Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Carmin Ballou

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Web 2.0 innovation 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 357 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 shared our own technology resolutions for 2024. Have you made your own technology resolutions for 2024? You know, should. In this episode, we have another very special guest in our Fresh Voices series. In Fresh Voices. We want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. We have another fabulous guest, Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:

Well Dennis in this edition of the Kennedy Mighell report, we are thrilled to continue our new Fresh Voices on Legal Tech interview series with Carmen Ballou, who is Vice President of Data Analytics and Innovation at the Attorney’s Liability Assurance Society, better known as Alas, as well as a strong voice on legal technology. She’s recommended by some of our earlier Fresh Voices guests. We want our Fresh Voices series to not only introduce you to terrific leaders in legal tech, but also to provide you with their perspective on the things you ought to be paying attention to. 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. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Carmen Ballou to our Fresh Voices series. Carmen, welcome to the Kennedy Mighell Report.

Carmen Ballou:

Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell the audience a little more about yourself? Tell us about your role at Alas, what our audience should know about what you do.

Carmen Ballou:

Well, you already mentioned my title is VP Data Analytics and Innovation. Alas is a mutually held insurance company for law firms. Our primary focus is legal malpractice coverage, but we also offer employment and management insurance as well. We right now insure about 77,000 attorneys and over 220 law firms. As for me, I run the data analytics group there, but the role has grown into a little bit more of an innovation focus. I think when we started this data group, my assumption was maybe we’d do some internal white papers and we do some Power BI reports internally, but because we’re a mutual organization, we received the guidance to get out there and share what we were learning with our members. And so we started building products essentially to deliver it, and that’s essentially how the group became innovation as well.

Dennis Kennedy:

That’s so cool, Carmen. I wanted to start out by saying that practicing at two different last firms was one of the highlights of my career. I think a last membership is definitely a symbol of quality and the mutual approach and also your approach of providing information to firms to help them, I think is really great. So I often say on this podcast that I get a little frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology, both old and new technology and its benefits to those in the legal profession. Would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology, especially from your perspective and in the framework of both loss prevention and proactivity?

Carmen Ballou:

Sure. Well, Dennis, thanks. First I have to say, I’m glad to know your experience was positive at ELA firms. I’ve been there almost 10 years, I guess, and I still remain impressed by the support and the materials that we have available to them. So I’m glad they made their way to you. But yes, technology and lawyers, I admit it can be a challenge, but I don’t think it’s an insurmountable one. First of all, lawyers are smart to write. I mean, they’re trained to learn about new clients, new industries, new types of deals on every new matter that walks in the door. So they’re happy to learn, they just don’t love change. And that’s such an odd dichotomy, right? Academically they want to keep learning and growing On a tech side, they still want word perfect. I have wondered sometimes if we could get them to, could we convert everybody to mark down if we told them how similar it was to Word perfect?

But anyway, but more seriously it is a challenge. I think there’s some techniques we can leverage. I mean, we know that attorneys are visual learners, so I try when I’m presenting something, I hit with words and I hit with pictures. I try to provide screenshots of prototypes, whatever I can, but we know they struggle to turn off the details. You can tell ’em it’s a prototype, say don’t look at this. You can deliver a product with four perfect graphics and beautiful interaction and they’ll notice a missing comma. So we get more proofreaders involved initially, but once we have something to give them, they’re great partners because they’ll offer detail at every single thing that I have. They’ll catch all of those errors before it goes out the door. And then I sometimes say the people who struggle the most, I have them beta test because they’re going to catch the ui ux things that nobody else is. If it’s not intuitive for them, you may need to make some more changes.

Tom Mighell:

What is your view, what do you see? I mean I think you’ve sort of answered it, that they’re willing, they’re dedicated, they hate change, but they’re willing to look at it. But what is your current view on the current state of technology competence? And to the extent you are able to talk about this is last seen claims on technology competence. I don’t see that it gets publicized that often if there are claims being made somewhere in the country on this new duty. And I’m just curious to know, is it showing at all in the claims process?

Carmen Ballou:

So first of all, I’m not sure, I’m not entirely equipped to offer sweeping pronouncement about how technology competent lawyers are. I do think fundamentally they want to meet clients’ needs and they’re willing to do a good thorough job. Most lawyers aren’t really doing the technology for technology’s sake. Some are of course, but I have found that they are willing to adopt it when it works, when it’s intuitive and it meets a need. And I’ve sat in our conferences that we have, and I hear people actually still sometimes itching for a technology solution and sometimes it’s just not there. As for whether we’ve seen claims, I did not actually look that up beforehand. I don’t know the answer to that. I will say we did a conference about a year ago though, that we called the Innovation and Data Conference. And at that conference it was kind of two parts.

On the first day we talked about some of the risks with technology, and truthfully, we did this in February, so it was right after Chad GPT was hitting the scenes. So all the GCEs, everybody, general counsels, they were all worried about this, the loss prevention people. So we spent some time talking about the risks, but day two, we spent talking about how technology can actually help with some loss prevention, and we had some really creative presentations from people who are talking about some tools that they are using that ultimately will prevent risk and reduce the risk of legal malpractice.

Tom Mighell:

Yeah, I’m sorry, I threw that at you. I’m curious to know, because I never see stories about lawyers who are getting sued for technology competence or grievances filed or anything like that. So I thought I would at least try and see if the answer’s out there, but someone’s going to collect that at some point somewhere.

Dennis Kennedy:

Let me just follow up a little bit on tech competence and something that you said about the two-part approach you did at your conference. Because when I teach law students these days, I tell ’em that lawyers are really good at determining all the risks, both real and imaginary with any new technologies, but they’re not so good on the benefits. And so I really stress with my students that they need to think in terms of benefits as well, especially for their clients because their clients are seeing benefits and that’s why they’re using these technologies. So I’m intrigued by the ELAs approach, and I think some of the other malpractice insurance companies are looking at this as well is to say, can we move the technology and the competence and maybe even the comfort with technology farther ahead and more quickly through insurance requirements rather than sort of rules and bar requirements. And in the case of aas, what might that look like? Is it incentives, is it education? What are the approaches that you see out there

Carmen Ballou:

To start with? The last is a little bit different than some other malpractice carriers or perhaps even your homeowners or your car insurance. We’re not going to give you a little device that tracks you around. It sees exactly how you’re doing. So we’re not giving any discounts for implementing certain technologies, but we do work very closely with law firms to discuss how technology can help with risk management. I read the memos that my loss prevention colleagues bring back from their visits with firms, and they’re often suggesting ways to enhance and improve the various technology, the various systems that are sitting in their systems. What can they do to improve if something’s just recommended, should it be required? And so we do make recommendations very much to help improve the technology and then reduce risk management. I do think a lot of systems, certainly it’s not just technology for technology’s sake, and it’s not even just to reduce the malpractice risk. If you think about a missed deadline, sure it’s a malpractice risk, but it’s also fundamentally bad for clients. It’s bad client service. And so people who have really good systems that have tracking it in multiple places will serve their clients better. And as a benefit to me, their malpractice risk goes down as well. And I will say right, as a tech and an innovation person, and right, sometimes that seems counter to insurance, especially insurance for law firms, I’m decently impressed about how we’re out there really suggesting technology solutions for various malpractice risks.

Tom Mighell:

So we’re always curious on the podcast, those who listen to us know that we spend probably more time than we should talking about the role of collaboration tools. And I would imagine that there are collaboration tools out there that can help improve the systems that lawyers use to help them with their potential malpractice issues. But I kind of want to ask your personal favorites. What are your favorite ways to collaborate, whether it’s with your internal team, whether you’re collaborating with external law firms or anybody else that you happen to work with?

Carmen Ballou:

Well, I would say maybe some people that I work with would be surprised at this answer. I’m going to get first I will say I do my best to listen and I know sometimes in meetings I talk too much, but overall, I try to listen, right? I go to our conferences, I listen to the podcast, I try to hear what the problems are. But I think in terms of thinking about how I collaborate with other people at a less, I mean internally, we just hold regular meetings truthfully with almost every department to get feedback. We actually host to the data part of my title, a monthly data steward meeting where the people who work with data get a chance to talk through problems. And sometimes, I mean certainly we have a Microsoft Teams channel and there’s feedback that goes in there, but sometimes you don’t want to put something in writing.

So sometimes collaboration is easier in person. It’s a set time to talk through issues and propose solutions. I’ll end one more. I think sometimes collaboration needs structure, and I heard a technique from Sean Monahan at Harbor at ILTA this summer that we’ve been using a bit. He suggested actually doing data governance tabletop exercises, kind of like cybersecurity tabletops to talk through how data changes throughout Affirm. And so we’ve been doing that. We went, what happens when a firm changes a name? And it’s very interesting then to see what’s a manual process, what’s an automated process, and then think, how can I help with that?

Tom Mighell:

We do a lot of that work in terms of privacy and personal information and how personal information goes through systems in a company. So yeah, that must be incredibly helpful to kind of understand that it will help you build better products down the road. Alright, we have many more questions for Carmen Ballou from Alas, but before we get to them, let’s take a break for a quick word from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Carmen Ballou at Alas, we found in the Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience does as well. And also I am finding that with the lawsuits I teach, they’re very interested in different careers that people have taken that are non-traditional and it really opens up their thinking about law, both its practice and everything that’s going on in the legal profession and legal industry these days. Would you talk about your own career path and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you into your current role and your focus on data and innovation?

Carmen Ballou:

I am glad you asked that question because I like to tell those stories too, especially in sort of a new career. How do you get there? So I would say I was, well I started as a math major, then flipped to history, so maybe not surprising, I became a lawyer eventually, but I worked in between there at a popcorn factory and architecture firm before going to law school. Then I practiced about seven years at a large law firm in Litigation and investigation. And I didn’t always love it. And it was right before legal ops project management eDiscovery became so huge. And so at that point there wasn’t really a home for me and large law, but they had me wondering if there were better ways to think about fraud and compliance issues. But before I got to address those, I actually took a little one more detour, which I spent about four years at home with my kids.

I enjoyed it and it gave me time to think about what it was I did like best. I did know that what I did not like, I did not formal legal writing, but I did numbers technology and problem solving. And so I’m grateful for those who took a chance on me getting back into the workforce. After that time I landed aas and found a way to put it all together. I spent most of the pandemic lockdown finishing a master’s in data science from the University of Chicago. I will say that answers the question, theoretical math is not my forte. My forte is problem solving the technology and now I get to spend my time thinking about how data and technology can help solve problems. So there’s a growing number of us legal data science people and it’s been fun to be one of the first.

Tom Mighell:

That is awesome. I will say I have always believed that law is for the people who don’t like math and I have not taken math since high school and I probably should regret it, but I do not. Alright, so it’s time for our obligatory artificial intelligence questions. It seems to be all the thing and to talk about. So we want to kind of approach it in two different ways. I’ll do the first, Dennis will do the second. The first one really is your opinion at, we’ve now had a year basically for chat GPT to kind of absorb into our consciousness and seeing lots of applications of that. After all of this and what you’ve seen, what role are you seeing artificial intelligence, maybe chat GPT, generative AI actually playing in legal technology? Where do you feel like the sweet spot is or some of the more important applications are?

Carmen Ballou:

I mean to start with, right? There’s clearly been a lot of hype, some has been overblown, but with the launch of GPT, we did have interest from people in data science and natural language processing who never were interested before. And so I think that’s great. I do think on a practical level, what I have seen be most effective is are actually tools that are using RAG or retrieval augmented generation. I think those have been the most successful. They really provide a way to enhance the foundation models with a source of truth data and then also provide search results that can link back to that source data. And I think for lawyers that process is really the safest way, one of the best ways for us to be using the tool. It does all remind me that there’s recently I read the book Legal Singularity with an innovation book club and while I don’t buy into the whole concept of a ling singularity and a data science is going to solve everything, it did remind me that a lot of data science is about information retrieval and sometimes it’s large data sets, sometimes it’s smaller. But I think that RAG is proving to be one of the most promising out of gen AI for us.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, definitely hearing a lot about the RAG approach and I think that sort of my favorite example to use is to say if we ask Chad GPT about a place to eat dinner, it’s going to give us a certain set of answers. But if we also tie it to a Yelp database or something like that, then theoretically it’s going to give us much better answers because there is this sort of better content system of truth notion. And to me that’s a really interesting approach that feels like it’s developed in the last year or so as people have kind of dealt with the benefits and the issues around generative ai. So it’s an interesting place to go, although the source of truth, like with Yelp reviews and stuff has its own set of underlying issues and you’re still not likely to get, the example I saw was like what’s the best diner to go to in Toronto?

And even if you tie the Yelp reviews to that, you’re still getting, you’re probably not getting to the best diner for you in Toronto. So AI is going to be already is, but it’s going to be I think an even bigger challenge and opportunity for the legal profession. So I talked to students and lawyers about how to get prepared for that and so how might you suggest that the profession and people in it get ready for this new era of ai? And I think that’s partly understanding the level of hype out there. And then what examples of potential AI uses seem the most exciting to you at the moment

Carmen Ballou:

In terms of getting ready? I left ELTA last fall and the report I came back and gave to Alas was that information governance was hot again. I think for a few years, enterprise search and the curation being done by knowledge management groups was sort of picking up the slack from information governance. But I think cool pilot looks pretty cool and you see though, when you see a demo of it, you kind of can watch if you’re in a room with other people, you’ll watch the faces around you and you will see occasionally a little bit of a sense of horror when they realize that that thing is being trained on all the documents that it has access to. And we know that the last thing you really want happening is for copilot when you turn it on to surface the performance reviews for everybody in the company. And so my advice is really that I think information governance at data governance, getting that in place, getting that button down, it’s absolutely what we should all be working on to prepare for additional jet AI tools coming to us.

Dennis Kennedy:

And then are there some examples, I guess specific examples that seem really exciting to you where either you’ve seen something or you have your own experiments you’d like to try?

Carmen Ballou:

I would say I do still think copilot looks very cool and I have actually not used it yet, so I know it’s come, it just came there. But we do know that lawyers like to work at Word, they like to work at Outlook and I think it’s pretty cool. I’m anxious to get it turned on for myself in a work setting and to be able to use it. I think it has challenges in the legal sense connected to the DMS where a lot of source of truth is, but that remains what I’m pretty excited about.

Tom Mighell:

I am, and we’ll talk about this in my parting shot later, but I just got copilot turned on at my company to test it out and I am now terrified about what you said about whether we’re done. I’m going to go do searches for financial information and performance reviews and everything to see what actually can be seen out there. But I will tell you, I just typed in what is one of my consultants, what is so-and-so working on, and it gave me a five point bullet point to say these are the types of things that this person’s been working on over the past week. And I’m like, I don’t need a one-on-one anymore. Basically copilot can tell me everything. But anyway, we just bought one license, we need to test it out, we need to see what’s possible, we need to see what the issues are, we need to be very responsible with it. But along those lines, so I’m learning copilot, we’ll be learning it slowly. How do you learn about new technologies? How do you stay current with what’s happening in technology, whether that’s legal related or otherwise?

Carmen Ballou:

I’m still sad. I’m sad kind of about the death of Twitter, I guess it’s not totally, well, Twitter’s dead exit there. It was so good for learning about data science outside of legal. So for the most part, I’m going to LinkedIn now as a substitute, but my LinkedIn is very full of legal people. I’m missing maybe a little bit of that kind of core data science that I was getting from Twitter. Also on the legal side, it will give a shout out that legal tech weekly journalist call that’s two o’clock central, three eastern. I find it really good to sort of give the summary of everything that’s going on and it’s kind of a nice way to wrap up the week actually A little sense of humor, a little bit of future thinking. But there’s so much information. I mean none of us can even watch all the legal tech podcasts or videos. There’s just not time even for that. One of the techniques that I do use a little bit is on a data science side. Actually as our data group, our platform for our data engineering and our data science is Databricks. So I’ve started just tuning out what I’m hearing from or Amazon’s gen ai. I’m like, what is Databricks doing right now? How can we incorporate it? The mechanism I have for implementing these techniques quickly and by just staying focused there, it kind of helps me stay focused on what I can actually deliver.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we still have more questions, more discussion with Carmen Ballou from Alas, but before that we need to take a quick break for additional word from our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy:

And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Dennis

Tom Mighell:

Kennedy. And I’m Tom Mighell. And we are joined by our special guest, Carmen Ballou from Alas. We’ve got time for just a few more questions. Carmen, the next question is what we call our best advice question. We like to ask, what is the best advice either that you have been given by a mentor or by someone in the past or the best advice that you have for others, maybe listeners or both?

Carmen Ballou:

Well, the advice is sort of being combined from a couple people. I hear in Nicole Braddock Ethereum principle and I hear henchman, they really talk about pushing the notion that technology should be so intuitive that you don’t have to train. And I’m not sure I’m willing to go quite that far. But that said, it’s really, it is something I’ve started to think about a lot more as we develop our own products. I started to think about, okay, if I have to add an FAQ on that, if I have to add additional training, is there a way that I can make it more intuitive? Now I can do that with my own products. Sometimes if I’m implementing somebody else’s, I’m stuck with what they’ve given me. But that’s the piece that I keep hearing over and over in my head. As we develop products,

Tom Mighell:

I will say I work in information governance and part of what we tell to companies is information governance is not anybody’s day job except for the people who are the department that’s responsible for to the people. And just an individual should have it as easy as possible. And even though it might not be just like you said, so it’s completely intuitive, it needs to be designed that way because they just don’t have time during the day to learn about all that stuff. They need to find it easier ways to do it.

Dennis Kennedy:

Making things intuitive is really interesting to me because I think that, and this is one of things that I think AI emphasizes is that this notion of the average intuition is a really difficult thing. I think we’re all sort of personal and so I think more in terms of the technology becoming more and more invisible so that we can use it and then when we need to learn more about it, it’s easy to surface that. So it’s a little bit different approach. I sometimes think like, oh yeah, this program was, was really intuitive once somebody explained it to me. But you look at if I just come to a fresh, it’s not the case. So let me wrap up here with the question about new career paths. So one of the things I’m doing at Michigan State’s Center for Law Technology and innovation is a big focus on new legal careers. So I wanted to ask you about how you would encourage today’s lawsuits and new lawyers to find career paths and legal tech and other non-traditional careers like you’ve had that you find really fulfilling. And then the follow up question we always like to ask is, who are the fresh voices in legal tech that you would like to single out and maybe see us add as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Carmen Ballou:

Well, to the question of I think how do you find your career path? I think first of all, I’m continuing to be fascinated by how tech and legal skills are often cross-functional. I think a good business analyst in a legal sense, it’s a lot of the same skills that it’s the same funnel method that you learned in terms of taking a deposition. I think a good developer, it’s somebody who’s thought about all those different ways somebody could break a product, can make for a good transactional lawyer who knows how to write Bulletproof documents. And so I think throughout my career, I think I’ve spent a lot of time on websites in this case, whether it’s Clock, whether it’s LinkedIn, whether it’s pages, just reading about what those jobs are, but then think about how those skills that you have in one area can really be pitched in the other. As for voices, I think you should talk to, I’m going to say I couldn’t quite pick one, but I think you should talk to the innovation team and the analytics people at Troutman. They admittedly are in a last firm, but they’re kind of doing everything. They’ve got APIs, they’ve got data science, and I know they work closely actually with their risk people to really make sure that they’re doing it in a great way. But I really love the innovation that is coming out of that law firm.

Dennis Kennedy:

Cool. Yeah, I’ve heard good things as well. Alright,

Tom Mighell:

We want to thank Carmen Ballou at Alas for being a guest on the show. Carmen, can you tell our listeners where they can either look out for you online to see, learn more about you or get in touch with you if they want to?

Carmen Ballou:

Well, if you are in a last member firm, track me down at one of our events. I’ll be there. Happy to listen to you, get any advice that you have for me or any thoughts you have on things we should be doing for you on LinkedIn. I am the only Carmen with an I below on there, so there’s certainly a lot of spam in the direct messages, but I do my best to keep an eye out for real people and I’m happy to connect there.

Dennis Kennedy:

Great. Thank you so much, Carmen. You were a fantastic guests. Great information and advice for our listeners. I actually want to find some ways to get you to speak to some of my law students, both at Michigan State and to my class at Michigan where I teach as well. Now it’s time for parting shots. That one tip website or observation you can use. The second this podcast ends, Carmen, we’ll ask you to take it away first.

Carmen Ballou:

Well, as we record this, it’s actually the day after the skills showcase, which is an annual online gathering showcasing knowledge and innovation professionals work at law firms and in legal tech. It was a Zoom event yesterday, but the recordings are already available on YouTube and on their website at Skills Law.

Tom Mighell:

Very cool and timely. Alright, we talked about copilot earlier. I’m going to bring the news to the extent that you have been hiding under a rock this week and didn’t notice it. Copilot is now widely available. Previously it was only available to larger organizations. Now it’s available to anyone with a Microsoft 365 business account at $30 a month per user. Still pricey, but they have offered a somewhat cheaper version of Copilot Pro to individuals who have both personal and home licenses of Microsoft 365. That’s only $20 a month, so a little bit better, but it’s out there and available and start testing it out if you’re interested in it. Dennis,

Dennis Kennedy:

If you thought about it some years ago and said for $20 or $30 a month, there’d be this totally game changing AI that you could have whenever you wanted to ask whatever questions you wanted. It would seem like the biggest spark in ever. And now we’re trying to say it’s kind of a lot.

Tom Mighell:

It’s when you multiply it by all of your employees at your company that it starts to be, you start thinking about it is I think that for me individually, I would pay that amount, but when I multiply it by all my employees, that’s when I go, Ooh, that’s a big outlay. But you’re right, game changing.

Dennis Kennedy:

My math is sort of like there’s one employee at my company, so it seems really reasonable. So anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot as people know about notes and note taking. And so I was appreciating the other day, snat, which is this screen capture program. It does tons of other things as well, including a little bit of OCR of the images that you capture. And so the current version is 2024, not surprisingly. And what I like about this is that I can find something and instead of taking notes or trying to sketch something out or whatever, I just capture the image and I can capture that image, crop it, put it on the PowerPoint slide, I can throw it into Apple Notes so I can use it later. And so it makes the idea and the practice of taking notes a lot easier and it costs something. I forget what it costs, might cost a hundred dollars, I forget. But it’s just totally worth it to me as a way to do that, especially if you want to do PowerPoint slides. It’s just a great way to do that. But it’s the note taking that’s really captured my attention recently.

Tom Mighell:

Snat is an amazing tool. And so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mall report. Thanks for joining us, the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Network site. You can find all of our previous shows along with transcripts also on the Legal Talk Network website. If you’d like to get in touch with us, remember, you can reach out to us on LinkedIn. We still love for people to leave us voicemails to talk about questions that you may have during our B segment. That number is 7 2 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. 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. We want to remind you to share the podcast with a friend or too that really helps us out. And 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.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Kennedy Mighell 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.

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