Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Sarah Glassmeyer

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Web 2.0. Innovation collaboration, metadata

Speaker 2:

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 364 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 struggles, insights, and potential solutions for our ongoing battles to try to create a personalized daily data feed or daily me as part of our second brain projects. In this episode, we have another very special guest at our Fresh Voices series in Fresh Voices. We want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. And 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 Sarah Glassmeyer, who among other things is director of Data curation at Legal Tech Hub and the world’s Okayest legal technologist. We want our Fresh Voices series to not only introduce you to terrific leaders in the legal tech space, but also provide you with their specific and unique perspective on the things you ought to be paying attention to in legal technology. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots at 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 Sarah Glassmeyer to our Fresh Voices series. Sarah, welcome to the Kennedy Mall Report.

Sarah Glassmeyer:

Thank you so much for having me.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, we want to learn a little bit more about you for our audience’s sake. Can you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself? What’s your role at Legal Tech Hub, what the audience should know about you as we’re getting started?

Sarah Glassmeyer:

Yeah, so hi, my name is Sarah. I am coming to you live from Val Preso, Indiana, which is a little bit outside Chicago. I started my career as an academic law librarian and through the years I’ve kind of wiggled my way through ed tech and legal innovation and nonprofit world. And now I work as a director of data curation for legal tech hub. In some ways I still am very much a librarian in that what I do is kind of oversee their directory of legal tech, which is just one part of what that company does, but also just I do kind of things on the side, especially in the A to J world as far as consulting and writing. Basically I kind of describe myself now as neighborhood busy body of legal tech that I sort of just have lots of thoughts that I’m not scared to share ’em with people privately, publicly, wherever. So that’s me. Yeah,

Dennis Kennedy:

That’s great. Yeah. Sarah, I just want to start by saying that I actually thought of you when we were naming this series because I wanted to call it Fresh Voices instead of new voices, I wanted to avoid definitional and categorization problems that some might have and save room for people whose opinion I consider ever fresh like yours. That’s a new word you’re using on us, Dennis. I’ve not heard that term before. You got to create new words every now and then. I get it. We’re evolving. Sometimes I get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology, both old and new and its benefits to those in the legal profession. Could you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology?

Sarah Glassmeyer:

And actually I really do appreciate the EverFresh idea or the new voices because I’m now in my late forties and I feel like I’ve had a couple different careers and I don’t mind being old. I actually like being old and I think it’s very useful in that I’ve now seen a couple different hype cycles and I am now old enough that I learned to shepherd eyes and print and do all my research and print and then seeing the way technology has changed through the years as far as legal technology. And so I have that perspective of what’s different, but that is the thing I remember leading up to the six months before I turned 40, I was just like, okay, if anyone’s going to name me to 40 under 40 list, you got six months, take advantage of it. So yeah, so I think I’m able to say a couple things.

One, none of this is new in some ways a lot of the use cases or the way we do things or even the promises made have been made before. And also coming from library land more we in libraries are about 10 years ahead of legal practice as far as, okay, this is the digitization and change of traditional services to virtual services, how does that affect things? And so seeing how I have a little bit of a head start and seeing how that might happen in law. And also I have an anthropology background that was my undergrad degree. And so for me, I always just also just tools are tools. And it doesn’t matter if it’s 30,000 years ago and you’re all cracking rocks together to make a knife or you’re a lawyer in a fifth floor or a high rise on a fifth avenue in New York City doing contract review.

All tools is just to make you more efficient or to make you more useful and more productive. And so I don’t really get too caught up in the magic of it. It’s just like everyone uses tools. And so that’s my perspective is that this is what lawyers need to do and you are already using tools, don’t be scared of the technology. And I guess also because coming up, my goal initially was not to be, I wasn’t one of those kids that used computers all the time growing up. And I did have the gifted camp thing where we learned basic and I could basically, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t anything I disliked, but it wasn’t anything I was firmly attached to. My goal was to be a rare books librarian and to live in a basement and never talk to another human being. And then just the whole confluence of Web 2.0 happening and the 2008 market crash.

And so in my library, our budget got ended. And so it was very much like, oh, we should be publishing law online. Why is this not happening? Why are we going in debt to Thomson Reuters to get law? It should be easy to publish law online because it’s easy to get on the internet now. And so I basically kind of self-taught myself. So a lot of also my perspective is you don’t have to be a techie. You don’t have to really like this stuff. It just has to be, it’s very attainable. And I try to always break apart gatekeeping and try to make people feel empowered that they can do this. They don’t have to wait for someone to do something for them. They can learn how to do it and do it themselves.

Tom Mighell:

So this next question we probably should have put before that question because anybody, if you listen to this podcast, anybody else listens to this podcast, our griping about the state of legal competence or competence, techno competence among lawyers is the fuel that drives this podcast. And we talk about it constantly, but what I like to be able to do is to talk to those of you who are out in the field and say you’re engaging more with lawyers than perhaps I am, not necessarily Dennis. I want to hear what other people have to think about it. Is it as bad as we say it is or tell us about your impression, your take on the current state of technology competence for lawyers.

Sarah Glassmeyer:

So technology competency is not great at all. And I think it even starts back in law school as far as the initial, especially if you’re of a certain age legal tech was taught by law librarians or legal research and writing professors or that’s where you were introduced

Tom Mighell:

To it or not at all or not at

Sarah Glassmeyer:

All. But that’s where you’re introduced to it. And a lot of times you were taught by the Lexi or the West law rep, and again, this is thinking back 2005, 2000, that kind of period. And so I think a lot of the training that we’ve done for lawyers and law students has been very product focused and also very, even it’s one of those things like use cases is a very important to know when you’re analyzing tech and evaluating tech. But in learning about tech, I don’t know necessarily a use case is the first entry point as you should be taking. You should understand a little bit more about how it works and understanding how things fit together. And I always use Legos as a lot of my brand when I do talks and images. And one of the reasons is I like branders legos and how they’re modular and how they fit together. And I don’t think there’s ever really overarching and how technology fits in either together or within the practice of law.

And also one of those things, everyone is different as far as their needs. We have this very broad legal profession and we have people who are, I always say in the fifth floor or fifth Avenue in Manhattan versus a little two man shop in Indiana versus a boutique firm in San Francisco. And it’s like they don’t all need to know the same thing. And I think it’s because the legal profession is so diverse and there’s so many different kind of verticals, it’s hard to under figure out what are the things that everyone needs to know. And that’s one of those things I always try to break it down into more very broad buckets is this, are you creating knowledge? Are you analyzing knowledge? Are you storing knowledge? And then within that, try to figure out what is the tech product or the tech type that fits within that main bucket that you need to know for your type of job.

And then understand that. But because in law schools we can’t have 27 different kind of courses for people to understand, but we also don’t teach that underlying, there are some very underlying kind of concepts that we could cover that we just haven’t yet. So I think that’s the one problem. And then I think we’ll probably end up talking about CLE and the duty and how to then once you’ve graduated legal education, the way we do it is so horrible, try to get people to then teach themself. There’s no motivation to do that or time or really resources until very recently. So it’s just kind of not even giving someone not, are we not teaching people to fish? We’re not even giving them the telling them what a fishing pole is or what bait is. So

Tom Mighell:

I’ll send you a badge for the honorary member of the Kennedy MA Report Club

Dennis Kennedy:

Because you

Tom Mighell:

Get off our lawn.

Sarah Glassmeyer:

And that’s the thing, no matter what I’m doing in my job or career, anything, I always, maybe because I started off as an academic, I figure feel like education underlies everything of what I do, even if I’m just writing a ranty blog post, it’s because I’m trying to educate people about an issue or things that they might not have seen about. And also, I guess it’s kind of a Pollyanna thing, but I really feel like education is a cure to so many ills. Just people really haven’t been trained in this or given a reason that they should care about it.

Dennis Kennedy:

So now that I’ve kind of moved into the world of legal education, I really see that I tell my students a lot of time, I say the legal profession is all about continuous learning and that’s one of the best things about it. And the other thing you touched on is something that I see all the time too is that we have this notion of this ethical duty of technology, which doesn’t seem to be enforced at all, but when I talk about it, I always come down to this thing you say, well, it’s like theBar exam and other things. There’s this sort of monolithic notion of what lawyers do and what they need, the technology they need to know. And it’s varies so much with clients and what they’re doing and their specialization and all of those things. And I do think that we’re just with all technologies, it’s better off to teach people how to learn the stuff on your own and how to feel comfortable about that. And not to kind of confuse technology and math, which is most lawyers say they went to law school, they didn’t want to do math ever again in their life. But could you talk about your view of what technology competence might mean? And then I guess how we actually might get the legal profession up to speed and the types of education that you see might help lawyers.

Sarah Glassmeyer:

So the technology competency to people who have not been knee deep in a regulations or been against the 51 state and bars, it’s a comment, it’s clearly important to the ethical code as it appears as a footnote and a comment to one rule. It’s very much you, not a whole piece of the regulatory thing. It’s almost an afterthought. And no, I liked what you said about continuous learning. That’s the thing. Law school is such an emotionally draining experience. And then the post law school continuing education is just you’re sitting in a hotel ballroom at some point in time taking notes. There’s never any sort of joy in learning amongst the legal profession and your professional legal training. And I think to get into technology, one of the things I liked that I wrote recently, and one of the things that makes me excited about chat GTP, although there’s many things I’m concerned about, is that it much like when Web 2.0 came out, it makes things that were really inaccessible accessible again and as I call it, you can really just futz around FUTZ, that wasn’t a cuss word, just have fun and play and learn things that way.

And you’re never encouraged to play or have fun it seems like in any legal training. And I think with technology, it is been my experience anyway, getting into it and playing around and seeing what it can do and seeing what you like is so important when trying a new tool. And there’s never a way to get credit for that because so many legal professionals are at 95% capacity already and don’t really have spare time to do any of this. And they’re certainly not going to do it if they can’t mark off the requirement checkbox of it. I think that’s a real problem. And I think for me, competency, again, it varies person by person I think. And again, also kind of drawing on the idea of continuous learning, it’s not an end point. There’s never a point that you’re like, boom, competent. It’s more just like a, oh, I learned this skill now I can either add onto it and try something new with it, or I learned how to do a no-code website.

Okay, that’s great. So that’s for my business, or I could use it to write a blog, can I maybe upgrade that and then start embedding an expert system and so then I can maybe sell forms to my clientele, something like that, keep adding on that way or just keep trying on new different things because, and again, I wrote a thing, it’s on the web, it’s basically legal tech explorer. I don’t know if you have put it in the show notes as a link, but I kind of divide up legal tech into buckets of ideas as far as this is moving knowledge around, this is creating knowledge, this is storing knowledge, this is analyzing knowledge. And within that, depending on what kind of lawyer you are, do you need to know how to do some sort of data analysis? Is just getting really good at Excel good enough for you?

Or do you need to learn how to do Python? It really depends on you, what you need to do. And then within that, if you need to supercharge that particular skill or move on to, okay, I got data analysis down, maybe I should move on to even learning about social media or even learning about chat, GTP, things like that. So it really just, you are competent, I think when you are curious and continually learning and then you’re not causing issues, not causing negative consequences because you’re not able to do something. So it’s not that there’s an ultimate goal. It’s not like, oh, I can do X, Y and Z and now I’m competent lawyer and I can forget about this again for 20 years. No, it’s more of an attitude change and that’s something, it’s not something that a bar can reward or can check off. So it’s one of those things that it requires an attitude change, I think, amongst people. And that’s really, really hard to either measure or enforce or encourage even. But I think it could start in law schools to have more unstructured learning time and more encouragement of maintaining an intellectual curiosity and not just getting into the widget factory of the practice of law.

Tom Mighell:

When I was still practicing, I did several seminars around Dallas. I lived in the Dallas area, I did several seminars around Dallas on how lawyers should be using Adobe Acrobat, including redaction, and was told by the state bar of Texas in no uncertain terms that there was no CLE credit available for that type of training because I was basically doing software training, I was just training them on how to use software. And so I was so tempted every time a story came out about Bad redaction or terrible reaction, I was so tempted to send that in to the state bar. I’d say, if not for me, there would not be any of these issues going on. Anyway. So we talk a lot about collaboration tools in this podcast. So we always like to ask our guests, we want to know what are your favorite ways of collaborating, whether that’s with friends, with colleagues, with work people, with anybody. What are some of the tools that you would recommend or that you use and would recommend?

Sarah Glassmeyer:

It’s so funny. So I actually love to collaborate with people, but I also am very comfortable working on my own and maybe a little too comfortable working on my own. So I think for me, it’s so funny, so much of my big ideas or just conversations now occur in either Twitter dms or LinkedIn messaging, which is so weird, but it is that instantaneous. I am not going to formally write an email that seems makes it real, but especially just brainstorming or bouncing ideas off of people, these kind of informal networks, our ability to communicate. And that’s why again, everything shut down the last four years. And why I’m here is because I went to an unconference that Dennis hosted and I would love Unconferences to come and become a thing again as far as just more, again, I feel like informality is going to be theme of this podcast in my conversation, but just ways to get people in the same room together or virtually or in person and just not have to have a actual idea of what you want to talk about when you start talking because then it becomes a little bit scary.

But also my favorite is Google Docs because I love just idea dumping and then letting people either add notes or then you edit it, change it around. So those are probably my two favorite, just either just a real informal, not necessarily like, oh, we’re going to have a Trello board set out a project plan. Like, oh, no, no, no. We’ll get there eventually. But I just really, right now, I’m most excited by because there’s so many possibilities right now. And because I have so many varied interests, just talking to people and seeing what they’re interested in and seeing if there there’s a way we could work together and bouncing ideas off. And also I think we have a real problem is that because we’re also siloed and because even just institution to institution versus practice vertical versus practice vertical, when we find ways to kind of break these down and talk to people that you don’t normally talk to, realizing that someone’s already done what you want to do and that you just maybe need to modify it a little bit, or they tried it and it was a horrible failure, so you could maybe learn from that.

But yeah, so I think for me it’s a really informal channels and maybe we’ll do a shared Google Doc. But yeah, that’s kind of my main way of interacting with other people. I always joke though, if Twitter dms ever get released, I have to change my name and move to a new, fake my death, change my name and move to Mexico.

Tom Mighell:

Who knows what Elon will do at some point in the future. We have many, many more things to talk about, but we need to take a break for a quick word from our sponsors and then we will be back with the world’s okays legal technologist, Sarah.

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Sarah Glassmeyer, the world’s Okayest legal technologist. And while you’ve been listening to our break, we’ve been trying to convince Sarah that she should trademark of that name and to further build her already large personal brand we found in the Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience really loves that as well. So Sarah, 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 current focus?

Sarah Glassmeyer:

Yeah, so as I said, I started off as an academic law librarian and I wanted nothing to do with technology. I actually had to take some basic database design and web design when I was in library school, and I was super mad about it. I would definitely have not taken it if it wasn’t a requirement for the course. And because of, again, web 2.0 then was happening again, this is like 2004, 2005 that I started off as a professional librarian. And prior to that, because again, I’ve always liked to write, and so prior to this I’d written privately, again, this is the live journal days and Diary Land and all that kind of early flush of the interactive internet. And when I was at the University of Kentucky, I was the only one. It is those things I find really funny. I am a middle-aged librarian from Indiana, and somehow I am looked upon as being this real wild person.

I think that kind of speaks to the conservative nature of both librarianship and the legal professions in that I should not be the outlier wild. And so as a new librarian, I felt very isolated. I mean, they were nice enough to me, but no one cared about the things I was cared about. And so I started, personally, I just started to write, I remember I was at a conference in Toronto and Connie Crosby was there and that was blogging. And Jim Mighells who was at University of Buffalo, he still is early blogging and podcasting. I was like, maybe I could do this under my real name and write about the things I’m interested in. And I did, and it turned out great. And here we are 20 years later and that’s the end. So I started to write publicly and just allow myself to fail in public and not lock in because that’s one of the things I feel like people do nowadays.

They lock in, I’m a blockchain person or I’m chair of AI person and I’m what I’m interested in this week kind of person. And so that connected me. And again, I’m very, very lucky in that this all was happening between 2008 and 2010. And so social media was taking off and it was easier to connect to other people and share ideas. And then as far as more professional stuff, because we couldn’t afford to buy primary law anymore, and Web 2.0 was a thing and I was like, well, this seems easy enough to get law on the internet. Spoiler alert, it’s not at all. I started to get interested more in the copyright status of primary legal information and open source technology and meeting people like Tom Bruce at the Legal Information Institute and many, many others, you’re kind getting involved in that free law world sort of traced me then.

And it’s one of those things that’s really funny. I literally got a job offer from John Mayer at Cali through a Twitter dm, and if you know John Mayer, that absolutely makes sense. At the time, I didn’t really know him and I thought it was just like a joke or a hypothetical, no, it was like a serious job offer. So I went to go work for Cali, and again at there I worked primarily on the El Elaine Dell open source Facebook project, but there, because Cali also had a GJ author or they still have it, which was one of the very, very, very early expert systems and document automation tools for at that time, legal aid attorneys. I started to think more about actual practice material. Everything initially was all just legal information. And also if you ever hear me talk about legal technology, and I’ve kind alluded to it, I see legal technology as basically just knowledge moving.

You’re either moving knowledge, it doesn’t matter what kind of legal tech it is, basically all you’re doing is somehow moving knowledge around or interacting with knowledge. And that’s probably because I started off as a library and I’m looking at legal knowledge. So I started to look more at legal practice and then took a year off and went, had my midlife crisis and had a Harvard fellowship and looked at free law again, kind of gave that my one last go and realized with my skillset at the time and the way the status was, I couldn’t do anything more with that. So I went to get work for the A, BA, and then that really blew me up as far as being exposed to legal technology of all stripes and corporate law, big law, A DJ world or even small practice world. And then from there I went to Reign in court, which I loved, and that was very much again, created a directory of legal tech.

And then when they folded, literally the next day I had a call with Nikki and Ro, and I’m at Legal Tech Hub now. But I think through it all and if any advice, I keep volunteering for things I can’t do. So especially it was very easy when it’s a librarian to take committee assignments for professional associations. And I’m a big professional association fan to this day, and it’s one of those things I very much acknowledge. Not everyone has the bandwidth, the time to take on volunteer work or write a blog like I did. So it’s one of those things, whatever you can fit into your life has to fit into that life. So I volunteered to be a webmaster because I want to get better at creating websites and doing that sort of thing for one of the special interest sections of double LL or again, I want to write about this topic and that has to make for a blog post, I have to learn a little bit more about it or I just build things.

You talk about my branding. One of the things I also tell people is that I’m very punk rock, which again is hilarious because I’m a middle-aged dumpy librarian from Indiana. But if you know anything about the punk movement, it’s very much DIY and maker spaces. And that was things that were really hot during my formative years and also probably I grew up on a farm 40 Mighells from anywhere. So if we wanted anything, we basically had to make it. My parents were not driving me to a corner store to get anything because there was no corner store. So it’s the idea of just either figuring out how to do it myself or making it or just trying to not always just buy things. It’s easy to buy a pre-made website, but you couldn’t make it when you have to make stuff, you also have to then understand the underlying structures and doing things the way, figuring out what makes things work the way they do and why, and if there’s a way to improve upon it.

And so that’s another thing at USS Smart. To go back to legal education, I don’t think we have students make stuff enough. It’s even in legal technology education, it’s a lot of just learning. But I think you have to force to do stuff. And then when you see the guts of things and understand how they all fit together, you understand a little bit more how they work and why it’s important that some things are in place and some things are not. So yeah, I guess just keep learning and keep trying things and also don’t be, another thing I’ve been just thinking about lately is how fear of failure really is endemic in our world. And just like, again, I love Bob Ambrogi love Bob, and this is not a criticism of him, but he had that blog post recently about the five biggest fails in legal tech.

And it’s like, yes, but failure is not a bad thing. Failure if you learn from it, if you’ve, there’s some people that have failed and they obviously were running a scam or something. Not saying that anyone in that blog post was that way, but some people just don’t think through things that they just have too much money, more than money than sense. So they do something. But if you are making a good faith effort and you don’t succeed, that’s not a bad thing. So I think that’s one of those things. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good as the saying goes, just try stuff and it made it work. It may not, but who cares? You’ll live. That’s always you. As long as everyone’s still alive, any mistake can be fixed in my mind.

Tom Mighell:

Let’s peel off a little bit of that. So you talked a little bit about social media. So we want to talk about your social media persona, how your dad has become a legal tech celebrity through your presence and what it is about your posts. And I don’t know this, Dennis knows this, I don’t know this. What about your posts that makes people think that you are taller than you actually are? So what should people know about your approach to social media and maybe what are some lessons that others you would want, some advice that you would give to others on how to be more successful, more engaging?

Sarah Glassmeyer:

For me, and this is one of those things, many, many things people compliment me on is really just born of my own innate laziness or the fact that I just could not be bothered to care. And I think a lot of people when they post on social media, especially LinkedIn, they have this persona of them crushing it and they’re always successful or even trying to just be real positive about things. And I just can’t be bothered because I forget who people, but if I have this professional persona, then when I go to a conference and meet people, I would feel the need to maintain that. And that just seems like a lot of work. And so I think a couple things have fed into my current way. I am on social media as one, again, I just can’t be bothered to be someone I’m not, and I’m now to the point having gone through several cycles of being very popular and then also having hundreds of people yelling at you that you’re very, very wrong.

I’ve kind of learned to disengage from it a bit and such that I don’t let it affect me as far as my own personal self-worth those things. I think if you think too much about, for me anyway, if you overthink social media and if you’re really trying to be something, you’re not going to be fun, you’re not going to want to post anything or it’s going to just seem like another job duty and that, why would you do that? I’m horrified by the fact that people use chat GTP to write LinkedIn posts what is going on. I don’t understand the idea of getting followers for the sake of having followers and maybe they’re monetizing it. Again, this is another thing that I’ve had a real problem in my career that I just keep giving stuff away for free that I guess I could sell, but I just again, can’t be bothered.

But, and also for me, with my social media, I am especially kind of along the lines of the crushing it bro attitude. I’m in the middle of America and I grew up on a farm, and I do feel like people have attitudes of what people who fit that demographic are like. And so I always just rep for the Silicon Valley, as I call it, the Midwest. And there are people that live here that are just regular people, and just because I don’t live in New York City or San Francisco doesn’t mean I’m not a techie or I don’t know anything. And also just like to give you an idea what life is like here, it’s kind of nice. We have four seasons and my mortgage is one third of what I paid for rent in Chicago. And now being the age, my mom passed away in 2017.

My dad moved in with me in March of 2020 for a few months. And so I do have elder care responsibilities and I think through everything, I just kind of like to tell people what’s happening. Also, my dad is hilarious. He just is unintentionally hilarious. I just love sharing stories of what he says because he cracks me up. But I think there’s other people out there, especially of my generation who I do not have that unfortunately do not have kids, and I do kind of feel that way, but I fortunately don’t have kids. So it’s just that I know there’s people who are a sandwich that they have kids and they now are also doing elder care. So a lot of it’s just also just kind of like you are not alone. If I can be an example to people either positive or negative or just other people, just understand you’re not the only person that’s going through this just to explain things.

Because also I think especially with care giving duties, people don’t realize how many people are out there are trying to manage a professional career as also taking their kids to camp or taking their dad to the doctor. So it’s just kind of one of those, being honest and enjoying it, but also I think just one of those things, I don’t know if anyone could replicate or very few, I guess there’s people think different ways. Some people just think more in images or concepts. I have a constant monologue in my head all times, and so a lot of times I just tweet what’s in my head or now skeet on blue sky. So a lot of it’s just getting the stuff out of my head so I can then do the job I’m paid for. So I don’t know if that’s a replicable trait or anything. But yeah, especially when I started, I was like, my mom was, I always friended my mom on any social media service that I tried. And I feel like if you’re not scared to say it in front of your mother, that’s fine. That should be your goal and otherwise don’t worry about it. Yeah.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I agree with that. I think there’s this thing that once you go down the road in social media and have this, people have an idea about you, it does start to limit you. And I wish people thought about that more as they come in, like you say, and they try to be super professional because even as sort of free in what I feel I am to say that I know there are limits to what I can do and places I wouldn’t go that sometimes I would like to do. So that is something to think about as people look at their social media presences, what happens over the long term. But yeah,

Sarah Glassmeyer:

If I could reference it because that is one thing also I’ve been thinking I am now to the point I’ve achieved everything I’ve ever wanted to in my career. I’ve gotten every award that I thought I’d get or I can’t imagine any other job or any other, and I’m happy I would work at Costco tomorrow and probably be as happy as I am now. And so it’s one of those things I do feel kind of okay taking on more controversial statements because I can take the heat, what’s going to happen? I get fired. Okay, fine. Or I am never, yeah, on double secret probation and everyone glares at me when I go to elta. Okay, I don’t care. I won’t go to ELTA again. I think someone starting out, I do understand you might have to not take out the most controversial statements all the time and not take on the most, but I am protected, have done it all. I am not worried about myself anymore. That’s what I feel kind of nice that I can take on some of these causes or say things that maybe someone who doesn’t have as much a little bit more concern with keeping their job and career going. Can’t do.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah. First of all, we’re going to bond on the whole Midwest small town Indiana thing. I grew up in small town Indiana on the other side of the state from you and the Midwest does rule. Let’s just, we can all agree on

Tom Mighell:

That. Can I say that my uncle lived in Terre Haute most of his life and being from Texas, for me it feels like Terre Haute is close to everything in Indiana. So it’s close to you, right?

Sarah Glassmeyer:

It was completely opposite of the state. That’s fine.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, it’s completely, yeah. And so one of the things that really rings true is this idea to learn something, you need to get your hands on it and learn. And so this is going to lead to the AI question. And so I hear people talking a lot about AI and nobody says, oh, what I did with it is I just sat down with it and worked with it and I learned it, which is what I did. And if you suggest to people that, oh, here’s as a lawyer, or you’re in the legal profession, here’s what you need to do on AI is just pay the $20 a month and just put in the time. So that’s my approach. But how do you think the profession should get ready for the AI era, which may already be in the process of passing them by and then more interesting to me? What examples of potential AI uses seem the most exciting to you right now?

Sarah Glassmeyer:

I think for institutions and if you have your firm, your own firm, one of the things you need to do now before even thinking about AI is making sure your house is in order. And again, so AI works on structured data most, I don’t want to say most, but it’s not uncommon for lawyers’ data contents of their firm or their personal collection to be a little bit of a nightmare. So it’s one of those things you have to do a lot of pre-work as far as getting your knowledge management together so you have data that can actually be used by the artificial intelligence. So I think that’s the one thing. And also just starting to understand that not all AI is generative ai, and there’s several other different kinds of AI that have been in use for a decade at least, and they’re actually still very cool as well.

You understanding just some baseline differences. What is machine learning? What is natural language processing? What are neuro networks? What is generative ai? And then understanding how it might be used. And for me, I feel like there’s a lot of fun for various definitions of fun access to justice tools that could be done with artificial intelligence because one of my hobby horses is that access to justice, we need to not center lawyers in that conversation. And so much of what this is from my experience working as a law librarian and libraries open to the public and dealing with people with real legal problems, they didn’t need a lawyer. They needed someone to help them understand what the law was, listen to their story, understand where they could find more help. Because a lot of times it was more of a social services kind of a need.

And a lot of that could be done with ai, especially generative AI chatbots or document generation that I don’t think would cross the UPL line. So I get really excited about those kind of things if there’s ways we could supercharge the ability of existing legal professionals to offer more access to justice help. So I mean this things getting rich people richer doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning doing things that can help people who need help. That I think is exciting. I’m excited for the people that are going to get richer. I think you have a lot of possibility there too, but it doesn’t make my heart beat faster. Yeah.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we’ve still got more to talk about with Sarah Glassmeyer, the world’s Okayest legal technologists, but we need to take another quick break for further messages from our sponsors.

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’ve got time for one last question, Dennis, take it away.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, as you know Tom, I’m going to turn it into two questions, which is how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths in legal tech and other non-traditional careers in law? And then who are the other fresh voices in legal tech that you would like to signal out and maybe see as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Sarah Glassmeyer:

So I think for a law student or new lawyer right now, because social media is kind of distributed, unfortunately LinkedIn might be the best place to find these things, but I think look for people that you find interesting and see what they’ve done. And I think you’ll be very, very shocked if you crouch it, email ’em or message them and do it respectfully of their time and just ask ’em a question. Almost everyone I know is happy to do a half hour zoom call with someone and just kind of talk to them. But I think also just start looking at what kind of jobs you would like and understand what skills they have and what your current skillset is and see if there’s ways to maybe gain them. LinkedIn learning has a ton of relatively inexpensive things you can take as far as courses. There’s Coursera, there’s a lot of MOOCs again to flashback to 2008 ways you can get a little bit of skills on your own for free.

My Fresh Voice idea, and I am pretty sure he hasn’t been on here is he’s one of my favorite people in legal tech and I don’t know if he even knows this, but I’m such a fan of Sam Harden. He works for Pro Bono net in some ways is the Dior to my Winnie the Poh. And that I feel like he’s always just like, but great. I love him a lot and he does some really interesting, he writes on Substack and he does some videos of fun, of just training as kind, really in depth training on how to use certain tools. I think he’s fun, but he also has that kind of legal technologist in legal aid in the A to J world that I kind of also have where two sides of the same coin. Another one is my former coworker, chase Hurdle, MSU alum. He’s one of those people that’s because I always was a very nonprofit person and he’s very much open my eyes to how as attorneys can make money by still doing good, do good for yourself and do good for others. He currently works for, I’m going to mess up the name one of the immigration legal tech companies, but he used to work for LegalZoom and of course he was at the Center for Innovation. Simple Citizen, I think is the one he works with now.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, he’s a simple citizen.

Sarah Glassmeyer:

And so it’s just like the understanding that there is not necessarily a divide between doing good and actually having a career. You can make money and there’s nothing wrong with making money, but it’s also you can do that and help people who need help that aren’t currently getting it. Sorry to use two white men. That’s my examples.

Dennis Kennedy:

We had Chase before and Chase is like one of these ever fresh things. I used them in my as a guest speaker in my classes and stuff, and Sam is actually, and I think we’ll be in our next batch as I’m putting those together. So yeah, those are great recommendations.

Sarah Glassmeyer:

Thanks.

Tom Mighell:

Well, we want to thank Sarah Glassmeyer, director of data curation at Legal Tech Hub and the world’s legal technologist for being a guest on the podcast. Sarah, tell our audience where they can get in touch with you if they want to reach out or get to know more about you. You

Sarah Glassmeyer:

Can always visit my website sarah glassmeyer.com, but I’m also very active on LinkedIn and I’m on Blue Sky no longer requiring invites, so that’s a great way to go. Yeah, if you have a question or email, I’m always happy to just run your idea to the ground and tell you everything you’re doing wrong or provide some encouragement. But yeah, I’m always happy to talk to people.

Dennis Kennedy:

So thank you so much, Sarah. You were a fantastic guest as we knew you would be with great information and advice for our listeners. But now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation, you can use this second, this podcast in Sarah, take it away.

Sarah Glassmeyer:

So I always thought everyone knew about this, but it’s the way back machine on internet archive. If you go to a website and there’s a 4 0 4 or it’s dead for me, if I’m trying to figure out if a legal tech company is still alive, put their URL in there and it has web captures back as long as the website was in existence. And you can see different versions of the website and just see how things have changed or information that’s no longer publicly available, it might be there.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, my parting shot, those of you who’ve been listening to the past few know that I am lately on a health kick of the exercises that I must do in order to stay alive longer. And I am finding all of these, these are the X number that you must do every day. And so by the time I finish with this, there will be about 175 exercises that I’m going to have to do every day. But adding to my list is what I’m calling the McGill Big three. Dr. Stewart McGill is a professor of Spine biometrics at the University of Waterloo. I was listening to a podcast that he gave. He talked about the fact that he does not believe there’s actually a thing as chronic back pain that if you are actually working on your back appropriately and doing the right exercises, that the only back pain you should have is related to specific acute injuries that you happen to get due to wear and tear other things. But there should not be anything such as that. And he recommends doing these three exercises every day to work on your lower back endurance. So again, three more exercises I need to add to my daily list of exercises. Dennis,

Dennis Kennedy:

Tom, I can’t believe you found somebody with the name McGill to give people another way to mispronounce your name

Tom Mighell:

Has nothing related to Miguel or Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy:

So a lot of people ask whether AI is going to replace lawyers or take away all of our work. And so I was listening to the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway and they were doing a series on the future of work and one of ’em was on ai. It was the third part of their series. And they had Susan Athe who teaches, or aie, who Teaches, teaches Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business. And it was like the best discussion of the potential impact of AI on this employment workers, the future of work that I’ve ever heard in one place. So totally recommended. And the link will be in the show notes.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up for 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 site. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe to our podcast again on the Legal Talk Network site and iTunes or in your favorite podcast app. If you’d like to get in touch with us, remember, you can always find us on LinkedIn. You can also leave us a voicemail. We love to get questions or comments for our B segment. That number again 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 with a friend or too 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 2:

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 a 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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