Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Quinten Steenhuis

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 359 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 strategies for dealing with the shiny new tech object syndrome, something that seems to be affecting many of us lately. Highly recommend the X episode, especially if you’re having trouble resisting dipping into your wallet for a new tech purchase. In this episode, we are on a roll and 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 fresh voices on Legal Tech interview series with Quinten Steenhuis, who is practitioner in residence at Suffolk University Law School founder at Lema Legal and a strong voice in legal technology, especially access to justice technology. We want our Fresh Voices series to not only introduce you to terrific leaders in the legal tech space, we also want to provide you with their perspective on the things that you should be paying attention to. And as usual, we’re going to finish up with our parting shots, that one tip, observation or website that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Quinten Steenhuis to our fresh voice of series. Quentin, welcome to the Kennedy Mall report.

Quinten Steenhuis:

Thank you Tom. Thanks, Dennis.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit more about you, your role at Suffolk, what your audience, what our audience should know about what you do?

Quinten Steenhuis:

So at the Legal Innovation and Technology Lab at Suffolk University Law School with my great friend David LaRusso, and we try to find new and innovative ways to help poor people. I think that’s the core of our mission and we try to do it at scale. That’s the way that we use technology as a lever to take really difficult problems and make them a little bit easier to access like the access to justice gap. And we do that through whatever technology levers we have. Sometimes they involve improving processes. They’re not so heavy on the technology, but everything in that space is kind of within the realm of what we might work on.

Dennis Kennedy:

So Quentin, I’m a fan of your approach to teaching legal tech and your focus to access to justice and the way you sort of think comprehensively about it. And you sort of mentioned that sometimes it’s something simple that gives you the ability to initiate some great changes and then this notion is we can scale some of these things. It really helps in the access to justice space. So sometimes I get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology and innovation to those in the legal profession and the benefits of technology. Would you talk about your approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology?

Quinten Steenhuis:

I would say a lot of what we need to do is just showing, not telling, right? So at our lab we build a lot of things. We like to think that we’re focused on building the infrastructure to help close the access to justice gap. So that means we’re building what we call guided interviews, tools like TurboTax, so that I kind of hate to say that name, that help walk people through legal problems. We do that all the time. Or also helping build the tools that make it easier for other folks around the country to do the same kind of work. We’re helping people with electronic filing. That’s a really big piece of our last year and our next three years of effort is going to be making it simple and easy for legal aid programs and courts to find a really great user experience to self-represented people when they need to e-file all the way from a guided interview, the one click e-filing option to get that documented to the court.

So when you have things like that that can kind of speak for themselves and can show we actually can do something with this, we’re not just talking about the theory or the promise. We’re building real things right away that helps so much. I’ll also say kind of a little bit lucky to your question Dennis, that we’re not necessarily having to convince people. Most of the time we’re, we’re a small lab, we can help so many people in a year, so we get to be a little choosy. We wait for people to come to us who already have drunk the Kool-Aid as it were and already know that there’s a way that we can help them.

Tom Mighell:

So then that raises this question. We usually like to ask this question to everyone because Dennis and I sometimes feel on the podcast that we have become the two grumpy old men on the porch saying, get off my lawn. If you don’t know about legal technology, and we’re very skeptical about the level of technology competence out there, so we’re always interested to hear what your experience is. But I feel like if you’re waiting for people to come to you, you may not be hearing, you might have a skewed view of how that actually looks. I mean, what’s your experience of the level of technology competence among lawyers these days?

Quinten Steenhuis:

I think you are right Tom, that I probably have a little bit of a skewed view, but what I would say is I run into so many lawyers both at the Lit lab and in my private consulting work that are just hungry for a different way to do things. They’re sometimes they’re lawyers who are burnt out on practicing law the way that it’s been done for 150 years. They want to try something different, something that they can see. They’re not, as I like to say, cobbling shoes by hand. They’re able to help people in a more concrete way where they’re not tracking every hour. They’re people who are excited for something new, a different way to approach things. But I do think that this pool is widening. We had that great awakening during Covid, the problems that I’d been working on, opening up doors in the courts and government that didn’t seem like they might ever open, but suddenly covid hit in 2020 and people realized, oh, we have to do something about this whole technology thing.

The only way we can get people into the court and be able to help them. That was one great awakening moment. And then bam, right on the heels of that, we had the new promise of chat GPT, and people realized, wait a second, it doesn’t matter if we want to change, people are going to find ways to get the legal help that they want without involving us unless we figure out how to harness it and make it really do good and help people in a safe and careful way, it’s going to be out of our hands. So those two things brought a lot of people new interest in technology and I do think that’s really promising and we have to just keep that energy and focus to, we saw a little bit of a dwindling off after the pandemic where people were like, well, maybe we can go back to what we used to always do, and I’m curious if we’ll see that with AI because these things are hype cycles, but we’re getting more people on board.

Dennis Kennedy:

I was thinking lately that in 2020 I sort of point to the year where I really had to stop explaining to lawyers what cloud competing was. They actually saw what it was, but there is a little bit of retrenchment. I mean, when I talk to my students, definitely their eyes roll when they describe the technology that they’re finding so far in law firms. But what I find is that there’s a mindset among lawyers and they often say that they went to law school because they didn’t want to do math or technology. They think that’s a joke. I don’t think it’s funny anymore, but would you tell us some of the ways you were trying to change the way lawyers look at the world and use technology? You started to touch on some of those, but maybe you could go a little bit deeper.

Quinten Steenhuis:

Yeah, I think like you Dennis, I get a little tired of people who say that they went to law school to avoid math because the truth is the kind of things that we’re doing with technology are not so different from what lawyers do when they’re practicing law. We’re breaking problems into smaller pieces. We’re trying to analyze a problem from all angles. My law students, it’s starting to creep up a little, but I get a few more students who already have a bit of a tech background, but they come into my seminar. There’s no previous requirement to take any technology before, and I see a lot of them become inspired. Not all of them are decided something they’re going to do forever, but one of my students is, a really good example, came in being really upset that she had to take my class because it’s a requirement for this Accelerator to Practice program, which is a really cool innovative program that Suffolk has where you get trained to own a small firm when you’re finished with law school and she had to take my class legal tech for small firms.

She’s like, I don’t want to use computers, but it turned out she loved it. So she spent last year in our lit lab, which was a two credit lab class that she could just take for fun after she took the seminar. She’s like, oh, I want more of this. And this year she’s one of our legal innovation and technology fellows, which means she’s embedded halftime in a traditional clinic and halftime in our lit lab doing innovation work for her clinic. So she totally fell in love with it. So we just got to let people be exposed to something new and to really understand the power of it. If you think of computers as just this thing that’s happening over there that can help make things a little typing, word processing, whatever the things are that people can kind of imagine computers do when they’re not exposed to thinking about them as a problem solving instrument, it’s easy to not be that excited about it.

But I try to connect my students’ work to the real world. We spend the beginning of the year talking about the access to justice gap and what that means and why these tools are critical to help people. Then we talk about plain language and how we can improve communication. It’s fundamental. We can’t build tools that help people if people can’t understand the tools that we build, and those are really solid hooks. I am always amazed at how much the students fall in love with thinking about plain language. It’s like, oh yeah, I’ve been trying to adopt this kind of funny stilted way of talking that I imitate other lawyers around me doing, and it’s kind of freeing to know, wait, nope, I shouldn’t do that. I should try something a little bit better. That’s more fun and conversational and necessarily informal, but accessible to people, and that seems to really capture their interest and attention. And then we just move through the world of what are really practical hands-on ways that you can do things. Things that they do get their hands dirty with coding. Some of them really love that, some of them don’t. But there are other accessible entry points to allow them to build something useful by the end of the semester.

Tom Mighell:

So I want to switch a little bit from what you’re seeing to maybe what you yourself are doing and ask about collaboration. Those who listen to this show know that we love collaboration tools. You yourself mentioned the groundswell that happened with Covid and I would make the argument that collaboration was part of that groundswell because if you can’t be together somewhere, you are having to collaborate elsewhere or collaborate across using technology to do it. We’re always interested in learning about what people are using as their collaboration tools. What are the ways that you are using with students, with colleagues, with the people that come to you to ask for solutions to things? What are the most effective methods of collaboration you’re finding

Quinten Steenhuis:

During the pandemic? We really had that challenge that you’re describing and one of our core projects, I started at Suffolk in March of 2020, actually, excellent timing. I was supposed to come on campus. I was like, your office is already for you, but sorry, actually don’t come in person. So I didn’t actually see my office for a whole year, but we knew we wanted to try to use the tools I’d been working with in legal aid, the kind of document automation tools, and that would be a way that we could help get more access to the courts. So our first project was an open call to action like, Hey, we want to solve this problem. We think we know the right tool to do it, but we need lots of hands to do it quickly. We ended up collaborating with folks all around the world who were suddenly looking for purpose and meaning and maybe had newly freed up time from their regular day jobs during the pandemic.

And we brought together 200 volunteers. They were from all over the world. We had folks in 11 time zones and five different continents, and we tried to figure out ways to do just what you said, to figure out how to collaborate together and work together to build this project. And I don’t think that the tools, I’m going to say are going to be really unique to you. We wanted to figure out things that people could grab on right away. So we used Slack, we used Zoom, we used Trello. We had some really great folks like John Grant over in Oregon who helped us build some really nice workflows on our Trello board to help track our work and make it easy for us to do project management around them. And we also, for a while, we had these daily standups and we were recording them every day and posting them on YouTube.

So it was a very transparent process for people to jump in and see, is there a way I can help with this? They could go back and some people did go back and watch all of our YouTube recordings. I dunno who those folks were that didn’t end up collaborating with us. But I hear people say, oh yeah, I watched that on YouTube. And it’s like, oh, that might not have been the most exciting thing to watch our standup, but they did. We’ve kind of moved a bit away from Slack because our university supports teams and it’s a free tool we can use without the limits of the free version of Slack. I still think Slack’s a lot better, but Teams is catching up a bit. I would say

Tom Mighell:

We can have that argument at a later date. Yeah, that’s all I’ll say on that because when you make, those are fighting words for me. So I will ignore that and I will move forward.

Quinten Steenhuis:

I will say Teams is catching

Tom Mighell:

Up. We will talk about it later. So we have a lot more questions for Quentin Stain House, but first we need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy:

We are back with Quentin Statehouse at Suffolk Law School. We founded in the Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and so does our audience. Would you talk about your career path and what kinds of things you’ve done to get into your current role and your focus on legal education, technology and access to justice?

Quinten Steenhuis:

Absolutely. Yeah. I like to say that there are dozens of folks like me, not hundreds or thousands. I started in, my undergrad was a more traditional computer science path. I was in the philosophy department at Carnegie Mellon, but I took mostly computer science classes and I ended up graduating with a logic and computation degree, but I was really always interested in law. I did Bach trial all through middle and high school and college as well. I was really passionate about social justice issues. I started a number of different activist groups as a college student. So it seemed to me when I was looking around, this was in 2004 that I finished up. I wasn’t really going to find a path to building what I wanted to solve really critical social justice problems by staying in tech. So I went to law school. That was kind of my other passion and I was doing a little bit of tech consulting and I realized really quickly I couldn’t do that and be a first year law student.

So I kind of just forgot about that whole part of my brain for the next three years for sure. And I wasn’t until I was in law school that I even realized there was this thing called legal aid. I didn’t really know anything about it before I went to law school and joined the clinic at Cornell, but I did discover that I really liked it. I liked that way of helping people. It felt very comfortable to help people when they needed help the most. And I started at Greater Boston Legal Services right out of law school, really good timing, just like I had that great timing to start at Suffolk in March of 2020. I started at Greater Boston Legal Services in September of 2008. Right before the financial crisis, we were a union program with a first in last out policy. I get that, right.

So as a new person, when we were suddenly facing this cliff of our finances, because all of the high interest rates that were powering legal aid at that time through state I OTA programs disappeared. I was at risk of layoff pretty early on to my time starting at GBLS. So I decided when our IT person left, I was like, you know what, I can do that too. And about a year into being a new legal aid attorney, I ended up having two different hats to wear. So I was both doing it at GBLS, not on my own. We were big enough program that we had a small IT department, but that was part of my job. And I was also a housing lawyer helping early on, as you could imagine in 2008, I was helping people who were facing foreclosure and tenants whose homes had been foreclosed on and former homeowners who had been foreclosed on during the foreclosure crisis.

So it was a really interesting mix. I will say that GBLS was great to give me chances for professional development with those two different roles. So I kind of got to pick and choose the most interesting and high professional development kind of cases as a tenant’s lawyer, which was exciting. So I got to prep a lot of cases for trial, not many cases go to trial in the landlord tenant space. Spent a lot of time in court. And then I had this other role of being our systems administrator, which I kind of just pretended, okay, I’m not a lawyer, I’m just a systems administrator. And when I was in court, I was like, I’m just the lawyer. I don’t do anything else. No one really wanted to think about the mix of those two things. It wasn’t something that was going to help give me credibility in either of those roles to know that I had two jobs.

It took about 10 years of seeing the different patterns and understanding that there were ways and seeing other examples of people solving the problems our clients were facing in a more scalable way with technology. When I started to see what other people were doing, I realized there isn’t a reason I have to keep these two roles separate, that there’s a way to combine my skills in tech and my skills as a lawyer. And I just kind of followed in the example of other greats who came before me, mark Lordon for example, who built this great system that we used at Greater Boston Legal Services. I got to see what he had built and it was like, I think we could build something like that, but we can make it easy enough that people can use it on their own rather than just an attorney walking through the system.

So I did, and again, this came down to the freedom that I had at GBLS that my supervisors were like, yeah, you can spend some time working on that if you want. No one’s making you do it, but if you want to go for it. And I had the time and freedom to do it. So for a year, I just spent time doing my other job, but also building this system for tenants to use called Massachusetts Defense for eviction. It’s now used about 2000 times a year by tenants to help stop their eviction cases in Massachusetts. It’s ongoing six years later, and yeah, it’s used hundreds of times a month, about a couple thousand times a year. And that led me to eventually saying, you know what I want to focus on. I started doing a little bit of consulting around that work while I was still at GBLS and then I was recruited to join Suffolk with this amazing timing of really having a real need for that exact skillset at the beginning of the pandemic.

Tom Mighell:

It’s interesting, your time at GBLS is, I won’t say almost exactly like my law firm experience, but when I was a partner at a law firm and really just miserable with being a lawyer in general and I saw the issues or the lack of support that our lawyers were receiving around technology, I made a deal with them to be a lawyer and to support the lawyers with technology. I trained them. I did trial technology, designed the website, all sorts of things until they finally said, we need you to bill hours instead. And then that was kind of the end. It makes me wish if that had been me 10 years later, which is when you were going through all that, I think my career path would’ve been very different. So it’s time now for the obligatory questions about artificial intelligence. We can’t ever avoid them.

We have to ask them, but I’m going to frame them tightly because you’ve already started talking a little bit about it. It seems to me with all the hype around chat, GPT, all the hype that’s going on there is legitimately value to the technology that is out there. And it seems to me that as you’ve mentioned previously, that the access to justice space feels like an area for which chat GPT is well-suited. Can you maybe talk about that in a little bit more detail about what you see the role is playing in access to justice?

Quinten Steenhuis:

Absolutely. Yeah, it’s interesting to think about this AI hype cycle and exactly what it means to be a hype cycle. So Corey Dro had this really great article about it. I don’t know if he saw his commentary called What Kind of Bubble Is ai? Definitely recommend that piece. It was great. And it talks about how this could be like the cryptocurrency bubble where a lot of people just lost their pants and nothing useful was produced as far as I can tell, sorry, for anybody who really isn’t a crypto or it could be more like the.com bubble, which where it was maybe 10 years early for the real value to be proved, but clearly there was value and the businesses that were left standing are now the biggest players in the stock market. We know that there was value in the internet, and I think it’s really clear really early on that AI has a lot of real promise.

They’re grifters, they’re people who are trying to push us and to try things that may never work, but I can look at it and use it every day to help me solve some challenge that I have in my work. I use it as a teacher. I use it to help me think about interesting challenges to assign my students to help me think through my lesson plans. I actually have my students directly use chat GPT to generate practice sets for them to go work through on their own. We spend time helping them learn how to use it to prompt for other kinds of legal tasks, but that’s just a really concrete pedagogical thing that we can do with it. We use it to help students give deeper reflections. It used to be I’d have 20 students in a seminar and I would choose, each student should get three or four more solid touch points on their reflection, which are due every week.

They’re turning in a reflection on their exercises. And that was, I felt really good about being able to do that, spend a little bit more time with each student’s answers and go deeper that way. But with this semester using the GT four API, the student writes their reflection. I have GPT-4 look at their reflection and help ask some follow-up questions. So every student, every time, every week is getting a little bit deeper in the reflections, and I really have seen the quality of the reflections go up with that change. That’s just a little bit for teaching and that’s obviously one tiny piece. Like I said at the lab, we build things. So these tools were built by computer programmers. They’re really good at helping people write code faster and better. I would say for me, it seems that the speed up for something new that I haven’t done before is probably where it’s the highest value and it’s at least 40%.

There are some problems where I kind of just don’t know where to start and I would just be stuck on them for months before chat GPT and now I’ll open up chat GPT and say, here’s generally the problem I’m trying to solve. I want to do it in the Python programming language. What should I do? And it’ll produce some code I can start playing with right away. So I’m really not stuck on that blank page problem with coding in a way that I might’ve been a year or two ago because I have such limited time. I’m balancing many different things when I want to code a tool like that, that’s just kind of an expert for helping me know where to start is amazing. GitHub copilot and chat GPT can also help you fill in lots of boilerplate code. And if you are an expert, that’s kind of where we are with these tools.

I think for the most part, you have to be an expert and also not know everything about the thing you want to do. It’s kind of the sweet spot for where chat GPT is right now. I am a programmer who really knows coding really well, but there’s no way to know every library, every piece of software, the best way to approach every problem so I can ask it to generate something for me and I can spot the problems and where it’s gone wrong. So it saves me a lot of time if I was a complete beginner and I’ve seen my students try using it for this tool, this purpose, it’s harder to be able to evaluate and even know when it’s wrong or whether it’s offering is useful or how to ask a follow-up question to get back something that is more helpful. So it’s more challenging for that area.

I think this is true for how people who are our clients as lawyers are also using it right now, right? Untrained person, a self-represented or unrepresented person might open up chat GPT and try to get some advice on a legal problem directly and what they’re going to get back without knowing the right way to frame their question is sometimes going to be very general. It’s probably going to be helpful but not be able to drill down on the specifics of their issue. They might not know to say what jurisdiction they’re in. They might just say, how do I stop my landlord from doing this? How do I get them to fix my ceiling? And that’s going to be different if you’re in Massachusetts or Texas or Michigan. Those are all different rules around what your landlord’s responsibilities are and how to fix them, right? So they won’t be an expert user of the tool.

The information may be there, but they may not know how to get it out the right way. So I do see promise there though that we can build these tools around these systems where the generative AI is doing the hard part, which is understanding the person’s question and knowing what information to retrieve. And we can do some more work around having it if it’s a legal problem, drilling down on those things that always have to be asked like the jurisdiction and maybe asking the follow-up questions about those edge cases because it will just be able to follow a rubric that you give it really well. If you say, this is the parameter, this is exactly the kind of answer I need, it can do that for you. But untrained people who are lay people may not know how to ask it the right way.

Dennis Kennedy:

So a couple things you touched on are really interesting to me. I talked to another professor recently who does the reflections like you do, and she took the approach this semester of not letting students use Chad GPT at all and to essentially do them in class by hand in a specific period of time, but your solution is way more interesting to me and I think produces ultimately better results. So that’s one thing. And then what you’re saying at the end also is intriguing to me. I think if you have, my landlord isn’t fixing the leak in the ceiling and you go to a lawyer, they’re going like, okay, here’s what you do. You file this lawsuit and you do this and that, and you’re going like, no, I just want to have the ceiling fixed. So I think that if the AI can start to do things like say, oh, here’s what the first step is, send an email that says these things and then evaluate what happens after that, it starts to become interesting.

And then what I’m going to end up asking you is about which leads to the self-represented litigant issue. So my understanding and the statistics are hard to come by, is that what I’ll call the people law area? We could be up to 80% of parties are self-represented right now. And yeah, that’s about right. It’s causing lots of problems within the system. So I’m really intrigued, and I’ve talked to some judges and others about how we might use AI in those areas where you have literacy, where you have language, you have just basic understanding issues that can be part of what’s happening. But what are some of the examples of using AI that seem right now to you most exciting as we move forward?

Quinten Steenhuis:

Last week I was at the Innovations and Technology Conference, that’s the legal Legal Services Corporations annual conference talking about just that. And I think what’s to me the most promising is to use these tools as aids and helpers for things that we already know and do and can trust as being safe. So I mentioned document automation. That’s a core issue for our lab focuses on that. It was my entry into legal tech. It’s what I do for consulting. And what we are finding is that there are lots of ways that document automation, the way it’s always been done is very rigid and difficult for people to use. It takes a lot of time to build a tree with a thousand different questions in it that will let the person tell their story. It can be really hard for the person who’s using the tools. You’re going to try to guess and anticipate what follow-up questions they need, but sometimes they’re going to have answered everything the first question and your system is too dumb to know that, and it’s going to ask them again in the next question and they’re going to be like, okay, I’m going to repeat my story again, the same thing, or I’m going to actually go back and remove it from the previous answer and then write it here.

But then again, we don’t want generative AI to invent a new way to ask for somebody’s name and their birth dates and all of those things that are just kind of, we know there’s a right way to do it. We can usability test it. We can look over someone’s shoulder and see this is the way that works for people to ask these kind of questions. What generative AI is doing for us is it’s letting us chart a middle course. So in our document automation tools now we can go through that series of traditional questions and there may be a point where someone has to write an answer to an open-ended question where we know it needs to hit five points. The old way would’ve been to have five questions and maybe a couple of sub-questions to get those five important points. And that’s the only way we would know they would actually answer everything.

Now with generative ai, we can say, okay, give us your answer. We’ll have the AI look at your answer and say, does it meet those five points? Did you say everything you need to convince the judge about your story? And if not, we can keep asking follow-up questions right inside the document automation tool until they have a full and complete response. So that’s a really easy thing we can do and it’s been a big challenge in document automation tools for decades. Another thing we can do, and this is interesting, so I had a user of my document automation tool for eviction defense recently post some feedback they said, I got all the way through your tool. It was a lot of questions, but I didn’t get to say the thing that I thought was most important. It turns out that probably the defense that they wanted to make was not a real defense, but I really do empathize with that person who was like, I didn’t get to tell my story because I did intake, legal intake for years and years at both at Greater Boston Legal Services, not as often, but when I was on emergency duty.

But also I spent some time onsite doing legal advice at a shelter here in Boston, and I always had to start by letting people tell their story. Most people wanted that first, they needed to have that first step. And then you follow up and you get the information right? You might have a script with questions, but you don’t start there. You start with letting them say why they’re here, and then you only ask for the parts you need to know. AI can help us with that in documentation too. We can have our script written out with all of our questions, but first we can let them tell their story. And by the way, they can even talk to the computer. They don’t have to write out their answer. If they’re more comfortable saying it out loud, they can say it out loud and we can get a transcript of it.

That’s really good. Thanks to open AI’s transcription tools and we take out the important information from their story. Whatever those facts are that we needed, we can capture and let the generative AI tool get that from their narrative and then just say, okay, here’s what you’ve told us so far. Here’s what we think your answers are. If they’re wrong, correct them. Now that we’ve gone through that initial part, let’s go back and fill in the details with the rest of the questions that we’ve vetted that kind of follow those best practices and we can use ability test. So I’m really intrigued by this possibility to marry the tool two kind of approaches, the logic base, the safe, the vetted way, and use generative just to smooth out the edges to improve the litigant experience and make it a lot better for them.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, that’s great. I can also tell that like me, I can definitely see that you learned from Mark Larson. There’s some elements of Mark definitely in that answer, and I’m sure you I will always be grateful to Mark.

Quinten Steenhuis:

Absolutely. Yeah, it was one of my first mentors in this space.

Tom Mighell:

All I was thinking about when you were telling that story was when I was a prosecutor for about 10 years and 95, it was just minor misdemeanor court. It was just night court where people were arguing about the really important things like auto offenses and barking dogs and high grass and weeds. And 95% of the people who came into that Courtroom had no defense. They just wanted to complain about how unfair the system was or here’s how it happened and why that police officer was so mean to me. And then they 100% accepted their fine and went and paid it immediately with no complaint at all. Made me start thinking, is there an option for unrepresented people in criminal court too that would have an application there? And it makes me think maybe that’s interesting to think about. Alright, we still have more to go with Quinten Steenhuis of Suffolk Loft School, but we got to hear from our sponsor. So we’ll take a quick break and then we’ll be right back.

Dennis Kennedy:

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

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mighell. And we are joined again by our special guest, Quinten Steenhuis from Suffolk Oak Law School. We’ve got time for just a few more questions. The question that I like to ask at this point is what we call our best advice question, which is over the years have you received advice from a mentor from others or do you have advice for our listeners that you’d like to give best piece of advice? Or it could be both?

Quinten Steenhuis:

That’s a really great question. I will say, I’ll give a piece of inspiration that I had at last week’s Legal Services Corporation conference. So we had a really great speaker who was not born deaf but became deaf as a young child who helped me think a little bit more about something I wasn’t totally new to me, but universal accessibility, that idea of making things easier for the person who is most challenged by situation makes it better and more comfortable for everybody. So I always try to think about that. I start with building these tools for the least sophisticated user and everyone’s really pleased when the tool’s easier to use for them. Even if this attorney is going to use it every day and doesn’t need all of the handholding, they still appreciate that we made it clean and simple and straightforward language.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, that’s great. Tom, I think we did a podcast once where we talked about just turning on the accessibility features inside programs and how it just made your life easier in a lot of ways. So Quentin, I have two questions. So you have students, and you gave one fantastic example about one, but how do you help and encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths in the innovation and technology space and with non-traditional careers in law? So that’s question one and second, who are the fresh voices in legal tech that you would like to single out and maybe have us invite to be part of our Fresh Voices series?

Quinten Steenhuis:

I should have a really good answer to the second one, but I didn’t do the preparation, so I will definitely get back to you with some really concrete names. I love to uplift flip folks as well. Well, I’ll mention one of my co-panelists at the panel last week, Hans Westerman and another co-panelists who didn’t end up making it to us in person. Yaro Veka. I’ve met at some AI and law conferences over the last year, and I’m really inspired by their work. Hans just started at University of Mastre in the Netherlands, I think this spring he’s going to start there as an assistant professor. He’s been doing some really cool experiments with using generative AI to help do things like assist with mediation tasks. So it’s an AI powered mediation tool that helps calm down the mediation conversation, can offer some suggestions on good questions to ask and intervene with.

And that’s called LL Mediator, so I’ll single that out as one that comes right to mind. And he yamir both collaborated on this tool called Justice Bott, which is another take on document automation, but focused on helping people understand if a statute is violated or not and helps bring in case law. And it’s interesting, it’s really easy to use. It’s nice and accessible, and they built that collaborated on that project, which is housed at the University of Montreal Cyber Justice Laboratory. I should have some more names for you, but I’ll start with those two folks that I just was working with last week.

Dennis Kennedy:

And then how do you suggest today’s law students and lawyers find career paths, I guess similar to yours or some of the new things that are opening up?

Quinten Steenhuis:

I try to bring in some folks into the classroom. I think that’s the number one way. So I usually have four or five guests over the course of the semester that themselves have these non-traditional paths and we don’t spend the whole class on it. We usually spend half of it just getting to interview the guest and hear a little bit about their journey. This last week I had Brittany Hernandez, who now works for Gavel, had a really interesting career path out of the Jag Corps into doing some Solo work in legal tech and automation, and now is the law school ambassador for Gavel. That was really interesting talking and really enjoyed getting to hear a little bit more about her career journey. I have a lot of favorite guests, they’re all great. I love, there’s an immigration attorney, Jared Jasko, who’s in Baltimore who I’ll mention who’s really interesting tech forward work in the immigration space.

He’s always a favorite guest. People really love his ability to talk about his journey, trying to build a legal tech product and the evolution of it, things that worked and didn’t work. I think that’s the best way to get to hear actually from real people who’ve gone through this and have stories to share about what’s successful. And students really appreciate hearing where people did not succeed because it makes them realize it’s okay to not succeed. The person’s still standing, they’re still successful, even if their first try at something didn’t go a hundred percent of the way. So that’s always, I think, I hope really inspiring and people certainly give me that feedback that they enjoyed getting to hear those stories.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I agree. And I also use, and I’m sure you do, I like using the Michigan state law alumni because it’s a great way for them to give back. They really enjoy it and they have such credibility with the current students. But anyway, we want to thank you so much, Quentin, you’re fantastic guests, great information, great advice for our listeners. Now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website, our observation you can use the second this podcast ends, Quentin, we’ll ask you to take it away.

Quinten Steenhuis:

Alright, we were just talking about this before we started the recording, and my one tip would be to go to name drop.io. I think there are other competitors, but it’s one I found and record yourself saying your own name. And I’ve now put this on my email signature and people are really appreciative. I have a hard to say name. It’s spelled S-T-E-E-N-H-U-I-S. No one thinks it’s Stain House, but by putting that in my email signature, I think I’m going to make everyone feel more comfortable addressing me the first time.

Tom Mighell:

Well, and I definitely need something like that as well. So for my tip, I have, now that I’ve been using Copilot and Microsoft 365 for a little while, I’m going to start during my parting shots, bringing up some observations in ways that have been interesting to me in using it. And one of the first ways that I found is that when you’re using Outlook, you’ll get a big long thread of emails. You can sort in outlook by thread, but what if you just want to summarize it instead? And if you are using either Outlook online or the new version of Outlook, this does not work in classic Outlook is not available with copilot. And when you open up a thread, there’ll be a button at the top, it said, summarize this thread and you click a button and it will instantly pop up. Here are all the relevant points from all the messages that you needed. And we were working on a change order with a client and I wanted to see the back and forth of what the discussion was, and it gave me that information in about 30 seconds, which was super helpful. So I’m hoping to find more ways that copilot is making my job easier, and I’ll be reporting on that here in this space. So stay tuned. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I mean, summarization is such a cool thing to use AI for that I think is vastly underappreciated. The other thing about AI that sometimes is a barrier for people, especially in the legal profession, is this notion of like, I have to figure out how to prompt the AI to get the results that I want. And that means more than just asking it a one sentence question that says, tell me which is the best sandwich shop in the area that I am. And you’re probably going to be disappointed with the results. So you see more and more people introducing sets of prompts that are examples. And it’s not so much that you need to use these and just follow ’em along, but you can kind of see what people are doing and what might work and what you might actually be doing wrong. And on the one hand, and then also it gives you an ease to jump into experimenting with generative ai. So Jennifer wa Check who is a law professor at Capital University has published something called Introducing Ai, prompt Worksheets for the Legal Profession. It’s on ll rx.com. And Tom will put a link, the show notes. But if you want a good place to start and see the types of prompts that are being used in the legal profession, really a nice place to get started.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up to this edition of the Kennedy Mall report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Networks page for our show. You can find all of our previous podcasts along with transcripts on the Legal Talk Network website as well. If you want to get in touch with us, please reach out to us on LinkedIn or remember, we still love getting questions for our B segment, we actually have a voicemail. Please leave us a voicemail at 7 2 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell. And I’m

Dennis Kennedy:

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 two that helps us out. 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, a 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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