AI Takeover—Did Generative AI Kill Off Pre-Existing Technologies?

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro: Web 2.0, innovation, trends, collaboration, software, metadata… Got the world turning as fast as it can? Hear how technology can help, legally speaking, with two of the top legal technology experts, authors, and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to The Kennedy-Mighell Report here on the Legal Talk Network.

Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to episode 352 of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode, we took a deep dive into the simple art of notetaking and whether there might be ways for us to improve our own use of notes with processes and technologies. It’s a notable episode, to be sure. Sorry about that. In this episode, we wanted to take a different perspective on Generative AI hype. Has AI made all the technologies that were so “hot” a year or so ago simply disappear? Tom, what’s on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, we will indeed be trying to discover and analyze what happened to all the hot technologies Dennis said we needed to pay attention to before ChatGPT captured all the legal tech, or really technology oxygen? In our second segment, we’re going to ask the question, has legal tech podcasting completely turned into only interviewing AI vendors? And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots. That one tip, website, or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over.

First up, we wanted to try and discover and think about where all the technologies that seem to be so “hot” just a year ago have disappeared to after the onslaught of AI hype that seems to have sucked all the oxygen out of the conversation of technology in the legal space and frankly, the general technology space as well. One of our favorite tropes in legal tech is people generating attention by declaring a technology dead. I don’t think that we’re going to say that any of these are dead, but if you judge relevance by how much you’re seeing it online, feels like a lot of these topics that I’m about to bring up anyway are on life support, but surely they can’t be true. And so, I wanted to ask that question and see if Dennis felt the same way that I did. So, Dennis, what do you think? Has Generative AI literally killed off all the pre-existing technologies, in law or otherwise, or does it just seem that way? Is it just my imagination?

Dennis Kennedy: Breaking news. It’s also killed off the billable hour, so maybe that’s a good place for –

Tom Mighell: Not yet. No, it has.

Dennis Kennedy: No, it really has.

Tom Mighell: Not yet.

Dennis Kennedy: I was just reading this today. The billable hour has officially been killed off by AI. So I was thinking, Tom, that our episode a while back on the Gartner Hype Cycle is becoming one of my favorite episodes, and I think one of yours as well, because there’s never been anything like the Hype Cycle with Generative AI in the legal tech world. And I guess that’s when we talk about sucking the oxygen out of the room, that’s sort of what I feel like.

We’re in this just outrageously big hype cycle and there are important things happening, but it’s hard to get a good handle on it. And we’re in this kind of legal tech echo chamber about AI, and the best way to get clicks and audience and potentially advertising revenue is to talk about Generative AI. So that’s all we hear about. Even though I think that much of the tech world and the things we talked about a year or so ago are still kind of marching forward, but certainly with much less attention.

Tom Mighell: So I’m going to disagree with that shortly. But what I’m going to say first is I saw a quote from somebody that I read occasionally where he described AI as what he called marketing gas. And I was like, what does that mean? And so, guess what? I asked ChatGPT, what does the phrase AI as marketing gas mean? And it gave me a very well-considered three paragraph thing that said, “It’s a bit slangy and can be interpreted in a few ways depending on the context. Either one, it might imply that the potential and capabilities of artificial intelligence are often exaggerated or hyped up in marketing and media.” Okay, I get that. Or two, “Alternatively, it could mean that AI is a powerful tool for marketing efforts, which is sort of the clickbait that you were talking about. The best way to get likes and clicks and people and eyeballs to look at things is to use AI or chatbot.” Number three was, “Misleading or empty promises. It might also be a critical statement suggesting that AI and marketing is full of hot air or empty promises.”

(00:05:08)

I sort of like all three of them, but I think that quote sort of sums up for me what’s going on right now with AI is whether you take any one of those three explanations. I think they could all legitimately describe kind of what’s going on right now with how it’s being considered, is that it seems to be the only thing to think about, the only thing to talk about, the only thing worth considering. And I think there have been several casualties. And like I said, I don’t think they’re dead, but I don’t like their chances very much at all.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, and I think that all three of the above is the right answer. And I think if we went back to the original days of the internet, we would probably find somebody saying the internet is just marketing gas. So it’s always been good for clicks and audiences and I think that that’s a good way to think about it. What we’re hearing about Generative AI is kind of what’s in it for the person who’s talking the most about it. But to go to what the question you raised is what happened to contract lifecycle management, blockchain NFTs, all these other things we were talking about and are they still around and are people actually using them? So let me turn it over to you Tom, and let you give your thoughts on that and maybe we’ll talk through some of them and see whether what they’re being used for if anything, or whether they’ve just been thrown in the trash can.

Tom Mighell: So let’s cover these, maybe I’ll throw these out and then we’ll talk about them separately. So instead of giving you the whole list, let me kind of throw these out in three different groups, three different things that I think have fallen by the wayside to a certain extent. Let’s bring up the one that I think is probably least a victim of AI and more a victim of sinking under its own weight. And maybe not so much the blockchain, but cryptocurrency in general.

I think that those who supported and/or promote cryptocurrency have largely, with all of the scandals lately happening, I think that they’ve dealt kind of, and not even to mention the fact that cryptocurrency seems to be the currency of choice for scammers and ransomware artists and people of ill repute, I feel sort of like it’s not as well regarded as it was before. I hardly hear about crypto in a positive way these days. And I think that it’s unfair to say that crypto taints the blockchain, because I think the blockchain still has benefits to it. But I never hear about the blockchain anymore. I never hear that things are happening. We talked about smart contracts and all our contracts are going to be on the blockchain after a while. And we talked about all that just a couple of years ago, and you hear nothing about that now. Is that just me? I don’t hear it. And it feels like, although it’s not gone, it’s really not that important to people.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, it certainly doesn’t get the same level of clicks right that AI does. People do tend to conflate cryptocurrency and blockchain, and so I think it’s important to separate those things. And with crypto, there’s been a whole bunch of scandals and fraud and other things, and people question the uses, although frankly, $100 bills are used for some of the same nefarious purposes.

So cash clearly has its own issues and fraud can happen in any number of settings. So I think that crypto is sort of its own space. I don’t know how much it was ever part of the legal world other than paying ransomware and a few people experimenting with crypto for payments, its own field, sort of, and it has value. And if you look some of the cryptocurrencies have actually gone up recently, so there’s still plenty of interest there.

Blockchain, I think it’s really fashionable I think in the legal tech world to say. Blockchain, it never came to anything. It was meaningless. It’s just this big joke. But it’s being used for practical purposes, in supply chain, in identity, and in other things on a regular basis. And it solves some real-world problems, not the least of which is the basis for NFTs and digital art and other things like that, which went through their hype cycle and have dropped down.

(00:10:08)

And I think in both cases, if we look at the hype cycle notion, say it went up, it went down, and now it’s kind of in this moving toward this plateau where it has this usefulness. It’s just like way below the level of the original hype.

Tom Mighell: Okay. All right. I agree. I feel the same way. All right, next area that I think, frankly, in my opinion, has sunk even lower than blockchain or cryptocurrency, and that is Web3 and NFTs. I never hear about Web3 anymore. I don’t hear about the next coming of the Internet. It’s really not a thing anymore. I had not heard about NFTs in a long time.

But yesterday, I saw an article talking about Disney is getting ready to offer some digital tokens, some NFTs based on Disney characters. And the whole article was just couched in ridicule, which is, have you not seen what’s happened to NFTS lately? And yet Disney, what do you think you’re doing? You are incredibly out of touch. So that reading that article was all I needed to really see, to understand that NFTs are not really in favor to the extent that they ever were. They were a hot thing at one point in time. I don’t see either of these making any headway in the technology field anytime soon.

Dennis Kennedy:  So this, to me, is a lot about critical thinking. So obviously, you get clicks if you say, “Oh, my God, Disney, the entertainment company that’s possibly the most successful Internet entertainment company of all time, has just turned into idiots, and they don’t know what they’re doing at all.” So I would say what’s happening where it’s interesting, in the NFTs, in the Web 3 space is in gaming and sort of digital commodities, digital products, other things in the gaming world and the online world.

And then we see Web3 in some of the Twitter alternatives and other spaces. And again, this stuff where I think the issue of why they start to disappear is they really are these sort of platform technologies in their infrastructure, and so they’re harder for people to understand, and then as they become part of the ecosystem, they’re just less noticed. So I think they’re still around. I think there’s an enormous potential with the NFTs in digital products especially — and we’ve talked about this, I think, on the podcast, Tom, in these online gaming worlds, which you are more part of than I am. But the audience and the membership in those online gaming communities is unbelievably large.

Tom Mighell: Well, it’s not getting a lot of coverage. That’s the whole difference is there’s no coverage. We’re not seeing anything. I reject the argument that it’s all about clicks because there are legitimate news sources that aren’t as concerned about the clicks, that aren’t talking about these types of things.  All right, number three, and this one, I would argue, really hasn’t sunk below or along with some of the others, but I would say that its importance has tarnished somewhat. And that is the Metaverse.

I would say it’s still trying to have a relevance. Meta released its new Quest 3. Is it the Quest 3 that they introduced? The new VR goggles? There are still VR goggles being produced, are still lots of discussions about the Metaverse. And frankly in today, as we’re recording today, Microsoft Ignite is going on and Microsoft announced that they’re actually going to make it easier for Teams to meet, to have Teams meetings in the Metaverse. So I was, I guess, surprised and relieved to see that there is some work being done on that.  So I don’t know that it’s dead, but I would say that it’s certainly again, the luster of it has diminished somewhat. I don’t think that it seems to be quite the excitement that something like ChatGPT would generate.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I tend to agree with you, although there’s some interesting things. I was talking and we had lunch with a couple and they were talking about how they use the Quest goggles for travel, virtual travel, and how they really liked it. They were my wife and I’s age, so I think there are some uses out there. I think it’s perceived as sort of this gaming thing and the technology not quite there. I think it’s a longer-term play, and again, I think it’s part of this sort of digital ecosystem with gaming and other things that we’re going to see where it has some interest.

(00:15:00)

But I think it’s a struggling area and probably we’re waiting to see what happens with the Apple Vision Pro when it comes out and see whether that gives a kick to this area. I think that, although Tom, I think our podcast gave a lot of great ideas of how, and we’ve done several, where you could use virtual reality in the legal space. I just don’t think that lawyers see that or are willing to move in those directions at the moment because they’re super cautious.

Tom Mighell: No, I agree. I think we need to take a break here in just a minute. But I want to raise kind of briefly when I think about the legal tech world, I don’t know that I think as much about legal tech being completely supplanted by artificial intelligence. And as we’re going to talk more in our B segment, I see instead legal tech starting to embrace it and talk about how they’re incorporating even more of it, taking advantage of the ChatGPT hype to use it.

I will say, though, that there are already tools out there. There are lots of contract lifecycle management tools. There are a lot of e-discovery tools that are already making good use of artificial intelligence that seem to be good enough already. Why are we ignoring these types of tools? Why are we ready to move on to the next set? So I guess to the extent that they’re being ignored or left behind to some extent, that’s where I would usually find it in legal tech. Do you find the same thing to be true? Are there other areas that I’m not thinking about?

Dennis Kennedy: I think that those two examples to me are perfect. And I think this raises the big question in legal is why would we want to use these early stage Generative AI tools with the sort of rough edges that we know they have for e-discovery and contract lifecycle management when there are very mature, job specific tools designed for these purposes? So if you have the ability to — this is like the case where you’re going like, “Oh, my God, I have Generative AI.” It is the hammer, and the whole world looks like a nail to me. Whereas I think there are very specific tools that work really well in these areas.

And I think that my concern on the hype is people sort of jump away from tools that have worked well for a long time and where there’s a lot of maturity and they use different types of AIs and other things and sort of jump to GPT world. I think our people could be making significant mistakes in doing that.

Tom Mighell: Well, we’ve got more to talk about. We’re going to ask a couple more questions about this, but we need to take a quick break. So let’s take a break for a message from our sponsors.

[Music]

Adriana Linares: Are you looking for a podcast that was created for new solos? Then join me, Adriana Linares each month on the New Solo Podcast. We talk to lawyers who have built their own successful practices and share their insights to help you grow yours. You can find New Solo on the Legal Talk Network or anywhere you get your podcast.

[Music]

Craig Williams: Today’s legal news is rarely as straightforward as the headlines that accompany them. On Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we provide the legal perspective you need to better understand the current events that shape our society. Join me, Craig Williams, and a wide variety of industry experts as we break down the top stories. Follow Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network or wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

Dennis Kennedy: And we are back. Tom, I feel like we’re in a time of the fog of AI, much like the concept of the fog of war. How in the world can people not active in the world of AI even begin to sift through all that they hear about AI these days?

Tom Mighell: Well, you know, the main problem is when it really is a fog, there’s so much out there. There are so many people competing for eyeballs on AI. It’s really hard to know what’s good and what’s not. And I find that I don’t understand enough about AI to know whether the stuff I’m reading is reliable. And I don’t know what a good or trusted source is. But that said, I think I found some and I have some recommendations that I’m going to put in the show notes. I really think there’s two ways to approach AI, or people want to learn more and or do more.

With AI, there’s two ways to approach it. First is learning about what it is, how it works, how you can work with it best. Dennis has written a white paper on how to use it in one specific area. You may have some recommendations here, but I’m going to post in the show notes a very straightforward article that the Washington Post had a number of weeks ago just called, How To Talk To an AI, which I thought was from a standard of basics it was very useful to look at.

(00:20:14)

I think Dennis posted this on X yesterday, and it’s a Harvard Business Review article called, How to Improve Your Company’s Use of AI with a Structured Approach to Prompts. I feel like practical articles like that are good ways to understand. Here are some of the ways that you can make use of tools like ChatGPT. I think the second way to approach it is knowing kind of how to use it as one thing. But keeping up with what’s happening is also important because it’s changing so fast that who knows what’s going on with all of this stuff? And this is where I have a little bit more challenge finding good materials. I will tell you our Twitter friend Marshall Kirkpatrick has a daily news letter that he calls, AI Time to Impact. Every day, he posts, I think it’s the five most important AI stories of the day or the stories that he finds. I will post the links in there. I’ll tell you some of them are so technical. I can’t begin to read them, but there’s a lot of interesting other articles in there that talk about what the latest things are.

There’s another company called deeplearning.ai and they have a newsletter called The Batch, and The Batch comes out at least once a week, but they call it what matters in AI right now. And I find that that’s a much more approachable. It’s a lot more things that you might find in a newspaper rather than in a scholarly article. But those are some of the ways, and I’ll put — like I said, put them all in the show notes. Those are some of the ways that I think having good resources that you can trust on a regular basis to both learn how to use it, but also how it might be changing. So, you can then adapt how you might use it or see other uses that you might have for in the future.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, Tom, I’ve become much more circumspect about Generative AI and what I say about it. And I like to say, it’s time to experiment and it’s not a time to pronounce and make big proclamations, even though that’s what it seems like, many people are doing. It’s difficult to find trusted sources. I think with AI, you do have to do the hands-on experimentation. I can tell you. I run into the limitations of the current GPT world on a regular basis, and that’s why I’ve become a lot more circumspect in what I say and just kind of produce things as if I write, it’s a result of experiments that I’ve done.

So I think you recommended two really great sources on AI, but I think that the key here is finding good entrusted sources on those other technologies that we said, we were wondering if they’re dead. So how do we know what’s really happening with blockchain if in the legal tech world, people just say, “Oh, blockchain.” What a joke that is, or what a joke that was. I’m glad that’s over. How do we find out what’s actually happening? Like I say, in the supply chain, in identity, in other places so we know what’s happening. And so, you have to go out and do that work. I’m going to recommend, and Tom, you and I are already starting to do this, is getting out of the LegalTech echo chamber. I mean, that’s part of the reason we’re doing our fresh voices on LegalTech series. I think you have to look at adjacent professions and what they’re doing. I think you have to be really good at reading critically and then finding good information, sources that are diverse and cover a wide range.

So I want to give one example of something that I’ve done for quite a while now. And so, I’m part of this weekly Zoom meeting of the innovation in large organizations institute. And so, it’s talking about innovation in large organizations, but we talk about technologies, AI, how they’re being implemented, what’s real, how they work, and that. And I’m energized by those conversations every week. Many people on the call say they are as well. And then when I go back and I read what’s written in Legal Tech and what AI and other innovation in the legal world, I feel like people are talking about a completely different world, much more limited. I hesitate to use the word fantasy but I sometimes think people are expecting things of technologies, especially AI, that they’re just not able to do.

(00:25:01)

And I think coming up with that, that way to get a realistic, hardheaded view of something that’s in this extreme hype cycle is very important. And for me, it’s like getting views from outside legal is a big thing that I feel you need to do.

Tom Mighell: So, I mean, what else do we do, Dennis? What else do people do? You know, it’s a problem that we sometimes can only access the types of content that we’re able to see. We sometimes don’t have a choice. We have to get what we’re given and sometimes we’re given a lot more than we expect on a particular subject. So it’s hard to find this other stuff. What should people be doing? I mean, what else should they need? What should they do? What do you recommend? Let’s give, give the audience a few ideas and it’ll take us out of this segment.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. Our good friend no longer with us. Wendy Werner used to say that law school gives you the superpower of being able to do research really well. So I think we — people in the legal profession do have that ability. They also have the ability to ask hard questions. And I think that’s where we’re at these days. And so, I just had jotted down a couple of things so you can say, like, I’m reading something and this person was an expert on something completely different less than a year ago, and now they’re an AI expert, and they’ve changed their expertise completely in less than a year.

Tom Mighell: There are several people that I’ve seen, especially on LinkedIn who move from the topics that we talked about before. They move from blockchain, to NFTs, to metaverse, to AI. And they’re turning very neatly on a dime and they have a new website and everything for all of those things that they plan to offer.

Dennis Kennedy: So you can say, I just need to ask the questions. Like, so is it legit? Does it make sense to have the kind of chronicle that path? Can I see the writing and the speaking they’ve done around that? Does it make sense? I think you need to ask what are people selling? What are the outcomes they have actually accomplished? If somebody tells you that they’ve done hundreds or thousands of experiments with AI and they’ve generated millions of words, that actually, to me carries some weight. If they say, we have this new product we’re selling and we have these amazing new features that are coming out sometime in 2024. I have some reservations. I also want to know like how they’re actually using AI for themselves, especially in what they say they’re selling you. And are they just saying the same things that people are talking about elsewhere that anybody can say, like hallucinations, risk. All these other things that you can find anybody, anywhere saying. And then I think the big thing for me is are they humble about what they know in AI and these other technologies? Or do they have the supreme confidence that ChatGPT is known for, whether they’re right or wrong.

And I think those are just the typical things that you would do with the legal background to assess whether somebody has the expertise or not. So that’s what I look at. And then, my thing, like I said, I’m pulling back on the pronouncements I make, and I’m saying like, I’m doing experiments. And if I have results that I think I want to publish, then I will publish those as results of experiments that people can look at and they could try and they could say I’m right or I’m wrong or whatever, but it’s just testing and testing, and then not making a lot of big assumptions about what the state of the technology is and whether AI, especially this sort of Generative AI in what I think is still an early stage is going to be the be all and end all.

Tom Mighell: I am sure that we will be back to revisit this topic because ChatGPT and AI is an engine that seems to have no plans to stop anytime soon. So we’ll be back to talk about this, but for now, we’re going to take a break for a message from our sponsors.

Jud 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 Jud Pierce and together with Alan Pierce, we host a different guest each month as we bring to life this diverse area of the law.

(00:30:01)

Join us on Workers Comp Matters on the Legal Talk Network.

Christopher T. Anderson: If you’re a lawyer running a solo or small firm, and you’re looking for other lawyers to talk through issues you’re currently facing in your practice, join the Unbillable Hours Community Roundtable, a free virtual event on the third Thursday of every month. Lawyers from all over the country come together and meet with me, lawyer and law firm management consultant, Christopher T. Anderson to discuss best practices on topics such as marketing, client acquisition, hiring and firing, and time management. The conversation is free to join but requires a simple reservation. The link to RSVP can be found on the Unbillable Hour page at legaltalknetwork.com. We’ll see you there.

Tom Mighell: And now let’s get back to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy. Tom mentioned to me this week that every podcast episode everywhere, except for ours, seems to be an interview with another AI vendor talking about their new products. I had to agree that it does feel that way. Tom, what got you thinking about this? What does it mean? And what should we all be doing about it, if anything?

Tom Mighell: Well, so, I fully did not expect that you would want to turn this into a B segment because it really was more of an observation, but let me see if I can expand on the observation a little bit. And what got me thinking about it was just the simple fact. I subscribed to a number of legal technology podcasts. I will say it feels like it may not be true and it may not be reality, but it feels like almost every podcast I listened to is somehow about artificial intelligence or some vendor coming in to talk about their new artificial, their new AI functionality. It may turn out that I’m only listening to those podcasts, that there might be other legal tech podcasts out there that are taking a well-rounded look at the world of legal technology. And I realized that we here at The Kennedy-Mighell Report are running the same risk by at least talking about this subject, but you know, to add on to the subject that we had in our A segment, I am concerned that there are other parts of the legal technology world that are falling by the wayside because we focus so much on artificial intelligence.

My frustration really is not only do I feel like the topic is being oversaturated in legal tech but I find that some of the podcasts I listened to don’t even get to a point where it’s useful to me. I want to learn what the tool does. I want to know what the AI functionality happens to be and I don’t usually get that information. I get a one sentence description, really what it is, oftentimes, a lot of descriptions from vendor to fender about what they do, they sound the same, they sound similar. And, you know, maybe there are just more sales talking points than what I would want to know as a consumer of the technology. So when I listened to it, I’m legitimately interested in knowing what types of artificial intelligence tools are available, but I really want to know, give me a use case, give me a how this would work and I don’t see that happen very often. I’m really kind of just using this as a rant. I meant it to really be a bolt on to our A segment, but I hope that a lot of our podcasting colleagues will either get guests on that talk about things in a more practical way than a salesy way, or that we start talking about other topics, so I feel like we have a good mix of things. Dennis, is my rant completely out of line?

Dennis Kennedy: No, but it does make me miss the old days when we used to do Tom’s rant as the B segment.

Tom Mighell: Let’s bring it back. I’m sure there’s enough to keep me going for a while.

Dennis Kennedy: This is one of my favorite things we ever tried. I mean, I see a lot of it and the trouble is, like, I heard somebody recently say they compared that what they were doing — their new AI stuff coming soon, they compared it to the PC and the iPhone in terms of how revolutionary they expected it to be. Well, as you said, Tom, I’d rather like to know like what it is, what it’s difference than what everybody else is doing, and how it will help me? So what is the job to be done? Like what is it going to do for me and how much is it being driven because you have venture capital money that you have to get, show a return on and that AI is a big thing, or how is it being useful, and are we just all kind of creating products in the same very small area and then promising what’s coming in the future, which will be utterly amazing.

(00:35:04)

So I would like to see more, not from the vendors, but people actually like working in this space and using it, because otherwise it does feel like we’re getting a lot of marketing hype in the form of podcasts content. But, you know, if you’re doing podcasts, these people are making themselves available to do guest speaking. I mean, we get emails on it, Tom, from people want to be interviewed on our podcast, even though we don’t really do interviews.

Tom Mighell: We don’t do vendor interviews.

Dennis Kennedy: But we still get the pitches on it, usually here’s a tip to people pitching podcasts. Like if you pitch a podcast for something they don’t do, it shows that you don’t really listen to the podcast and the podcasters or podcast hosts are not real receptive to that. But anyway, now it’s time for our parting shots. That one tip website observation. You can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: I have two parting shots and my first one is surprise about artificial intelligence. So, the past couple of weeks I’ve been incredibly busy working on some legal research, which I don’t get to do very often in my job, but I’ve been researching legal citations for retention schedule and it’s an international schedule. And there are many terms that are being used in these countries that I don’t know what they are. Their areas that I don’t understand. Their business functions that I don’t really totally know what they mean because they might be translated into different languages. And I’ve been finding and if you’ve been using google lately, Google has been incorporating either bard or whatever into the very first result of the search terms. And so, I found that as I was writing in, tell me what is A and then I would put the name of some type of business function and I put in India or in Malaysia or in the UK, and I could see it working at the top. It was working and it came back with 95 percent of the time a good solid answer that gave me what I needed to know. It answered my question. Sometimes it went farther and gave more information. I dare say that Google search impressed me and felt like it was better because it was really answering things in a great way. I don’t know, I don’t want to go quite that far, but I will say I was very impressed with this opening introduction to putting AI results in Google search results. I was impressed with that.

My second one, very quickly, is the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center and ABA Tech Show have opened up nominations for the James Cain Memorial Award, the annual award that we give to lawyers who provide innovative services using technology, using the internet for clients of moderate income. Those nominations went live today. They’ll be open until December the 15th. I’ll put a link in the show notes. If you are someone who is delivering innovative services, or if you know someone who is delivering innovative services to clients that you think would be worthy of the James Cain Award, we’d love to hear your nominations, so please click on the link and submit that nomination. Again, the deadline is December the 15th. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: So I have two. So the first one is for God’s sakes, spend the $20 a month for ChatGPT 4. I hear so many people, especially lawyers talk about the crappy results they get using ChatGPT and they’re using the free version, which is 3.5. The move from 3.5 to 4 was monumental. That’s what all the hype is about is what happened with ChatGPT 4. And if you’re unwilling to spend the $20 a month to get to GPT 4, I don’t think you’re serious about AI.

Tom Mighell: Let me say real quick, Dennis, that your tip should be, get on the waiting list to spend the $20 a month for ChatGPT 4 because just today they announced that they are shutting down registration until they can get a hold of the enormous volume of people trying to sign up for it. So they do have a waiting list. They’re trying to move through the waiting list soon but you may not be able to get on it immediately after hearing Dennis’s tip on this podcast.

Dennis Kennedy: You snooze, you lose. So I rarely use hardware for my parting shot, but I just got the coolest thing lately, and this is the Odistar, O-D-I-S-T-A-R Desktop Vacuum Cleaner. It’s this little USB device that is like a mini vacuum cleaner. So, I use pencils and erasers, and we all accumulate stuff on our actual, the physical desktop.

(00:40:01)

And we try to do our best about keeping the desktop clean, but it’s not so easy. But here’s this little device that fits in your hand and you just run across your desk and it sweeps up everything off of your desktop, off your keyboard, whatever you want to get rid of things and for 15 bucks, the best money I’ve ever spent other than the $20 a month for ChatGPT 4.

Tom Mighell: And so that wraps it up for this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the LegalTalk Network’s page for our show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes, on the legal talk network site or within your favorite podcast app. If you’d like to get in touch with us, remember, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn, or we still love getting voicemails. We were thrilled to get one a couple of weeks ago. We’d love to get another one soon that we can feature on our podcast. That number to call us is 720-441-6820. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy, and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. As always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. And we’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the Kennedy Mile Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, the lawyer’s guide to collaboration tools and technologies, smart ways to work together, from ABA Books or Amazon. And join us every other week for another edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report only on the Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

(00:41:55)