these different software tools are tied in together with generative AI as kind of the binder between them.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. Alright, so let’s take a quick break for a word from our sponsor and we’re back Mighty talk this year as billions flowed into the legal tech sphere, Clio bought gel X for 1 billion, F Vine raised 400 million, and the legal tech fund closed a 110000002nd round, even up a personal injury platform, raised 150 million. And Eve another PI platform raised 103 million. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. So I’m reminded of the quote often attributed to the late Senator Everett, Dirksen, a million here, a million there. And pretty soon you’re talking about real money. So what do you think is driving the spending spree? Is this a good thing for the legal tax sphere or do you think there could be problems coming down the line?

Nicole Black:

I think that what’s driving it is artificial intelligence, the promise of artificial intelligence, and also what venture capital and PE see when they look at legal are all these unvended law firms. It seems to them that there’s this vast subsection of our industry that is unvended. And if only you could give them the right tool, they’d become vended. And sometimes I feel like there’s a lack of appreciation for the reason that so much of our profession is unvended as they like to describe it. But I think that AI combined with that vast amount of unvended firms seems like this ripe opportunity, and there’s just all this money pouring into anything that sort of sounds like a good idea. I think that just in the broader technology arena, you’re going to have the same problem. Everyone’s concerned that it’s a bubble. I think that there’s a good chance that this is a bubble, that all this spending is going to be for N and that they’re not going to get that return on investment that they’re expecting. But it’s hard to predict if that’s actually what’s going to happen or not.

Victor Li:

I agree with you. We’ve done a few of these last few years now, and it seems like every year we talk about this, right? Oh, m and as, oh, money flowing in. Oh, funding being up and every year it’s just like there’s another big deal that just dwarfs whatever happened the previous year. And so yeah, it’s hard not to then look at that and be like, oh my God, this is going to be a big downturn or there’s going to be a problem. But I mean, look, trying to predict the economy is a fool’s errand. I mean, people have been predicting recession for years and knock on wood hasn’t happened. Hasn’t happened yet. Who knows what next year could bring. But I think people have been preparing for it for a while. I mean, we’ve seen it in some of the other hiring numbers being down and things like that. So yeah, I mean, I definitely think that people might be hedging their bets, so to speak, but it doesn’t seem like that’s stopping some of the money from flowing in.

Nicole Black:

And I also think that, and I say this every year as well, but we don’t have the full picture because venture capitalists will scream, tout their investments and push out press releases about all their investments. Private equity is very different. Private equity holds everything close. They don’t share any of the numbers, but there’s significant private equity investment across our industry as well. And so all we’re seeing is what venture capital’s doing. Private equity is equally as impactful, and we don’t have any visibility into what they’re doing other than the fact that things are happening because you will get press releases about acquisitions and reinvest new investors coming in, but you don’t actually know the amounts of money that are changing hands. And they also don’t often share how much something was acquired for either. So there’s a big section of our industry that we’re not seeing, so we don’t have the full picture, but there’s nothing to say point at the fact that they’re not also equally investing in all this AI stuff as well. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Victor Li:

And I mean, inevitably they’re going to be winners and losers. There’s going to be more consolidation. There’s going to be companies that do well, and there’s going to be companies that might be more flat by night that end up either getting dissolving or getting bought out for pennies or going bankrupt or things like that. I mean, that’s just natural. That’s the market. I mean, there’s nothing really that, I mean, no matter how big the AI boom gets, that’s not going to hit the fact that they’re going to be winners and losers. Right?

Nicole Black:

And Robin AI was a good example of that. We all recently talked about that on the Friday webcast, but it’s a good example of an AI firm just kind of fizzling out, and that had received some big investments, and there’s been a lot of debate about whether it was an AI or whether it was a service firm or what that company did, and as they shifted their focus, but still, it’s one example of maybe things not quite panning out the way investors had envisioned.

Victor Li:

And I guess also, it kind ties into another thing that, and we talked about this earlier, how these companies all try to keep up with each other. They’re all trying to say, oh, well, we can do this, we can do that. We have generative ai, we have agent ai, we have this, we have that. So it ends up being kind of a rat race. I mean, yeah, I’m not saying that these companies don’t have the goods, a lot of them do, but there are inevitably going to be some that don’t, or at least maybe don’t have it all figured out or don’t have it the way that maybe some of the bigger, more reputable company does. And then that ends up feeding some of the problems that then you have these companies failing, and then maybe that leads to some more kind of instability in the marketplace.

Nicole Black:

Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next year, both in legal tech and beyond, because it’s hard to predict. It’s going to be hard to have predictions for next year that are at all accurate, I think.

Victor Li:

Well, luckily we are not making predictions on this show, so that’ll probably be next month’s show if you want to do that one. But yeah, it’ll be interesting. I mean, it is one of those things where it’s like, yeah, I mean, I think people have been prepared for the worst for a long time, just in general with all the things that are happening. And yeah, I don’t know mean it doesn’t help that things have been so unpredictable just this last year, not just in terms of legal tech, but just all across the board and businesses hate unpredictability,

Nicole Black:

Right? Yep, for sure.

Victor Li:

Yeah. Were there any deals this year that kind of caught you by surprise or made you raise your eyebrows a little bit?

Nicole Black:

Well, I did think that Clios was interesting. I mean, I don’t think you can talk about the acquisitions this year without talking about that. I think that Clio acquiring VL was a really interesting acquisition, and it will be the next thing is to see if they can pull it off. Is this, can you take the practice of law and marry it with the business of law? And if so, what does that look like? And how do your customers want that to look? And can you live up to the promise of that? And also its impact on the greater market. I think that everyone definitely took notice, and it’ll be interesting to see what follows, and whether other companies think that there’s some value to combining those two, or whether having a more less, scattershot is not the right word, that makes it sound like I’m somehow critiquing having a more focused approach or specialized approach, whether that’s the way to move forward in this next sort of era of ai, or whether it is, it is interesting how net Docs is a good example.

You take net documents, they used to just even before AI be a very static document storage company. But when generative AI comes along, and even before that ai, they were building AI into their platform before generative ai. But it takes the data and the data itself becomes really valuable, and you figure out this data is available to us and our customers. The customers have access to this data and our software platform. What can we do with generative AI to make it useful? So NetDocuments has expanded beyond just document storage. So all the companies in some ways are doing that. They’re looking at their data and they’re saying, what value can we provide our customers if we put generative AI on top of the data that’s already stored in here? And so this may be an extension of that, but it may also be something that’s really difficult to pull off. Time will tell. So I don’t think you can talk about it without looking at that. But I think it’s also just the trends. All the different investments across the board are really interesting. And it’ll be, I want to see how it’s going to continue next year and what does that actually look like when some of the excitement dies down maybe.

Victor Li:

Yeah. I’m glad you brought up Clio. Cause yeah, we were talking about it, but also just talking with other people and whatnot. I mean, I think for the longest time, I guess maybe the default kind of thinking was, okay, you don’t want necessarily a one-stop shop. You want something that’s more specialized. You want something that, like I said, is more focused, maybe not necessarily something that where you can do all these things, you maybe just miss something that could specialize and do a great job with a couple things. But then just having these two pretty big companies just join forces and now promising more or less a one-stop shop, that was kind a shock to my system kind of. Oh, I guess now that the old thinking no is no longer necessarily the case, but I guess that’s the point right out with the old and with the new, right.

Nicole Black:

Yeah. And there’s been a ton of investment, a ton of acquisition, and it’ll be interesting to see in the coming year and even the coming years, not just this next year, but whether it pays off what it actually looks like and whether the promise of generative AI pans out. Because it’s still, like we talked before, sometimes you spend more time trying to create the product with AI than if you’ve just done it yourself. So TBD, right? See what it all looks like.

Victor Li:

Yep. All right. So let’s take another quick break for a word from our sponsor. And we’re back. So now, on the non-AI front, or maybe not AI specifically focused front, this was a year in which we saw more states and jurisdictions embrace letting non-lawyers practice some form of law on a limited basis and alternative business structures, which include some form of non-lawyer ownership. For instance, Illinois took its first steps to create a program this year that would allow non-lawyers to provide limited legal advice under the supervision of a certified AttorneySync areas like family law and housing and others. Meanwhile, last month, McDermott will and Schulte made headlines when it announced they would look at ways to secure outside funding, including from private equity. These reforms have long been touted as a panacea for the access to justice gap in this country. So my question to you is, are these reforms really a way to significantly bridge the access to justice gap, or is it just going to be another way of just putting a bandaid on the gaping wound?

Nicole Black:

I think the only thing that’s going to bridge the access to justice gap is governmental funding. I’ve always believed this. I think that I’ve said this before, capitalism trumps altruism. I think that anytime you’re talking about a business, a company, they’re just trying to make money. And I do think that some of these efforts by different jurisdictions to allow non-lawyers to practice are band-aids, right? But I think that anytime a business a, a firm talks about doing something to bridge the access to justice gap, it’s just an attempt to make money. And I don’t think that you can feasibly profit from bridging the access to justice gap in a way that actually achieves bridging the access to justice gap. I think they inherently conflict. Yeah,

Victor Li:

I mean, I don’t know. I go back and forth on this, right? I mean, on the one hand I can sort of the logic behind it, this idea of, well, okay, so definitely as far as allowing certain non-lawyers or licensed professionals, paraprofessionals to practice very limited areas of law, I can see the logic of that. The idea of, okay, well, there’s certain areas of the law that most lawyers just find just not profitable or not worth their time, or just not anything they can make money off of. And so having this subset of qualified legal professionals handle it at a reduced cost for people, I could see that having an impact. Although I do wonder as to whether or not the regulations would be so onerous and so difficult that it would act as a barrier to entry for a lot of people. But time will tell, right?

I mean, we need to see evidence of it on a widespread basis before we can really make judge about it. But I’ve always been skeptical about the alternative business structure stuff, just like why would private equity firms or venture capital firms or whatever kind of firms whatnot, why would they invest in a law firm just for them to then serve underrepresented people? I mean, there’s no money there. I don’t know, maybe that should me being cynical and maybe not understanding completely what it’s about. I mean, typically I find that the argument for alternative business structures is more, it’ll help spark innovation. It’ll help lawyers or law firms, and we’ll be able to spend money to develop their own tools and things like that. But I don’t know. I never really know about that argument though.

Nicole Black:

I do think lawyers should run their firms more like a business and that they should have people with MBAs inside of their firms that help them make those decisions that have power within the firm. I think restructuring firms in that way makes sense, but I don’t think that private equity should be involved in professions where people have ethical obligations, they have fiduciary obligations. So that would be the medicals, the medical field, veterinary, even we have R pe, our veterinary was taken over by a PE company, and it’s, in my opinion, all they do is try and take more money out of you as the customer. And the same goes for accountants and lawyers. I don’t think any good is going to come from PE being involved in any of those professions. Professions where you have licenses, where you have ethical obligations and compliance issues and fiduciary duties. I think the no good comes from that. And so I think PE does, depending on how you look at it, the company I work for is owned, PE owned companies can do some good, do good things, and PE can, depending on the field and the company and what it does, it can help it grow. But I think when you’re talking about professions, it’s just a really bad idea.

Victor Li:

Yeah, I agree with you. And also as far as bringing in funding or whatnot, I mean, I’m sorry, not bringing in funding as far as running a business or whatnot, I absolutely agree with you on that. I think that that’s a hundred percent the case that lawyers should be allowed to bring in non-lawyer business people or people with that kind of a background and not run afoul of the UPL laws, but just the fact that we’re even having this discussion. I mean, for the longest time, this was the third rail. This is something that people would just absolutely freak over, and then there would be no discussion of any types of reforms for years. So just the fact that we’re even having this conversation is a pretty big deal as far as coming off where things were even just a couple of years ago where this would basically be World War III for a lot of lawyers.

Nicole Black:

And I think the lawyers and doctors are the worst business people, but they also like to have power over their own practices, and they want to make the money and be in charge of that. And I know that even my dad’s a retired position, but once they started having office managers and people telling ’em what they could and couldn’t do, they didn’t really like that as much. They couldn’t just do an x-ray or do an image if they wanted to of a family member off the books that wasn’t allowed anymore. So once, they definitely don’t like it when other people start having some power within their own firm. So I can understand the resistance, but let’s move it in that direction.

Victor Li:

That’s fair. So now let’s talk about a topic that’s near and dear to both of our hearts theBar exam. I’m sure you have wonderful memories

Of

Taking that exam that wonderful summer after law school where you had to study basically 10 hours a day in order to avoid failing and was wasting three years and hundreds of thousands dollars of your life. So obviously this year we’ve seen some movement as far as states either trying to adopt the next gen bar exam, or was California trying to move to a remote bar exam that didn’t do so well when it was introduced in February. And then other states like Oregon starting to offer types of multifaceted licensure schemes that involve supervised practice and things like that. So where do you think this is all heading? I mean, obviously theBar exam is still going to be king. It’s not going away anytime soon, but it is noteworthy that there are some states that are at least kind of rethinking the whole idea of whether or not just this one exam is the end all be all, and thinking maybe that there should be some aspect of supervised practice being added to it.

Nicole Black:

I think law school itself should be revamped. I think they need to revisit what they’re teaching the students and how they’re preparing them to practice law, especially with artificial intelligence changing what the practice of law looks like. I think that you do need some sort of hoops that you have to jump through to become a lawyer. I mean, in some sense it’s just hazing rituals. But I do think that it’s important to have that. It’s just sort of like the final phase then allows you to then practice law, and you should have to prepare for it, but it should probably be more practical. It should be revamped in ways that allow more flexible test taking. Not everybody does well in that environment since people need accommodations and letting ’em take it remotely doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. If you have other processes in place to ensure no one’s cheating, but I think that at the end of the day, revamping it isn’t a bad idea and with an eye towards what it actually is going to test them on what need to know to actually practice law in 2025 versus just ensuring that they’ve memorized a whole bunch of stuff that’s not going to be relevant once they take the test.

Victor Li:

Yeah, I think that the next gen bar exam tries to address that a little bit with, they have a more kind of practice oriented thing where they give you some documents or some hypothetical statutes and things like that, and you have to piece together things like a memo or something based on that. So it’s that old was for the AP exam, did old DPQ thing that they used to give people where they give you a close sort of a closed set of documents and you have to kind craft your arguments based on that. So I can see the value of that. But then again, it’s the idea of, yeah, like I said, taking an exam and having it determined your whole future. And also it never really made sense to me. And also the idea that, okay, well I could take this exam and now I could theoretically practice whatever law I wanted to. It’s like, well, no, you can’t really, because no one’s going to hire you if you don’t have experience and you haven’t shown that you can do real estate law or shown that you can do trust and estates law or criminal law, they’re not going to hire you. You passed an exam 15 years ago, right?

Nicole Black:

Well, I got hired by the P’S office and they didn’t know what I was doing after I passed theBar. I’d done appeals there on a volunteer basis beforehand, but I think right now everybody just learns on the jobs. That’s still what seems to be happening. So I think the law schools need to change what they’re doing, and there ought to be something akin to a residency they have in medical where like an apprenticeship, something where you have an insight into what different practices actually look like, which is what they do in their fourth year of med school. And then they have a residency where they are focusing on what they think that they want to do, what they’ve decided they want to do, and learning as they go. So they don’t just suddenly start practicing medicine without any experience. And I think we need something more like that in the legal space.

Victor Li:

Alright, so to wrap up, I will ask you this one question. It’s not necessarily a prediction, but what is one thing that you’re looking forward to in the next year? What are something that you plan on following and that something that has your attention? It could be AI or it could be something else, but what is the trend that you’re looking at that you would like to see more of in the coming year?

Nicole Black:

Well, I actually think it is the law schools, honestly, and seeing what they’re doing. Some of them are starting to teach AI or have a course requirement, but then what I just wrote about for, I can’t remember which publication, but I think I wrote two different articles for two different publications. But how law students are starting to form their own AI organizations within the schools to help them learn about AI because the schools aren’t doing it fast enough. So I think that’s actually something I’m particularly interested in seeing is what the law schools start to do in response to ai.

Victor Li:

Yeah, I think for me, and this might be a little bit morbid, but I am looking to see if things get worse as far as the economy goes, as far as unemployment goes, and seeing if AI can bridge that gap. I mean, obviously I’m not advocating for anything. I’m not hoping for anything like that. But look, let’s be real, right? I mean, if there is a downturn, then people are going to look to cut costs. People are going to look for ways to save money, and I wonder if that will spur even greater adoption of generative AI and maybe even agent AI and things like that. So I mean, obviously let’s hope that doesn’t happen, but looking at things the way they are and the doom and gloom perspective, I guess for me, that’s something that I’m looking at as far as this coming year.

Nicole Black:

Yeah, lots of interesting things ahead, no matter how you look at it.

Victor Li:

And finally, if our listeners want to get in touch with you or ask you about things relating to AI or things relating to legal tech, what’s the best way to do that?

Nicole Black:

One of two ways. You can either email [email protected] at my case.com, so it’s NIKI dot B-L-A-C-K at my case, M-Y-C-A-S e.com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. I am on there almost daily, so you can connect with me there as well.

Victor Li:

Your email still my case,

Nicole Black:

My external facing email is still my case because that way I still have it screened into a separate folder that I can check, and I can also determine that it came from something external, if that makes sense.

Victor Li:

Okay. No, that makes

Nicole Black:

Sense. So I kept that. Yeah.

Victor Li:

Okay. Interesting. Yep. Alright, well thanks again for joining us, Nikki. I appreciate

Nicole Black:

It. Absolutely. Thanks for asking me to be a big guest. I enjoyed it.

Victor Li:

Alright, so clear your calendar for next year.

Nicole Black:

Absolutely. Looking forward to it.

Victor Li:

If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please go to your favorite app, but check out some other titles from Legal Talk Network. In the meantime, I’m Victor Li and I’ll see you next time on the ABA Journal Legal Rebels Podcast.

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