E-Discovery Disrupted by the AI Revolution

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

John W. Simek: Welcome to Digital Detectives. Reports from the battlefront.  We’ll discuss computer forensics, electronic discovery and information security issues and what’s really happening in the trenches.  Not theory but practical information that you can use in your law practice.  Right here on the Legal Talk Network.

Sharon D. Nelson: Welcome to the 147th Edition of Digital Detectives.  We’re glad to have you with us.  I’m Sharon Nelson, President of Sensei Enterprises, a digital forensics, managed cybersecurity and managed information technology firm in Fairfax, Virginia.

John W. Simek: And I’m John Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises.  Today on Digital Detectives, our topic is E-Discovery Disrupted by the AI Revolution.  Our Guest is Andy Wilson, the CEO and co-founder of Logikcull, a major E-Discovery platform for the legal industry.  And is at the tip of the spear in bringing AI into the legal field automating processes particularly around legal discovery that presently account for one-third of all legal fees globally.  Under Andy’s leadership, Logikcull has grown into a market leader in E-Discovery trusted by over 1500 organizations and 50,000 users in more than 40 countries worldwide.  With Logikcull, the one stressful legal discovery process is now simpler, more efficient and more affordable than ever before.  It’s always great to have you with us Andy, welcome.

Andy Wilson: Thank you.  Happy to be here.  It’s been a long time.

John W. Simek: Andy, so let’s start off.  Why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about Logikcull.  Its history, because Sharon and I kind of know where when you were right down the road from us.  And the exciting things that’s doing with Artificial Intelligence.

Andy Wilson: Well, Sharon, you should know I’m wearing my red shoes just for you by the way.

Sharon D. Nelson: Oh hooray, thank you.

Andy Wilson: Normally, these days I’m wearing slippers around the house because we all work from home.  So, the history of Logikcull, we’re going on 20 years but it’s not all Logikcull.  We actually just celebrated our 10-year anniversary of launching Logikcull on April 1, 2013.  So very fresh in my mind.  We did an all-hands meeting with the company on Monday, we went to this whole slide show and it was pretty awesome.  We launched it in D.C.  As you guys remember, we’re going to roll Chinatown office and now we’re all over the world being a fully remote company.  But we launched it.

It was the first of its kind, a completely self-service.  Drag-and-drop discovery product that anybody could use and kind of the root of the why behind building Logikcull in the first place was my co-founder and I, we came from a world of big mega litigation and we were processing data for these large law firms of big banks.  And we came to the realization that this is a service that is very valuable and everybody should have access to it.  The problem was, it was outrageously expensive and too slow, and too difficult to use.  So, we fixed all that.  Made it very easy and very affordable, and here we are.

Sharon D. Nelson: Well, I was lucky enough recently to watch your spring launch event called Culling Reloaded, which was a really fascinating demonstration of what you’re currently offering.  And what you’re working on.  Culling Reloaded, is that still available for our listeners?

Andy Wilson: Yup, and I continue link but it’s logikcull.com.

Sharon D. Nelson: Okay, so if they just go there, they can find the link?  If you want to give us a specific link, we’ll make sure to put it in the show notes.  And you started out by saying that your mission is to disrupt and democratize Discovery.  Would you tell us what you mean by that, Andy?

Andy Wilson: Yeah.  So, let’s talk about the word disrupt.  The legal industry, aa fascinating industry and I think a lot of people are just heads down and the status quo just – thinking things are not going to change and they’re doing things on very old fashion way, and say you have to shake things up.  And to get them to pay attention.  They’re like, hey, listen, this is actually going to get much worse for you because we’re living through this digital revolution.  Not unlike the industrial revolution.  I don’t think people realize, oh we’re living in the industrial revolution right now.  It’s what’s happening in our lives.  This Digital Detectives as an example, right?

And so, you’ve got to wake people up and so that disruption piece of our mission is really important because I don’t think we can actually achieve our mission of democratization without the disruption.  So, the democratization piece is really important.  As you well know, many of your listeners know, the evidence is not a piece of paper anymore.  It’s a tweet or a text message, or a voice memo.  It’s all digital.  Everything’s discoverable.  I tell my kids this all the time.  Try and get them to realize how grave the consequences can be.  Avoid Slackchat and Whatnot.

John W. Simek: It isn’t working Andy?

Andy Wilson: No, it’s not working.  It’s probably working against me.  It’s unbelievable.  That’s where the evidence is now.  And the problem that my co-founder and I holding on, this is like a note 2008, when we had the idea for this was, the (00:05:15) is going to grow exponentially in size and in complexity.  But the deadlines that legal folks are under attorneys, paralegals, investigators, etc. doesn’t give a damn about that.  So, you have this immovable object and this grilling tsunami of digital data and it’s going to create this noise to signal ratio that’s going to make life pretty miserable eventually.  And so, that was the bet that we made.  And so, we realized the world needed a calling service and everybody’s going to be able to — everyone will eventually need the service like this.

Sharon D. Nelson: You talked when I listen to that bid that I was talking about before.  You talked about how Microsoft data particularly is exploding and the implications of that for Discovery.  Would you go over that part again for our listeners?

Andy Wilson: I think the stuff that I showed before that was you want to know how much data is being created every day.  It’s 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.  And of course, it’s all discoverable to some extent.  But Microsoft is where a lot of the data resides.  It was 90 percent of the Fortune 500, you use Microsoft, their team’s product that competes with slack is now being used by almost 300 million daily active users, which is shocking.  Especially when you consider, I think there’s like a billion knowledge workers in the world.  Something like that.  So, it’s like a third of the knowledge workers are using Microsoft products.  And one of the things that we looked at in this presentation was well, how many Teams chats are being sent every day.  And the number was shocking.  33 billion Teams chats said every day, kind of well.

John W. Simek: That’s crazy.

Andy Wilson: It’s bananas.  And we’ve seen that in our own data too.  I mean, like, we always (00:07:00) check these external stats with our own internal data, a Logikcull as the product now processes about a billion pages of Discovery content every single month.  And so, we looked at the data, it says Logikcull to try and figure out is there a trend is there more Microsoft data, more Teams chat data and in fact, there was.  It’s growing your viewer 81 percent which is pretty dang fast.

John W. Simek: Wow.  Andy, apparently, one of the things you referenced was the impact of layoffs and budget cuts in the do more with less mentality that we’re all faced with today.  Well, we’re basically using outdated technology, I think.  But I’m sure the listeners, they want to hear more about your thoughts on all of that.

Andy Wilson: I mean, it’s everywhere.  The clients or the law firms are probably creating the most pressure here, but, we’re seeing it in law firms as well.  And it’s only going to continue.  I think that’s mainly due to AI is finally released here and usable.  I mean, look at open A.I. fastest product ever to get to 100 million users.  Thinking a month’s time.  It’s just incredible.  What you can do with this.  I use it now every day.  I use it to draft emails, I talk with it, I brainstorm with it.  And I’ve talked about strategy, I vet product ideas.  I mean, there’s so many different things you can do with our engineers are using it for sanity checking code in a safe way, not a Samsung like moment here.

John W. Simek: I was going to point that out.

Andy Wilson: We’re very careful with these things.  It’s really incredible what you can do with this technology now.  Here’s an example, if there’s a technology in Logikcull that we release a couple months ago to shave off time.  Have you ever seen that chart from XKCD comics strip.  Have you ever seen that showing you how much time you’ll consume per task over the course of like a month or a year?  Off to share that, we can post that in the show notes.  Because we also take for granted these small things every day that we do, or every week.  Like, oh, it’s no big deal.  But if you do them over and over and over again, that’s just compounds.  And so, when you when you do the math on some of these things you might find out that you’re actually wasting days or weeks of your life every single year doing these routine tasks.  And that’s where AI automation, I think is going to come in and expose some of that.  So, you’ll get more people back time in the day.

John W. Simek: But before we move on to our next segment, let’s take a quick commercial break.

Sharon D. Nelson: As a lawyer, insurance is one of the last parts of your job you want to spend unbillable hours on, that’s why thousands of lawyers have switched to Embroker.  Embroker offers A plus rated insurance for law firms.  You can quote and buy instantly online.  If you need help, they have experts on standby. Go from sign up to purchase in 15 minutes by visiting and embroker.com/law. That’s E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R.com/law.

The Digital Edge podcast where the law and technology intersect.  I’m Sharon Nelson and together with Jim Calloway, we invite professionals from all fields to discuss the latest trends, tips and tools within the legal industry.  Stay up to date on the rapidly changing Legal Tech landscape with the Digital Edge on the Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Sharon D. Nelson: Welcome back to Digital Detectives on the Legal Talk Network. Today our topic is E-Discovery Disrupted by the AI Revolution.  Our Guest is our friend, Andy Wilson, the CEO and co-founder of Logikcull, a major E-Discovery platform for the legal industry.  Andy is at the tip of the spear in bringing AI into the legal field, automating processes, particularly around legal discovery that presently account for one-third of all legal fees globally.  Under Andy’s leadership, Logikcull has grown into a market leader in to E-Discovery trusted by over 1500 organizations and 50,000 users in more than 40 countries worldwide.  With Logikcull, the one stressful legal Discovery processes simpler more efficient and more affordable than ever before.

John W. Simek: Andy, you mentioned Teams and Slack in our first section there.  But can you talk a little bit about what AI can do with all of that data that you referenced?

Andy Wilson: I think it’s the only way to really handle it.  Because the data is so noisy.  I mean, what people use — these are business products.  But they’re using them in a very casual way.  And it’s not like normal email communication, where your email communications are a text-based.  If you look inside any kind of Teams chat or Slack chat.  You’ll see, obviously, you’ll see text stuff, but you’ll see video clips.  You’ll see animated gifs, you’ll see a bunch of emoji reactions that are basically language of how people are communicating.  And if you take that and you combine all the data that you have to go through, it would take thousands of years to go through all this information with legacy means of doing Discovery.

And so, if you think about AI is just perfectly suited to handle this massive amount of data that’s generated by Teams and Slack, as an example like our algorithms will analyze and categorize conversations, identify patterns, even pinpoint relevant keywords and phrases.  So, all that chaos of chatter is no longer chaotic and it’s easily discoverable.  And we’ve heard of stories.  This actually came up with one of our in-house customers last year.  They uploaded three million Slack messages into Logikcull.  3 million segments.  And within two minutes time, they found 13 relevant Slack messages and that was it.  They didn’t have to go through the rest.  And the only way that you can do that is with AI automation.

John W. Simek: How do you deal with a generational thing though that some of these expressions, they mean different things to different generations.

Andy Wilson: It’s really tough.  That’s where AI can come in as well to try and help you understand what is the inference behind this.  The emoji as an example or this dancing cat video.

Sharon D. Nelson: That’s one thing that’s lasted.

Andy Wilson: Why do we say dancing dogs by the way?

Sharon D. Nelson: The cats are simply better.  Dogs are not great dancers.

Andy Wilson: For now.

Sharon D. Nelson: The one the ones that are AI will be wonderful.

Andy Wilson: Have you seen the mechanical dogs from —

Sharon D. Nelson: Yes, I have.

Andy Wilson: Boston scientific?

John W. Simek: It’s scary.

Sharon D. Nelson: It is scary.  I mean they have great uses.  They’re wonderful in a nursing home to provide company and comfort but the military ones are scary as hell.

Andy Wilson: Scary, very scary.  Actually, you know we just had this conversation about robots and discover, that’s going to be a thing.  It’ll happen this decade.  You’re going to have to do robot Discovery.

Sharon D. Nelson: Absolutely, no question about it.  I’m with you on that.  To go back to something else that you’ve talked a lot about, is global redactions after searching for a person, a business, or an address.  What is that all about?  And what can it do for a lawyer or law firm?

Andy Wilson: This is a big deal.  So, a little over a year ago, we were doing some research on privacy law all around the world and we came out with a pretty shocking statistic.  Two-thirds of the world’s population will be under some Digital Privacy Law.  You already seen this happened in the United States.  California Privacy Act is an example that I kicked off New York.  And then I want to say there’s six different states that have their own privacy laws and you got GDPR.  So, the reason why I mention this is, that private information has to be hidden from view and the way that people go about doing that today is redacting.  And this probably won’t be shocking to anybody here.  But you know what the number one way to redact documents is?  You guys know?  Beyond Sharpies.

John W. Simek: Oh darn.  I was going to guess that.

Andy Wilson: You already got Sharpies?  I don’t need PDF.  And so, which you’ll find, especially in school district.  Any kind of public agency that’s under Republic records law.  So, think like you’re – actually Fare fox county is a customer (00:15:27).  And they’re under the public records law.  And so, every time a public record comes in, they have to go through all the data, maybe they’re looking for — I want to know the school’s policy about some type of education program, or mass mandates or something like that.  Which is also, by the way, that’s kind of a funny one because that will typically bring back a bunch of Halloween related conversations.

So, the information they have to go through is enormous and the data is really sensitive.  You’re talking about student names, their IDs, sometimes their locations.  Sometimes their bank account information is shared just really inside of an email with a teacher.  It’s kind of scary and say they have to redact us all and what you’ll find is that they’re doing them one by one.  Like there was a story in the wash and post about a woman that was redacting for foie related reasons.  And she actually had a physical reaction.  She wanted to throw up every time she thought about redactions.  So, it’s really bad.  And this digital problem is now affecting the physical world and people’s mental health overall health.  So, we want to solve this and we wanted to build a way to do really smart, high scale redactions across any kind of data.  Not just text messages or your emails but Teams data, Slack data, audio and video content.  And do it safely and do it quickly and we did that.

And so, that’s what we’re doing is a way to do global reactions across any kind of data.  And just last week, we had a customer that previously was using Adobe and doing it one by one, and it would have taken it wasn’t that many documents, it was like 250 documents or so.  But if you think about how long it takes to do a single reaction, it’s like a half a minute to a minute.  That will take like three to four hours of time.  She was able to do it in less than three minutes.  Just done.  So massive time savings and way more secure.

John W. Simek: Andy, I didn’t have the pleasure of watching this.  See that Sharon did your demo thing there, but I understand that you can do some pretty crazy things with AI in respect to legal holes and basically a single click.  I’m interested to hear about that and I’m sure listeners would too.

Andy Wilson: Yeah.  Well, so legal holds.  Let’s talk about that for a second.  One of the things that is interesting in this new world about legal holds is that hackers have looked at legal holds as a clever vector into an organization.  And so, why is that?  So, think about what a legal hold is.  It’s an email that goes out to an employee and it’s coming along in email because it says, hey we’re investigation, please do not delete your things, click here to confirm you have received it so that they have an audit trail.

John W. Simek: Oh, jeez.

Andy Wilson: I know, right?

John W. Simek: (00:18:18) this is going.

Andy Wilson: It’s so bad.  And so, one of the things that we did just to – that’s like disrupt and democratize.  We actually created an AI fishing tool for legal holds.  Where it will take a recently departed employee and then figure out who they’re connected to, and create an email and use their names and the email will come from somebody in the legal department and it looks very real.  And you click that button and then it takes you to a fake landing page.  That says, hey you’ve been fished.  Maybe you shouldn’t send legal holds over email.

Some people don’t like that approach, but we’re trying to raise awareness.  This is a real problem people.  You don’t want to be — I think the title of that one was Lawyers are now a liability, something like that and don’t be the liability.  And so, we built these tools to raise awareness around it and connect it to that as — and this is back to Teams and chat.  If you think about Slack as an example, Slack is already a trusted source of communication.  It’s not like email.  And I think that’s also why people are less professional inside of it.  Looking for some ways very unprofessional inside of it, in case people are in trouble.

But if you think about Slack, it’s already a trusted source.  You don’t get fished in Slack, doesn’t happen.  So, we built a tool inside of Slack.  It’s an actual application for legal holds.  You just connect it to your Slack account, and then when you send legal holds, it will intelligently route those holds to someone in Slack and they can confirm it inside of Slack versus email, dramatically reducing the risks behind legal hold fishing attacks.

Sharon D. Nelson: Well, that’s very amazing.  Another thing I think our audience would like to hear about is audio review and auto transcription.  Can you educate us a little about that?

Andy Wilson: Yeah, this is a big deal.  I mean, we always come from the lands of everything is discoverable.  So, we have to make everything searchable and organized.  And then feed it into our algorithms, so we can surface up the signal from the noise.  That’s the whole the ethos of the product and the name like logic calls, a calling service.  So, one of the pieces of digital content that has become a big problem in the discovery is audio and video content.  So, if you think about like body camera, footage or dash cams, call center data, 911 centers as an example.  Whenever those locations are under some sort of Discovery event which could be a government subpoena, it could be a foyer request.  What you’ll find is that back to like Adobe and PDF being people are literally sitting there.  Like, I talked to this woman last year, Susan in North Carolina legal department and I said, what are you doing for audio Discovery?  And she said, I listened to every single voice message.

Sharon D. Nelson: Ouch.

Andy Wilson: I was like, what? She was like, yeah.  I was like, how long does that take?  She’s like, it can take weeks.  And I was like, do you listen to 1xp or 2xp?  (00:21:21).  Now I said, it’s still on two weeks?  She’s like, yeah.  And I said what if we have to redact that information?  And she’s like, oh, well, we’ll have to flag it and send it to the service and then I tell him which time stamps.  And this was the nightmare.

So, we look at that and like, okay, that’s a waste of time.  And it’s only going to get worse.  Because all that audio and video contents only going to go up into the right.  So, what can we do about that?  So, we built an AI model to automatically transcribe all of audio and video content.  And more importantly, make all the words hyperlinked.  So, let’s say, for instance, like this podcast as an example.  We should do this as a fun following story.  We’ll take it and throw it in Logikcull and I can tap the word Logikcull and It’ll take me right to that point in time inside of the video.  So, you don’t have to listen to everything.

And then what we recently did was we added smart redaction capability.  Where in one click, you can automatically redact all the personally identifiable information.  So, think about like a 911 call.  You might be saying your house’s location or a call center where you might reveal your credit card number.  Your date of birth.  This is gold for hackers, right?  And so, we can now find all that almost immediately.  And then a click of a button, you can automatically redact it.

John W. Simek: Before we move on to our last segment.  Let’s take a quick commercial break.

[Music]

Judd Pierce: Workers’ Comp Matters is a podcast dedicated to exploring the laws, the landmark cases and the true stories that define our workers’ compensation system.  I’m Judd Pierce and together with Alan Pierce, we host a different guest each month as we bring to life this diverse area of the law.  Join us on Workers’ Comp Matters on the Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Male: The ABA Journal Legal Rebels podcast features the men and women in the legal profession who aren’t satisfied with good enough.  These are the people who are changing the way law is practiced and setting the standards that will define the profession in the future.  Each episode, we share their story.  To hear insights from those with an eye fixed towards tomorrow, follow the Legal Rebels Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Sharon D. Nelson: Welcome back to Digital Detectives on the Legal Talk Network. Today our topic is E-Discovery Disrupted by the AI Revolution.  Our Guest is Andy Wilson, the CEO and co-founder of Logikcull, a major E-Discovery platform for the legal industry.  Andy is at the tip of the spear in bringing AI into the legal field, automating processes, particularly around legal discovery that presently account for one-third of all legal fees globally.

John W. Simek: Andy, Sharon once told me a story about AI and the comments that you made that Artificial Intelligence can suggest what’s actually relevant and non-relevant starting with privileged documents.  Can you talk about that capability because that is going to be game changer, right?

Andy Wilson: Yes, it is.  I mean, privilege is a lot more new ones and I thought it would be – I thought it was just fairly straight forward, law firm to client communication is actually more complicated than that.  So, it’s also one of more expensive things that is done in Discovery.  Privilege – you’ve never want to have a privilege document escape your hands, right?  Like that can’t happen.  And we’ve had for years, we’ve had a next inside of Logikcull so that when you do actually export and produce the other side, if you are producing privilege documents that can tag privilege, it’ll give you a big all warning saying, are you sure you want to do that?  That seems like a bad idea.

John W. Simek: If it was a service, I accept.

Andy Wilson: Exactly.  But we want to do something better.  We wanted to actually surface up all the privilege content much, much faster.  And so, what we built, which is pretty cool.  It’s built off of a large language model inside of Logikcull.  As we start – well it does two things.  Once, when you upload data, it will find a lot of the privilege content for you automatically and just fax it like a filter.  So, you can just click and say, hey, show me all the folder’s content comes to view.  And that’s step one.

But that’s not everything.  Because as you start to do your review and privilege being a lot more nuanced than people think.  Certain things that our initial AI wouldn’t have caught is going to be flagged as privileged by a human reviewer.  And what’s cool about this model is that it learns that and so as a user saying, hey this is actually privileged, it will learn and say, oh, if that’s privileged, maybe these other documents over here that weren’t flagged as privileged are privileged as well.  And it puts it into another filter we call, suggested tags.  And this is a game changer.  Because it’s not just privilege, but it’s also responsive, non-responsive, confidential.  As you start to add these tags, it’s learning, and learning, and learning, and bubbling up more of these documents.  All you have to do is click a button and they all come into view.  It is as you pointed out.  This is a legit game changer.

Sharon D. Nelson: At the end of Culling Reloaded, you predicted that by 2055, 50 percent of all work will be automated but only the work that sucks.  That was certainly very catchy as a prediction.  How did you come to that conclusion and what does it made from a legal profession?  And then I managed to squeeze more questions in here.  But let me let you answer that part and then I’ll go to our bonus questions.

Andy Wilson: Well, it’s a bit of a hedge.  Who knows exactly when this is going to happen.  And especially the rate that AI is progressing right now.  I mean it is mid blowing.  If you’re curious, look up Auto GPT and Agents on Twitter.  Twitter is the best place to keep up to speed with a lot of this.  And it’s changing every single week.  It is mind-blowing.  So, hey it might be 2035.  Heck maybe 2025, I don’t know.  Probably not.  Just given the fact that so much of this is going to be a slow roll and we’re in the early innings of this digital revolution.  People are still redacting documents with Sharpies and PDFs and, listening to voice messages one by one but there’s a lot of work to do.

And that’s why the disruption piece of our mission is so important because you really have to get people to kind of wake up before it’s too late and it kind of drowns them and putting like I mentioned that Wash and Post story.  This woman is like literally suffering physically because using these (00:27:59) ways of doing it.  So, I think for the legal profession, I have a few predictions.  I think overall this is a really great thing.  Because there is so much legal work that just sucks.

There’s so much repetitive things that don’t need to be repetitive.  Contracts as an example.  So much of contract creation is just route your routine and yet it’s like a new piece of art every single time.  Document review.  Think about people looking at emails over and over and over again, one by one to try and understand what’s responsive or what’s privilege.  We’ll look back at that and go, man, that was kind of silly.  I live in Bend Oregon and it’s the home of the last Blockbuster on Earth, Sharon.

John W. Simek: Yup.  I knew that.

Sharon D. Nelson: Yes.  You told me so we both knew.

Andy Wilson: Well, I go there every summer.  My wife and I, we will take our kids there, we get a DVD, we do an alternative movie.  And I remind pour kids, just how easy it is now to consume entertainment about what it was like back then and what we had to do.  And now, I always find it really funny.  And I think, are you serious?  You do get charge din late fees?  And if you di rewind it, you will get charged again.  Again, I’m like, yep, uh-huh.

John W. Simek: Did you have a VHS to show them, Andy what rewinding is?

Andy Wilson: I do have a VHS, but I don’t have a VHS player.  So, I have all these old tapes, I need to eventually convert to digital.  But anyway, I think we will look back in a similar fashion and go, man that was really silly.  And so, I think, the thing about predictions on the impact and legal, one of the really great things.  I think it’s going to happen this decade and in the coming decades is the access to justice will be forever changed.  That’s one of the biggest challenges of legal industry is the access to the legal industry is prohibitive for a variety of reasons.  And I think one of the biggest ones is the billable hour.  Blocks people from seeking access because the fear of how long something could take and the cost associated with that.

So, there could be a world where this is the moment in time, where this time it’s different.  Now the billable hour is really at risk and access to justice can actually be achieved because of AI and automation.  But I think that’s going to happen and I think the business models will have to adjust because if you can do something, like I just mentioned, in three minutes that historically would have taken you three to four hours.  Well, you should do it in three minutes.  You should take three to four hours but the incentives today in this industry are perversely related to that kind of adoption and I don’t think that’s going to work anymore because you’re going to be able to do things so much faster and smarter.

Sharon D. Nelson: I personally think that the people who work with AI will outpace considerably the people who don’t work with AI.  That is likely to come, I think to the larger law firms first simply because they have the money to do it, but the smaller ones who can figure it out and use maybe smaller less expensive products.  They may be able to keep up to.  I had had a whole list of questions there but I think you actually answered most of them Andy.  Was there anything else you would like to chip in with in terms of your predictions?  We’re writing them all down so that we can tell you whether you were right or wrong.

Andy Wilson: I’m just trying to think of it just simple constraints.  If there are even constraints.  Instead of driving so much behavior and just human work load.  And one of the other things I think is going to be interesting to watch, is the clients of these law firms.  Especially the larger law firms.  They are the ones who now — because they’re kind of like a small team, like small law firms.  If you look inside of any large organization, you’ll find a very small legal department.  It’s like less than one percent of revenue goes to the legal department.  They don’t spend like one percent of the revenue, they have to do important work but they often outsource that to law firms and third parties.  And now that there’s tools that are easy to use, they’re fast, they’re affordable for a variety of the legal tasks that historically would have been outsourced to third parties.

I think you’re going to see a pretty big shift where in-house teams are going to adopt these tools and because of the way the internet works being so networked, it will most likely create some sort of network effect inside of the broader law firm market and force these law firms to adopt these tools just to compete.  And I think that’s also going to change the business model.  So, I think it’s kind of like a small teams win.  Like small teams can now do the work of massive law firms and third parties at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time.

Sharon D. Nelson: I agree with most of your predictions.  There are some that I’ve thought of others I haven’t and it seems like there’s a new prediction every day and there’s new news every day and keeping up with this as a full-time job and I’m sure you feel like that too.

Andy Wilson: Yeah.  I’m like plugged into the Twitter hive mind just trying to keep up.  What’s going on.

Sharon D. Nelson: It’s almost impossible to keep up because it’s moving so fast and of course that carries its own perils.  But, certainly some of the information you’ve given today is just so valuable.  We want to thank you, John and I for coming on and being our guest today, Andy.  We’ve been friends a long-time you’re a very colorful fellow and that includes the red sneakers.  And it’s always been fun to interview you because you’re very imaginative and creative and always on the cutting edge of whatever you’re doing.  So, we really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us today.

Andy Wilson: Well, thank you Sharon.  Thank you, John. And it was awesome speaking with you and thank you for the time.

John W. Simek: That does it for this edition of Digital Detectives.  And remember, you can subscribe to all the editions of this podcast at legaltalknetwork.com or in Apple Podcast.  And if you enjoyed our podcast, please rate us on Apple podcast.

Sharon D. Nelson: And you can find out more about Sensei’s digital forensics, managed technology and managed cybersecurity services at senseient.com.  We’ll see you next time on Digital Detectives.

Outro: Thanks for listening to Digital Detectives on the Legal Talk Network. Check out some of our other podcasts on legaltalknetwork.com and in iTunes.

[Music]