AI 2035 Symposium: Practicing Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Episode Notes

Transcript

Nikki Marcotte:

Hello and welcome to another exciting season of @theBar, the Chicago Bar Association’s podcast where we have real, unscripted conversations about hot topics related to the law and the legal profession, and how those issues affect everyday legal practice in Chicago land. I’m Nikki Marcotte, litigation associate at Laurian Brennan LLP.

Mathew Kerbis:

And I’m Mathew Kerbis, the subscription attorney and CEO of Practi. And today we have a very special episode. In less than a week, Chicago becomes the center of the legal universe when the CBA opens doors on its most ambitious project in recent memory. That’s the AI 2035 symposium. And to walk us through it, we’re chatting with one of the symposium’s key architects. Let’s get into it. Our guest today is Joel Bruckman. Joel’s a partner at Smith, Gambrel & Russell, where his practice focuses on data privacy and cybersecurity. He’s also the vice chair of what the CBA’s website will tell you is the AI Strategic Leadership Committee, but what he will explain is actually something else. But at the end of the day, it means he’s been in the engine room of this thing since the beginning. Joel, welcome to At theBar.

Joel Bruckman:

Thank you so much, Mathew. It’s a pleasure to be here and thank you to you and Nikki for having me on. Very excited to talk about the CBA’s AI initiative and the upcoming symposium, which I’ll just Out of the Gate starts next Monday, May 11th through May 13th, and we’ll get into more details about that shortly. But thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Mathew Kerbis:

Yeah. Yeah. And you are so behind the scenes, and even though I’ve been attending a lot of these committee meetings, I’ve even spoken at a couple of them. People might not realize you’ve been a part of this, so tell us more about what your role has been for AI 2035, and then more about you and your practice.

Joel Bruckman:

Yeah, absolutely. So actually, first of all, let me just say that I attended your CLE seminar regarding alternative business models for law firms, and I thought it was very intriguing. I originally got involved in the CBA’s AI initiative back in August of last year. I was asked to join the executive committee overseeing this initiative by Judge Nicole Patton, CBA president, alongside two of my dear friends, that being Justice Rina Van Tine and Judge Megan Goldish. And when we got involved, for those that may not be aware, shortly after Judge Patton became the CBA president, she decided that her big initiative for her presidency was going to be AI in the legal profession. And I think that is very timely and I credit her for being a forward thinker on this because time is of the essence as it relates to AI. And in connection with that vision, Judge Patton went ahead and created 10 different subcommittees through the CBA.

Each one focused on a different aspect of AI and the legal profession. Each one of them is chaired by at least one judge and vice chaired by at least one practitioner. Our role as the executive committee alongside Justice Fantine and Judge Goldish is to oversee those committees’ responsibilities with regards to conducting monthly CLEs. And then the culmination of this entire initiative is this symposium, which the executive committee was charged with planning and has been working very hard on doing so. And we think that we have a very well-rounded, robust and interactive program for all attendees. A little bit more about myself, my practice. As you mentioned, I am a partner at Smith, Gambrell & Russell, formerly known here in Chicago as Freeborn and Peters. My practice does focus on cybersecurity and data privacy and litigation to the extent that it involves computer forensics. So think trade secrets, investigations and litigation, things along those lines.

I’m a former prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, which is where my friendship began with Judge Megan Goldish. And it was specifically in that office that I really honed this niche specializing in legal matters related to cybersecurity in that context was cyber crime. I was in the Financial Crimes and Public Corruption Unit at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and was one of the founders of a cyber crimes working group, which led to me being cross-designated along with several of my colleagues, the FBI Cyber Crimes Task Force, using federal resources to investigate cyber crime and then bringing stateside prosecutions. So that launched my career then with an expertise to go into private practice, and that’s how I got to where I am today.

Mathew Kerbis:

Clearly you’ve got the chops and being in the area that you’re in makes a heck of a lot of sense why you got involved. And even trade secrets these days, because I’m a fractional GC and while I won’t do deep advising on intellectual property, trade secrets, man, like today it’s like, hey, you want to patent something? The AI’s training on that patent. How important are trade secrets in a world of AI?

Joel Bruckman:

Yeah, no, I think that that is something very important to hone in on. And frankly, we have a topic dedicated to that at the symposium. There’s specifically a panel of practitioners who will be speaking about AI and confidentiality when client data becomes training data. And there’s a variety of intellectual property concerns, rights of ownership, things along those lines. But then to your point, you also have the aspect of trade secrets and vital to being a trade secret is maintaining secrecy. And so there are risks when people do not use AI responsibly, which is a core pillar in this symposium. It’s not just leveraging AI to benefit your legal practice, but doing so in a responsible way. And whether we’re talking about outside practitioners work involving trade secrets of clients or on the client side, in- house legal teams using AI for operational purposes, that is something that they need to be particularly mindful of to ensure that there are protections in place and that they’re using approved closed systems so that they’re not exposing very valuable trade secrets.

Mathew Kerbis:

I want to tie in what the CBA is doing and for you to kind of explain it with the context of, I’m very involved with the American Bar Association. I do speaking for otherBar Associations, and yet look, they’re all talking about AI, they’re all putting on AI CLEs, but tell us about why the CBA is doing it this way and how that sets the ChicagoBar apart from all these other bar associations that yeah, they’re covering sporadically AI stuff, but how we’re doing it differently, why that matters and why this symposium is like the culmination of all of that.

Joel Bruckman:

It was a bit incumbent on the CBA, and I think this is something that Judge Patton acknowledged that with the prominence and the status that it has, particularly in the Chicago community and the Color Counties with nearly, I want to say it’s about 18,000 registered members, that they offered something that was robust to really dive into, in practical terms, this emergence and this development of AI. The reality is that we’re not at a point anymore where we can talk about AI as something that is going to happen in the future. It is more than already here, and it’s something that is affecting clients. It’s affecting the way law firms operate on the business side. It’s affecting lawyers, whether they’re transactional practitioners or litigators. And so what this initiative really set out to do when Judge Patton created those 10 different committees focused on AI was to really drill into the nuances of the legal profession and how AI has this multifaceted application or effect on the legal profession.

So just to give you an example, among the 10 different committees, we have AI and law firm economics, AI and litigation, AI in legal writing and research, AI and access to justice, and they’re all equally important and they all have different ways in which AI is affecting the respective topic To have a discussion just to say, “Well, we’re just going to have an AI and the Law CBA committee would not allow the attention deserved to be given to these particular subtopics.” And so rather than taking the easy way out, we’ve put in the hard work and I give a lot of credit to our members of these committees, to the chairs and the vice chairs. Every single month, each of those 10 different committees puts on a CLE seminar, as Mathew has been one of our guests and is really well aware of this, and those are separate apart from each other.

So every month since September of last year, there has been 10 different CLE presentations presented by each of these committees. And so trying to build off of that, and as I mentioned earlier, as the culmination of this initiative, what this symposium really attempts to do and which I think it is going to do really well is provide practitioners with practical means as to how to leverage AI to benefit their respective roles in the legal profession in a responsible way. What I tell those that I speak to about the symposium, I say what it is and what it isn’t. This is not three days to talk about lawyers citing hallucinated cases and getting sanctioned by the court. That’s something that I doubt there’s a practitioner around who’s not aware of that issue. And there’s even a database that’s maintained online where you can find thousands of instances at this point of that situation.

This is meant to provide people with ideas and real case examples from practitioners who are using AI, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and take away from that, regardless of where they are on the AI use spectrum, at least one way in which they too can implement AI into their practice. And to do that, we went ahead and created the agenda in a way that has different tracks depending on people’s areas of practice, and those are litigation, transactional work, or administration/operations. This is the downside of being a lawyer who’s a slave to the billable hour. I have yet to meet a lawyer who can clear their throat in under three minutes, so I’ve probably been going on a little longer than you wanted me to, but consider it a professional hazard.

Nikki Marcotte:

No, no. I mean, it definitely is a professional hazard. We are all guilty of it, but hey, we’re just going to take a few steps back, rewind a little bit, and let’s start from the very beginning when Judge Patton first announced herBar theme for the year. It was a really big undertaking, AI 2035, the legal profession in the judiciary and the age of artificial intelligence. And she had a pretty expansive vision. And I think there was a lot of, at the very beginning, there was kind of a lot of skepticism about where this was going to go and how this was going to play out. So Joel, tell us a little bit about how that vision, the 10 new AI subcommittees, the 10 sessions a month that we’re seeing culminating in this massive three-day symposium, how did it go from idea to an actual thing coming into the world and being so concrete as it is?

Joel Bruckman:

Hard work. At the end of the day, that’s the answer. Hard work and participation. As I mentioned- A little

Mathew Kerbis:

Bit of AI, Joel, just a little bit of AI in there too, hard work plus AI?

Joel Bruckman:

I would like to think so responsibly, of course, but the reality is you cannot bring a vision like this to reality without many hands on deck. And the fact of the matter is that from the top down, those who have been charged with carrying out this vision have been truly committed to it. It’s something that I think we all wanted to see succeed and felt needed to succeed. To your question about carving out the topics for each of the 10 committees, what I say to people is, and this is speaking from experience, when you try to think about AI in the legal profession, period, full stop, it is overwhelming. There are so many different areas that AI touches on. And when I named a few of the examples of those committees, I think that that truly exemplifies what I’m referring to. And there’s an interplay here.

It’s like Peter Parker and Spider-Man, right? With great power comes great responsibility. We have a technology here that I would argue has never done more for access to justice, for pro se litigants, but you have to balance that because the way AI works is very much a bit of an art in terms of prompting garbage in, garbage out. When you have something so powerful that going back to what Matt was talking about with trade secrets of clients, you have to be using this technology responsibly. And what it means to take that very necessary message to drive that home in a way that provides benefits for CBA members is to have committees dedicated to these respective areas, talking about legal writing and research, which spans not just practitioners, but law students, bridging generational gaps of practitioners. So you can’t get into the weeds in a way that is truly necessary if you were trying to do this just in one general bucket.

And what the committee chairs and the committee vice chairs have really shown over the last nine months or so is a dedication. They have lined up exceptional speakers. They have discussed the elephant in the room, the million vendors that are selling different AI tools, trying to understand the ergonomics of these tools, trying to understand the learning curve, the capabilities so that you can forge a path forward. Taking us back to where I started, when you think of AI just generally, it’s overwhelming, but the way that Judge Patton has carved this out and the way that the chairs and the vice chairs of these committees and all of the members of the committees have brought the message home has made it more palatable, digestible, and that’s where you can truly start to take advantage of that. And it’s with that theme and in the spirit of that strategic approach that we put together this symposium.

And we honed in on specific topics, digging into what are causes of action that are arising from the use of AI? What is the effect on the business model of a law firm? We have a topic called AI and the downfall of the billable hour, which Mathew will be one of our panelists and I know he’s very passionate about, but that’s a real conversation. And I’ll say a topic like that, and like many other topics that we have, these were not created by AI. They were lit on fire by AI. And that’s the same thing, even talking about the hallucination di jour, that wasn’t an issue created necessarily by AI, lawyers failing to review work product and check case citations. It just became all that more dangerous because they were given something powerful. And so if everybody could leave saying, “Hey, I didn’t think about this implication.

Hey, I didn’t think about this way that I can implement AI into my practice and have something that they can grab onto, then everyone in our profession as a whole is all the better.” And again, I go back to Judge Patton. This was a vision that, like I said, was going to take a lot of hard work and we were all in on it for her and for the CBA and its members.

Nikki Marcotte:

Talking a little bit more about that vision, who first came to you with it and what was your initial reaction and how did you really start forming these ideas about the committees, the symposium, and how to drive towards this goal?

Joel Bruckman:

When I was first approached about this, it was in August, and Judge Goldish and Justice Fantine were already members of the executive committee, and they wanted a practitioner with experience in technology, with experience related to a variety of areas of law who would be able to contribute to how we bring this vision to a reality. I’m very passionate about this because I see just so much potential. And even for those of us who are really in the thick of it, we’ve only scratched the surface because the goalpost is moving every day. And when we started shaping the symposium, which we started at the same time as getting the programming going for the different committees, we knew that we needed it to be unique and hands-on. What I tell people is going to a seminar about AI and just listening to a bunch of people talk about AI and leaving is kind of like going to a car dealership and talking to a salesman who tells you all about a car and then you leave, but you never drive the thing.

So we knew that from our own experience, that much of the learning curve related to AI requires putting your hands on a keyboard and trying out different tools. And I go back to what I said about the art of prompting and AI fluency, because you need to know how to use it. There’s a circular conversation that can happen when you ask somebody, “What would you like AI to do for you in your legal profession?” And the response will be, “Well, what can AI do for me in my legal profession?” And that’s what you have to cut through. And the only way to do that is to present something that goes beyond high level, that actually has some interactive experiences. And I think that that’s one of the things that makes this symposium so unique is there’s not just a curriculum agenda, there is an interactive component with this as well.

Mathew Kerbis:

I think this is a great point for our first break, but before we go to break, I just want to emphasize that going from legal prompt engineering to prompting is more art than science is a really important paradigm you brought up a couple times that I think I just wanted to hammer home quickly for the audience. And also, this is a thing content creators do now. I’m going to do it right now. Okay, you ready? I have a secret AI thing that I’m going to share at the end of this episode, but right now we’re going to our first break. Welcome back everybody to At theBar. We are still here with Joel Brockman, and I do have a secret AI thing, but I’m going to share it towards the end of the episode, so stick around. But Joel, go ahead, get us into the specifics of what they could actually expect and even start with the venue and why this venue and where it is and what days and all that before you get into the nitty-gritty of the specific topics.

Joel Bruckman:

Yeah, absolutely. So the symposium is coming up next week. It starts on May 11th. It’s a three-day symposium. So it’s May 11th through 13th in person only. It will be at Venue 610, which is located at 610 South Michigan Avenue. The venue we found just to be perfect because one, it’s centrally located in the loop, and two, it was able to provide us with the spaces that we needed inside to drive this vision home. There are a few different aspects to the symposium agenda. So you have the curriculum, which is traditional panelists, keynote speakers talking about topics related to AI and both in plenary sessions and breakout sessions. I’ll talk about that more in a minute. But then there’s also an exhibitor hall where you have legal tech vendors that will be able to showcase different tools specifically related to AI that they are offering in the legal tech space.

And last but not least, one of the things that I think makes this symposium so unique and so valuable are the interactive lab demonstrations that take place each day where attendees will be able to participate in hands-on lab demonstrations of a particular AI tool, and those will be on different tracks. So taking a step back, this venue was able to provide us with those spaces that we needed that allowed attendees to take full advantage of what the symposium offers. And for those who may be familiar, the Spurtus Museum is the same location as Venue 610. It operates both as a venue and as a museum. So each day in the Feinberg Auditorium, we have a keynote speaker. For example, Out of the Gate on day one is one of the chief technology officers of Google, that being Charles Elliot, who will be presenting on AI fluency with a focus on the legal profession.

It was important to us that these plenary sessions across each of the three days were on topics that would be valuable to all attendees, not just litigators, transactional lawyers, not just outside counsel or in- house practitioners. From those plenary sessions, we go into breakout sessions. And I had mentioned earlier, those are on tracks of litigation, transactional work, and administration/operations. In the litigation track, you can anticipate specific topics relating to causes of action arising from the use of AI, the use of AI and e-discovery, early predictive analytics as to valuation and case strategy. On the transactional track, you can expect that we will have topics that are looking at how AI has affected deals, M&A from target valuations to negotiations, due diligence, or even post-closing integration. The administration/operations track really looks at the business of law. And so you can expect topics related to using AI for marketing purposes, for operational purposes, whether that’s timekeeping or billing and collections.

So in between those breakout sessions, we will have opportunities for attendees to visit our exhibitor hall. There’s plenty of space as well. We are practitioners. We understand you might need to shoot an email, take a call. We have a lounge set up. There’ll be ample space for people to get work done as they need to throughout the day. And each day we’ll also then have a luncheon. And during the luncheon, we will also offer a CLE presentation on various topics, and we have some very exciting ones lined up.

Mathew Kerbis:

Just thinking about what you are interested in, Joel, what are some of the topics realizing that everybody’s going to have their own interest, but it sounds like we got stuff for litigators. We got stuff for transactional attorneys. It runs the gamut with practice areas and actual hands-on experience, but like you personally, not as the vice chair, right? What are you going to go to? You can’t go to all these things.

Joel Bruckman:

Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s a great question. I will tell you, so first of all, one of the sessions that I am most excited about is our luncheon on day two, where we will have a panel from the Chicago Cubs and we will have representatives both from the in- house legal team at the Cubs as well as their business side. They will be talking about the intersection between aspirational usage of AI by operations teams and legal governance of AI. And there’s a bit of push and pull there in the context of any business. When you have something so powerful, the operational usage and the potential benefits are extreme, right? Everything from marketing, from strategy, but also making sure that these tools are used responsibly and in line with governance, and particularly as somebody who spends a lot of time working with clients on developing AI usage guidelines, AI policies, and you really need to understand and never lose sight of the business side of their operations.

This would be a great session for anyone who appreciates that. Just because it’s the Cubs, I’m also excited. We’re big Cubs fans in my house, but I think that’s a very interesting business to have that conversation. Some of the other ones that are particularly interesting for me is AI and confidentiality when client data becomes training data, because that’s a topic that touches on so many different areas, including intellectual property, trade secrets, ethical obligations. Now, the prosecutor in me is also very excited for our AI investigations panel. That’s one where we will have cross-disciplinary outside counsel and including a prosecutor for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office talking about the use of AI tools to conduct investigations. And so for example, there’s a family law practitioner, you have a criminal prosecutor, and you have a plaintiff’s personal injury and med mal attorney. And despite the differences in the subject matter of their respective practices, the commonality is the use of AI for investigations.

Yes, the what are you investigating changes, but the benefits of AI in conducting investigations is consistent. So that one I think is very interesting to me. The reality is we’ve put so much time and effort into coming up with very practical, beneficial topics that yes, some are spicy and evocative, like going back, Mathew, to yours, the collapse of the billable hour, but they are all very real and practical. They’re not theoretical, so you can’t go wrong.

Mathew Kerbis:

In that vein, one of my biggest criticisms of certain legal conferences, and of course I have no criticisms of this one, it’s the first of its kind, but is, hey, sometimes there would be a really interesting topic, but hey, we just can’t get CLE credit, so we’re not going to do it. Do you have any topics or things that the symposium is covering that, “Hey, we’re going to take the hit on this part, won’t be CLE, but we think it’s really important for the attendees to learn about this?

Joel Bruckman:

” The answer, no. Every single session that we have at the symposium, including every luncheon, is eligible for CLE credit. And so this is a great opportunity for me to say for those of us like myself who are in the first half of the alphabet and are reporting this June, that you can earn up to 18 hours of CLE credit. That also includes some professional responsibility credit as well, not just general. And that speaks to, frankly, the way AI impacts the legal profession. And we never were faced with a topic that we wanted to discuss that we felt like we could not get CLE credit for. And that’s simply because all of these topics are related to the practice of law in some respect or another. We’re talking about what’s going on now, how it’s developing, what you can expect to see realistically in both the short term and the long term, but tying it back to our practice as it exists.

And so with that, no, I want to give a big shout out to the director of CLE from the Chicago Bar Association, Jennifer Byrne, as well as Beth McMahon. They have really taken the laboring or with respect to putting this together and ensuring that we do get CLE credit for everything we aspire to. So a great opportunity in three days to knock out 18 CLE credit hours. There’s significant value as we all know in that as well.

Nikki Marcotte:

Now, I’m a bit of a tech nerd and I understand that there are going to be live tech demonstrations and interactive labs happening at the conference. So in a world where every legal tech vendor is doing webinars, what was the big thing about doing this in person? Why was that so important? And what kinds of exciting products and vendors are folks going to see if they attend the conference?

Joel Bruckman:

Well, first to touch on why in person only. The reality of it is that an event like this is really focused on interaction, right? Interacting with vendors directly, interacting with fellow practitioners, interacting with members of the judiciary, all to have these conversations and learn from one another. This symposium is baked with this intrinsic feeling that we are greater together than we are alone, and to share our own experiences. As I said before, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And you just can’t do that as well in a remote session. Also, actually having the audience interaction provides significantly more value and benefit to our attendees, and that’s who we are focused on with this symposium. We want to make this as valuable as possible. And to do that, when it comes to the lab demonstrations, we decided rather than to just have one each day, we’re going to have three concurrent, and they’re going to be divided into the same three tracks as the breakout sessions.

So people can actually use and see tools that they are most likely to use or consider using in their profession. So for example, with litigation, we have eDiscovery vendors, we have legal research vendors. Just to give you a few of both, we have Relativity, we have Concilio, Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis. But as it relates to transactional work, we wanted to hone in on software that could allow practitioners means of efficiency in their transactional practice, whether it relates to due diligence or post-integration closing. So we have vendors like Concordance and Harvey that will be doing those demonstrations as well. As it relates to the administration and operation track, you have workflow platforms such as Clio. You also have AI marketing vendors as well. So you get to pick your own adventure and you’re not committed to a specific track. Here’s the other piece of it as well.

And for any vendors who might be listening, cover your ears. But the fact that this is three days long, it allows people to try out competing products. It allows attendees the value in, “Hey, I’m going to try out product X on day one. I’m going to trial product Y on day two.” And we’ve scheduled them to allow that so that they can understand the ergonomics of the product, they can understand what they just find to be more helpful, useful for them. And again, the goal is to make this as valuable to the attendees as possible, and this was the format to best make that happen.

Mathew Kerbis:

Well, before we go into our next break, I’m just going to say that, yes, I will be sharing my AI secret when we come back. Nikki and I are going to chat about it first and then we’re going to get Joel’s perspective on it, but then we’ll also talk just quickly here, a little bit of the downsides and the pitfalls of AI. And so stay tuned everybody. We’ll be back with At theBar soon. Welcome back to At theBar. Okay. All right, you’ve waited around long enough. We’re at the tail end of the episode here. I’m going to share the AI secret and here’s the AI secret. I’m a big Perplexity user, right? I pay for that annual subscription. And to prepare for today’s interview of Joel, I typed in a relatively simple but well structured prompt into Perplexity’s AI deep research tool. It said the Chicago Bar Association’s putting on the first of its kind AI symposium.

This represents the culmination of a year long project with AI specific committees. The CBA podcast at theBar is hosting one of the organizers to discuss and promote the show. Look up the show, the history of the committees over the last year and create a one-hour run of show for the interview. And it one shot at an 80% good directional run of show. Don’t you think, Nikki?

Nikki Marcotte:

I do. Yeah, barely any notes.

Mathew Kerbis:

And here’s the thing, we did have notes and we made some changes and we made some edits and we didn’t obviously use everything, Joel, because we could have just asked you one question. We could have said, “Hey, how are you? ” And I think you could have just taken the whole interview. But here’s the thing, and this is why I want you to know, Joel, it suggested you, Joel Brockman as the ideal guest for this interview. How about that? How does that make you feel?

Joel Bruckman:

Wow. I think you might not be able to see me, but I’m bushing. I feel honored that it felt that way, but I think that in identifying the powers of AI, you just mentioned we’re going to talk about the drawbacks. Here’s an example of a drawback. While it thinks that I might be the best person, this has been a team effort. None of this would be possible without my fellow executive committee members, Justice Van Tine, Judge Goldish, without the vision of Judge Patton and without the hard work of all the staff at the CBA, particularly Beth McMean and Jennifer Byrne. So I am honored. So what I interpret that to mean is it felt I was the most long-winded of them. Brevity is a virtue and perhaps they’re better at it than me and maybe that’s why Perplexity leaned on me.

Mathew Kerbis:

And maybe they were like, “Oh, these are judges. Their time is too valuable and more important. We’re going to suggest Joel. He’s got to have some time. He can carve out some billable hours to show up on the show.”

Joel Bruckman:

That’s exactly right. It’s not surprising at all. I mean, I’ve done very similar things. I’ve used it for outlines on CLEs that I’ve presented on related to AI. And this is an important point, not to jump on this too much, but one thing I want to say is I am a big opponent of the stigma of using AI in the legal profession. There is a stigma that if you use AI, it’s because you’re being lazy or you’re cutting corners, or perhaps you don’t know what you’re talking about. You just teed this up for me perfectly because, not to quibble over the quantification, but I’ll say that AI can do 60 to 70% of the work, but the value of the lawyer, their experience, their skills and their knowledge comes in to round out the other 30 to 40%, or in your case, the other 20%.

So I want to dispel anyone who thinks that AI is replacing lawyers. It’s not. It’s frankly, though, here with an opportunity to be better lawyers. And just going back to that stigma, it is important that in whatever organization you’re in, whether it’s a law firm or a corporate legal department, that this technology is embraced. The importance of using it responsibly is embraced even more, but that it is encouraged to be used because your organization and your ability to practice law will be that much stronger.

Mathew Kerbis:

I mean, I don’t know if we’re going to get better than that, but I guess I’ll just give just some final few tips just really quick on using this to go off what you’re talking about. One of the reasons I really like perplexity, and of course Niki and I have to run a show, we could scroll down and we could see. It’s cited to 31 sources and how it put together its report. So we as professionals, really kind of anybody using AI, but especially lawyers with our licenses on the line, we don’t want AI answering us based off training data. It’s just not going to be useful. We want to ground it in sources. And so yeah, is perplexity going to be a substitute for legal research? No, that’s not what it was designed for. So using the right tool for the right purpose, seeing the sources, right?

I mean, we’re looking through, in the perplexity version, I could click on it and it will direct us to it. But in this 16-page run of show, it cites to one of those sources for every single sentence or paragraph for where it’s drawing its information from. So we just have to remember that if AI is not doing this, we will be a statistic on the next whatever hallucination, what have you news article. Any final concluding thoughts from you, Nikki?

Nikki Marcotte:

No, I agree, especially in an age where there are so many ethical considerations and pitfalls when it comes to using AI, particularly in the legal field and how to use it well. I mean, if we’re getting to a point where NPR is reporting on the 800 or so cases in the last even two years, that continues to grow at an exponential rate alarmingly, where lawyers have submitted briefs to courts using hallucinated cases without checking their work. I mean, I think AI definitely is here to stay and Judge Patton and everybody on the planning committee here has it right. We need to understand how to use it correctly. And I think this symposium is going to be a really great way to not only understand the mechanics, but get our hands around the pitfalls and how to avoid those and how do you use it intelligently.

Mathew Kerbis:

Joel, if anybody wanted to follow up with you directly or learn more about the upcoming symposium, maybe join some of the committees, what’s all the links, all the places they could go?

Joel Bruckman:

Yeah, certainly. So if anybody wants to reach out to me directly, feel free to email me, which is jaybruckman, B-R-U-C-K-M-A-N, @sgrlaw.com. You can also find links to register or information regarding fees, the program agenda on the CBA’s website. And I encourage everyone who is available to attend. I want to be clear that though it’s a three-day symposium, if you can only make one day, we have single-day tickets available. We also have three-day tickets available. We’re operating a promotion right now for law firms who are looking to send at least five lawyers. We have special pricing available. We have special pricing for members of the judiciary as well as law students. And as always, CBA members get discounted rates. So I, again, look forward to seeing as many of you as possible there. We have a lot of fun and very valuable things in store. One of the things that we were very intentional and purposeful about was to create an environment that wasn’t simply a whirlwind of activity, where you go to certain symposiums, there’s thousands of vendors, and it’s just like one sales pitch after another.

We want to give people the space, the time, and the opportunity to take full advantage of what we are truly offering in both our agenda and our lab demonstrations. So again, May 11th through the 13th, next Monday through Wednesday, Venue 610, 610 South Michigan. All the details are on the CBA website. I want to thank you, Mathew and Nikki for having me on here. On behalf of the entire executive committee of the AI initiative, which I know is a deviation maybe from the title on the CVA website. We all truly appreciate the support in giving us this opportunity to spread the message and awareness. And I look forward to seeing everyone next week.

Mathew Kerbis:

Thanks again, Joel. Joel, you’re going to be there. Nikki and I, if you ever wanted to meet the co-hosts of the AtthBar podcast, we’re going to be there, but we’re not going to tell you which day, so better come to all of them so you could figure that out and say hey, and that’s a wrap of this episode of At TheBar, brought to you by the Chicago Bar Association. If you’re in Chicago or you can get to Chicago May 11th through May 13th, then like Joel said, we’ll see you at venue 610. That’s the place that you need to be. So if today’s conversation sparked something, subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave us a review, helps other people discover the show. We’ll see you next time at theBar.