Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Emily Colbert

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 361 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 had another guest in our Fresh Voices in Legal Tech series, Tessa Mano, CEO of Legal Creatives, and an expert on legal design. It was a great show, highly recommended, as are all the other episodes in our Fresh Voices series. In this episode, we are on a roll and we have another very special guest on a timely topic that I’m super excited about. 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 welcome Emily Colbert, head of product Management for Practical Law to talk about the integration of AI in the Practical Law tool and the enormous potential of that combination. We often talk on this podcast about the importance of humans in the loop with AI tools, and you are going to learn about a great example of this in the show today. 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 Emily Colbert to the podcast. Emily, welcome to the Kennedy Mighell Report.

Emily Colbert:

Hi guys, so glad to be here.

Tom Mighell:

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

Emily Colbert:

Yeah, sure. So I lead product management for Practical Law globally, and what that means is we decide what to build, check to see what the market needs, what our customer needs, and seek investment for that and deliver it to the market. A little bit about me, I actually got my start in the legal tech world working for Practical Law before they were acquired by Thomson Reuters. So I’ve been with this product since its inception in the us, so super passionate about it, really excited about what we can do.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I’ve been experimenting with practical law ai and actually I’ve been recommending it and showing it to my law students that I’m teaching this year. I’m already a fan of it, I have to confess, but I’m also a long longtime fan of Practical Law even before the AI came into it. So I know that Thomson Reuters has jumped in on generative AI with several products, employing it with Practical Law, just being the most recent. Can you give us a view of the vision from Thomson Reuters around generative AI and how it is advancing practical law?

Emily Colbert:

Sure. So just for Thomson Reuters generally, I mean our sweet spot where we really excel is in content enabled technology. And when you think about AI and generative ai, it just makes a lot of sense. Generative AI is powered by the data it generates from and at Thomson Reuters we have these products like Practical Law like Westlaw with this depth of data and really, really, really trusted data. And so we see a huge opportunity. We also see a lot of change coming for our customers and we think who better to help them with it? And so when we think about the strategy with Thomson Reuters and ai, it’s really about infusing all of our great products with this and then bring it into our customer’s workflow practical itself, as you mentioned, it’s a little bit different, right? When you say, I love the practical product, that’s what I always love to hear. We have these experts on staff that are creating original content and keeping it up to date, helping our customers understand how to do the legal tasks they need to do, or law students understand what this concept is even about and what its practical applications are. To be able to generate off of that kind of trusted base that’s unique to me is just a huge opportunity for us and what we can do with it.

Tom Mighell:

Let’s take a little bit of a step back. For any of our listeners who might not be familiar with Practical Law, can you give us an example or a couple of examples of what a user might want to use Practical Law AI for and if they have used Practical Law in the past, how it differs or what additionally they can use for it now with the AI built in?

Emily Colbert:

Yeah, I mean, well, for those people that don’t know what Practical Law is in simplest terms, we provide guidance to our customers that help them perform legal tasks more efficiently and effectively in the form of a how to guide a model agreement that’s annotated a checklist, really trying to help them get to that task. With generative ai, they don’t have to know when they’re looking for that content, what to search for, what keywords to use, what we might have or not have. They can simply ask a really plain English question of what they actually want to know or want to do, and the LLM, the large language model will generate that plain English answer from practical content and then cite to it. And so when I think about what that does for someone, it helps them get to that answer much, much faster. So if they’re like, what is the employment law around sexual harassment in New Jersey?

You can simply ask that question and get the answer. And then with cited resources that you can dive deeper, validate your answer and get to work. There’s a lot more we can do with it. This is just where we’re getting started, but it’s really helping the customer find that answer faster, find things they would never have even looked for or know what we don’t have. That’s, I think actually a huge value too practical is a discreet database. And so to tell someone we don’t have resources on that, so we’re not going to generate an answer in 30 seconds is much better than someone hunting around for 30 minutes.

Tom Mighell:

Quick follow up on that. So I’m making the assumption, obviously with lot of companies that are sort of integrating generative AI into their tools, they are fulfilling a need that some customers didn’t really know they had at the time, but it might also fulfill that need. So I guess my question is what are you hearing from customers or the legal community in general around generative ai? And I’m assuming that that played a part in how the AI was developed into the Practical Law tool?

Emily Colbert:

Yeah, so look, we’re still in the generative AI hype cycle. I think we’ve moved from last year to this year in terms of people just playing with it and being curious or being scared to actually starting to think about how do I actually use this in my job? And one of the main reasons that we did Practical Law ai the way we did was we wanted to make sure that we had that trust from the step of this is new or this is scary, or this is exciting. Two, I can actually use this in my work. And so what that caused us to approach building this Gen AI in practical law, two big things. One, to be completely transparent about what gen AI can do and can’t do and where you do need to really verify your answer. And two, to make sure we’re still providing that core value of practical law, which is you can trust this content, it’s something that you do, you might go to Google for, but you come to Practical Law, you need to know that it’s accurate, that it’s up to date. And so we’re only generating from that trusted content. So that was kind of two big, I would say, qualities that went into how we did this.

Dennis Kennedy:

That’s the part that I really love about Practical Law ai, and I’m teaching IT classes as listeners know in AI in the law at Michigan State. But the most important thing I’ve learned about generative AI and how to use it best is to figure out where the humans need to be in the loop. And practical law is a great example of leveraging human knowledge with ai, AI power. And in a class I did recently where I showed the students what I did, I used Practical Law AI to give me a summary of what fair use was under the copyright law. I noted that it used the word transformative and so that I wanted to understand that concept better. So then I just prompted on that and then I projected out to say, given what we know now is training ai, large language models on copyright materials likely to be considered fair use and give me the best arguments for and against. And it just such a good job to get me started on that. And I think I could see the eyes of the students kind of open up as I was showing them how I did this, but could you maybe talk more about that human side of ai, which I think as in the AI hype cycle, we think so much about AI itself, but it’s actually the human piece. That’s interesting. And the fascinating approach you’ve taken of using that, the attorney editors and their expertise in connection with developing generative AI tools.

Emily Colbert:

Yeah, sure. So I mean at Practical Law and really at Thomson Reuters, the human experts a big part of our product, and I think with Practical Law, it’s almost really obvious to our users, even though you’re not seeing the picture of the person. Our users tend to tell us, they think of us like the friend down the hall that you can ask when you don’t want to tell your boss you don’t know the answer or tell the client you haven’t worked on that before and they trust us and they get really emotional when they talk about it. And so that’s something that we’ve been thinking about is how do we take that expertise and that really emotion and human component and get it out of the content into other places. And so even before JN AI was on the scene, we’ve been using our experts to train machine learning models.

We’ve been using our experts to create ontologies and just other things that aren’t just written content. So with Gen ai, they’re in the product in a lot of ways. Those editors, who by the way, for folks that don’t know, they’ve practiced at the top of their game in their particular practice areas from either top law firms, boutique law firms, if that’s what’s right for the specialty area or in-house legal departments. So they know the area, they know the practicalities of it, and they’ve done it before. And so they’re in the content. That’s the core part, that’s the data that we’re generating from, but they’re also in the process. And so these experts are working with us when it comes to prompting the models behind the scenes, some of the processing steps we’re taking, they’re grading the ai, they’re telling us when are we good enough to go talk to customers. They are the biggest critics and skeptics if any new stuff we put out, and we have to go through the wringer with our editorial teams, but we trust them for that and we love them for that. And so they’re in every step of the product development process and they’re constantly training and checking in on what we’re doing. Also working with our Thomson Ritters general Counsel’s office, which is super helpful as we go through development.

Tom Mighell:

I was looking at the Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report, and I noticed that there was a question in there where 55% of the legal professionals who were surveyed expected that AI would be lowering costs for firms driving greater firm profitability, which I assume is or to at least a certain extent, driven by efficiency, greater efficiency. So what are some of the specific ways you are anticipating that AI, either through Practical Law or just in general is going to help firm drive efficiencies in this way?

Emily Colbert:

Yeah, so I mean, if you read the report, some of that efficiency is actually just in the operation of the firm, but then actually also in the tasks that the lawyers are doing. So you’ll see, I think just across any business, you start to get a lot of efficiency in administrative type tasks in lawyers that also includes things like billing, things like finding my knowledge. So I think find will be a big part of that in terms of the actual legal tasks, absolutely legal research and co-counsel through case texts capture the legal market with that use case in the really early days. And as you’ve seen with the Westlaw launches, we’re really building on that taking you to the next level. But legal research will be an area that generative AI can just really shortcut, speed up, improve the quality of your activities, of course, always needing to verify.

And that’s something that at Thompson Road we try and make really clear both in our product development and in the way we talk about the products. Drafting’s, another area that people are just really excited about in-house. Counsel I think is even more bullish about getting there faster in terms of contract drafting. And that’s something that I think we’re going to continue to see develop and get more real. So obviously we’ve seen AI do a great job at correspondence and things like that, very, very simple contracts, but we’re going to start to see that get better and better as we go. And that’s an area where Practical Law is also heavily involved. So I mentioned our experts training, machine learning AI models. We recently released a product with that baked in, but we’re also using the practical law content in our rag, our retrieval augmented generation for our generative AI drafting tools that we’re building. And so trying to bring that verification and that base of quality into the drafting space as well.

Tom Mighell:

We’ve got a lot more to cover, but we need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors and then we’ll be right back with Emily Colbert at Practical Law

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Emily Kohler at Practical Law. Before the break, you were talking about the efficiency benefits of using practical law ai, and I think I see so much and hear so much talk about efficiency in AI that I sometimes think we might be over focusing on efficiency and not seeing some of the other types of benefits from combining practical on AI such as creativity and other things like that. So what are you hearing from users on that front and have you heard uses that people are trying that are especially cool and unexpected to you?

Emily Colbert:

So one area like the opposite of efficiency is really the growth of your business. And we are seeing people using generative AI to get that information, that knowledge and that ability to take on new and different matters in a way that previously would’ve had to do a lot more legwork to get there. And so I think that growing your business for a law firm or on an in-house department, that ability to address areas, other risk areas that you may not have been able to get to, I think that’s really important in terms of creativity. Take that into the legal space, which we don’t always think about as being so creative, but if you think about the drafting journey that our young attorneys go on and when they tend to spend the first several years just doing the really, really kind of basic things, drafting certificates and resolutions and nondisclosure agreements, but I think what we’ll see with generative AI is getting that leap up to the more advanced drafting and advanced legal tasks faster. So being able to get and open up your mind to learning about things like negotiation at a much earlier stage of your career. Now of course, that leads a whole nother can of worms in terms of how do we skill up associates faster and in different ways if they’re not doing the grunt work for years just to learn by the side of the senior and partner. But I do see generative AI allowing attorneys to be able to get to that next level as they’re able to leave those more mundane or administrative tasks behind. Cool.

Dennis Kennedy:

Can I, let me ask a follow up, Tom. So I think another area over focus for me is what we can do, what AI can do for associates. And I’m just totally intrigued by what it can do for partners and experienced lawyers, and that’s who I think Practical Law is especially useful for. So the example I gave you, if I know I need to talk to a client and it’s about fair use and I’m fuzzy about transformative use or other things like that, I can get up to speed. And in fact, I could probably do it while I’m on the call or on the Zoom with the client. And I also see from my in-House experience, just see all kinds of benefits. So not just at that low end or at the associate and young attorneys, but I think the more experienced attorneys as well. And are you hearing anything about that?

Emily Colbert:

Yeah, and actually the example you gave us spot on. So we did some focus groups with our AI tool back in December before we launched and had some quite senior practitioners in the room, and a number of them did cite that use case of, I would use this when I’m about to get on a call with my client, and it might be an area where I’m not as familiar. I mean, think about a lot of, especially in the larger firm space, a lot of those kind of relationship partners tend to be maybe in the Litigation space or in the corporate space, but then they’re asked to speak to the client about any wealth of issues before they bring in their partners in particular areas of specialty, and they need to be conversant, and this is a great way to do that. Also, imagine pitching business and wanting to bring in some data about trends or market or what you’re seeing, being able to pull that with just asking a question, can you give me an analytical report on indemnification and recent m and a deals in this industry? So I think that will be a really great business development aid for more senior attorneys.

Tom Mighell:

I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about how the AI tool was built within Practical Law and since given that practical law is already a fully baked product and that you’re augmenting or modifying it to include generative AI in the product, were there in integrating that AI into Practical Law? And if so, how did you address?

Emily Colbert:

Yeah, I mean, I think we’re on a journey of transforming our products in the same way we’re transforming the legal industry. And so there’ll be things that we had to deal with right away in terms of we have to put in certain prompts to deal with ways that we’ve organized or created the content today that won’t be giving misleading answers. And so we would address that in the kind of processing with the model. We still are going to be learning as we go in terms of how might we change the way we create practical law today. So if there’s certain ways that we dealt with things in the content without generative ai, we might need to change that or have the AI react in a different way. And so we’re continuing to learn as we go, as the rest of the market is as well.

Dennis Kennedy:

I’ve always felt that practical law, and this is why I’m a fan, to me, it’s a tool that just seems like it should sell itself as soon as somebody sees a demo. But we all know it’s never that easy, right. So what are you seeing today as the aha moments that make lawyers actually reach for their wallets and say, yeah, this is something I have to get

Emily Colbert:

For Practical Authors always been two things. One, you happen to be on a trial or looking online and finding something right when you need it. And it’s that moment where you’re just like, oh my God, I would’ve spent 17 hours doing this and I just now I’m 30 minutes and I’m almost done. So it’s that moment, that realization. And with generative ai, the nice thing is you can get that as quickly as, let me ask the question of what I’m actually working on. And then the other piece is really the return on investment. So people, when you just think about it as articles or form contracts, you don’t quite get how many hours it can actually save you an in-house Counsel, that’s particularly dramatic when they think about how it can help them either take things in-house completely or just use their outside Counsel much more efficiently.

Tom Mighell:

So let’s turn that around a little bit, and let’s say that there are people listening to the podcast who are hearing it and saying, Hey, that sounds pretty cool, but I still have some reservations. What are the hurdles that lawyers have when they’re considering buying or using Practical Law with ai and maybe how would you address those hurdles?

Emily Colbert:

I mean, I think the first thing is just the fear about what generative AI is going to do to the practice, the worry that it’s risky. That’s probably the number one thing. And I just think generative ai, AI is here to stay. It’s going to become a part of the legal profession. And what our customers are learning and we’ll have to learn over time is it’s about how to use it responsibly. And it’s somewhat trite, but people kind of say lawyers aren’t going to be replaced by ai, they’re going to be replaced by lawyers that use ai. And I think it’s true, right? I think we’ve seen over time, imagine if you’re the one litigator that says, I’m not using e-discovery at some point, you just have to get on the boat. And the nice thing about Practical Law is generative ai, and frankly, the same with Westlaw is because we make it so easy to verify. As long as you’re using it responsibly, as long as you are verifying answers, the risk isn’t there. It’s just helping you get to what you would’ve gotten to before much faster, and frankly, with less risk of missing something.

Tom Mighell:

We’ve got more to talk about with Emily Colbert, but we also need to take another quick break for a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back.

Dennis Kennedy:

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, Emily Colbert at Practical Law. We’ve got time for just a few more questions. Emily, what are you allowed to tell us, or maybe things you’re not allowed to tell us, we’d be fine with that too, allowed to tell us about what else we can expect from Thomson Reuters in the next year or so, whether it’s generative AI or other technology advancements, integrations, what’s coming down the road?

Emily Colbert:

I think the thing I’m most excited about is really how generative AI is giving us the opportunity to bring our suite of products together in a much more holistic way. The acquisition of co-counsel has really provided a foundation to integrate this legal assistant across our portfolio, and that’s something that we’re really excited about. So I think to me, when I think about Practical Law, it’s not just about the fact that I can bring it together with other products, but I can make practical more accessible through this legal assistant to people that maybe didn’t even know if they had it or know what it is. And so I’m excited to bring Practical Law out of the product into a legal assistant that might be integrated with other products into Microsoft Office, really to make it more accessible to customers that can benefit from it.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I think if you go back and look at the transcripts of our shows, you’ll probably find me saying several times that I think the integration of generative AI and practical law is a potential game changer, and especially as somebody who is not a litigator, I think for transactional lawyers and people doing non-litigation work as well. So you’ve talked about you’re excited about Practical Law, where it is now and where you see it headed. So sort of two questions for you. Is this product as fun to work on as it seems it would be, and then what would you like the impact of this product on the legal profession to be? And I think that legal assistant notion is a really cool one, but what would you like to see the impact be?

Emily Colbert:

So your first question, I mean a testament to, is this a fun product to work on? I’ve been working with Practical Law since 2007. I’ve taken brief hiatus at Thom is to work on other things, but I keep coming back and we all love the product and drink the Kool-Aid. We get so excited about it. And I think the reason why we love it so much and the reason why we get so excited is the same as what I’m most excited about, what it’s going to do with ai, which is practical, really helps people. It really helps our peers. We’ve all been in their shoes, stress less, get to what they need to get done faster, have confidence. And with generative ai, my vision is that, as I mentioned before, it’s just becomes so accessible that you don’t have to think about, oh, there’s this thing called practical, I should think about going to log in. But it’s just there with you. And that’s what I’d love to see us get to so that we can really help with law students in-House, Counsel, large and small law firm customers just when they need it.

Tom Mighell:

So built into my smart glasses at some point in time, I can just walk into court and have it with me.

Emily Colbert:

Absolutely.

Tom Mighell:

I know we’re always, well, I’m not sure if I even recommend that at this point. Alright, we want to thank Emily Colbert for being a guest on the show. Emily, can you tell us where people can learn more about what you’re doing and how to get in touch with you if they want to get in touch with you?

Emily Colbert:

Sure. I mean, just come to thom orders.com. You can learn a lot about Practical Law about everything else we’re doing with generative ai. We have special pages just for AI there to learn about it. Always feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or otherwise, love to connect with the legal community.

Dennis Kennedy:

Thank you so much, Emily. You’re fantastic guests, great information, great advice. And your excitement about this product definitely, definitely shows through. I’m actually even more convinced now than when the show started, that practical AI could be a game changer out there. And I’m really excited to see what you’re doing, especially with this notion of legal assistant. But now it’s time for our party shots, that one tip website or observation you can use. The second this podcast ends. Emily, we’ll ask you to take it away and go first.

Emily Colbert:

Sure. So just back from a vacation in London, hadn’t been there for fun in a really long time, and I can just say one tip, the Warner Brothers, Harry Potter Studios is worth it.

Tom Mighell:

I’m going to London in the summer, and so that’s a tip I can start using the second this podcast ends. Excellent. My tip and Dennis and I are broken records on our tips lately is that we are going to talk about AI in our tips. My tip is actually a little bit different in that you may be used to using chat GPT for any generative AI needs, but some of you probably, or many of you probably aren’t using Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence. And I have been using it lately to summarize YouTube videos. So because Google YouTube is a Google product, Gemini will connect directly to it, just send it the URL for a video. It will summarize the video. I’ve asked it to give me timestamps. If there are instructions that are given on how to do something, please write the instructions out and give me timestamps for them.

It’s doing a really amazing job of getting that information down in print so that I can see it and not just have to worry about looking at the video. And then I’m taking those notes, putting them into my second brain so I can always Gogo back to them and then consult the video if I need to. So it’s unfortunately, tools like Chat, TBT can’t access those types of URLs, but Google has that ability since YouTube is a Google product. So pretty cool. Give it a try. It’s an interesting way to consume YouTube videos. Dennis, can

Dennis Kennedy:

I just say, whoa, are you saying that I can use Gemini and I don’t have to watch the video, I just give it to URL and it gives me a summary?

Tom Mighell:

Correct.

Dennis Kennedy:

That sounds amazing. I have to try that. The second this podcast ends possibly. So one of the big names in prompting and generative AI is Ethan Molik, M-O-L-L-I-C-K, who’s a business professor at Wharton. He’s a new book coming out that I’ll probably mention as a parting shot when it actually comes out. But he has a brand new AI and prompt resource with example prompts and other approaches, and he also has a Substack newsletter, which is called Useful Things. And then this new site is called More Useful things.com and highly recommended because he’s doing some very cool practical things.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up to this edition of the Kennedy Mighell 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’d like to get in touch with us, remember, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn. And remember, we still love to get your questions for our B segment, so please leave us a voicemail if you’d like to chat with us or have a question. 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 wanted to remind you to share the podcast, especially this one with a friend or two 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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