Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Jackie Schafer

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

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 370 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 discussed the potential value of online unconferences and decided that we loved the idea, especially if someone else ran them and did all the work. I got to tell you, I ran into a bunch of people last week and by a bunch, I mean like almost a handful when I was at an in-person conference who loved the idea and would love to participate. So maybe there was something will come of it as long as Tom and I said if someone else runs them and does all the work. In this episode, we have another very special guest in our Fresh Voices series in Fresh Voices. We want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. We have another fabulous guest, Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:

Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy Mighell report, we are thrilled to continue our fresh voices on Legal Tech interview series with Jackie Schafer, who among other things is the founder and CEO of clear brief AI and a visible and insightful contributor to the legal tech world. 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 unique perspective on the things you ought to be paying attention to. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website and observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Jackie Schaefer to the Fresh Voices series. Jackie. Welcome to the Kennedy Mall Report.

Jackie Schafer:

Thank you so much for having me.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little more about you? Tell us about Clear Brief, what your role is, what should the audience know about what you do to get started?

Jackie Schafer:

Sure. So I’m the founder and CEO of Clear Brief. I’m a career litigator. I started out in big law at Paul Weiss in New York years ago, and I spent most of my career in government doing mostly appellate work complex litigation. I was also in-House counsel for several years. So I’ve just sort of been in the trenches writing briefs, coordinating with colleagues and clients, getting things filed. It was around 2020 that I started learning about AI and had this strong nagging feeling that it was going to really change our profession. So founded the company to build a tool that would live in Microsoft Word and basically help you visualize and see the evidence while you’re writing, both for legal sources but also for factual documents and also kind of help you with all those sort of tedious aspects of getting things filed, like the table of authorities, the exhibits, site checking hyperlinks. And fast forward to today, clear Brief is now used by hundreds of legal organizations across the world, including the largest global law firms, courts, government agencies, and in-house legal teams like Microsoft’s legal team. So it’s been an incredible journey, but the cool thing is you can actually, if you’re listening, go to the Microsoft App Source store. We make it available for people to go ahead and download and test it out. It’s a Microsoft Word.

Dennis Kennedy:

Cool. So Jackie, first of all, it’s so awesome for us to have you as guests on the podcast. You spoke to my Michigan State University AI and law class last semester, and I knew right then, I mean I kind of knew it before the Tom and I needed to get you on the show. My students really appreciated the talk that you gave them. So sometimes I get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology, both old and new technology and its benefits to those in the legal profession. Would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology? You really have a great knack for it.

Jackie Schafer:

Thank you for saying that. I actually think that maybe it comes from when I was in college. My college job was that I was a wedding singer, so I spent a lot of time sort of communicating with maybe inebriated audiences or just sort of reading the room kind of thing. I actually think it really does pay off because I’m always thinking about my audience and what they care about and what they’re able to even process in any given time. So I think where a lot of people are right now in terms of the lawyers who are learning about AI is that they feel very overwhelmed. And so when you talk to them in a way that’s really focused on technical aspects of models and rag and different techniques, and it might seem like it’s giving you credibility as a speaker to show everything that, but I think for a lot of the audience, it’s just not something they particularly care about.

They really just want to know how does this impact me and what do I need to be doing right now and is this something I can use? Is it secure? So I tend to just really think a lot about who I’m talking to and what they care about. That’s probably my simplest approach to communicating about ai and I spend a lot of my time as the CEO of a legal tech company. I’m still in the trenches talking with our customers because that really helps inform for me the direction of the product. So I do feel like I have a strong understanding of where lawyers are right now.

Tom Mighell:

Something you said in that last response leads perfectly into this next question, which is that you feel like some of the lawyers are overwhelmed by artificial intelligence, and I think that even people who are comfortable with technology can be overwhelmed by artificial intelligence too. But that of leads into a topic we discuss a lot on the podcast, which is technology competence and the duty, I’ll put the duty in quotes because I still haven’t seen it really enforced anywhere in the world, but we talk about technology competence and Dennis and I kind of have a dim view of the current state, but we always like to have our guests either reinforce our views or tell us it’s really a lot better out there. What do you think, what are you seeing out there in terms of lawyer competence around the use of technology and the practice of law?

Jackie Schafer:

Well, I will say that I may have a bit of a skewed view because my customers are people who are using clear brief. So they’re already a step ahead of most, maybe the majority of the profession who haven’t really been using AI tools if recent surveys are to be believed and that sort of thing. But I will say that tend to see the folks who are diving in, they break into two different styles where there are some people who just have a very interesting, I think really, really valuable open-minded perspective where they are just here to try it out. They’re here to be vulnerable, I guess in a way and sort of know that they may not understand it right away. They may not be perfect at it, but they’re just going to dive in, they’re going to experiment and they also leave themselves a little breathing room.

So they’re not sort of just trying to use it the day something is due. They know that they need to kind of build it in as part of their practice so they’re setting aside time to learn and use it in advance of a deadline. And then there’s also another group of folks that tend to be very anxious about the use of technology and maybe struggle a little bit with understanding what’s going on behind the scenes and thinking that every single attempt that they make is going to be easy the first time kind of thing. So I think it’s really helpful to have that attitude of that growth mindset that, look, I’m going to come into this, and we try to make our platform as easy to use and as simple as possible. And actually we hear that feedback all the time that, wow, it’s really intuitive. But still, I think lawyers we’re so used to being super confident and knowing exactly what to do in every situation, that just using a new technology tool is going to feel different to you. So just go into that process and know that it’s okay. It’s okay to feel little vulnerable. It’s okay to feel like you’re not perfect at it right away. You will immediately see the value once you get the hang of it.

Dennis Kennedy:

You were talking about surveys of lawyer use. I just a couple of weeks ago spoke at a session of 150 litigators and I asked how many were using the GPT-4 level tools, which I explained to them meant that they were paying $20 a month, so 150 people in the room, five of them raised their hands. There was a young lawyer who I talked to later who said, when you asked that question, I raised my hand and I saw that enthusiastically raised his hand and he said, then I was like, oh, am I doing something wrong? So I have the sense that whatever the duty of technology competence is that maybe we’re not quite close to that yet. So maybe as a follow up, would you talk about your own view of what that duty ideally should mean for lawyers today, litigators or others?

Jackie Schafer:

Sure. So I think we can think of it similarly as we do our CLE requirements where in our heads we know okay, there there’s certain chunks of time throughout the year I need to spend going to A CLE and a CLE is kind of usually a passive experience where you’re just sort of sitting back and absorbing. This is kind of like a action oriented CLE, maybe think about it that way, where I see a lot of customers actually who tell me that they have time that they block on Fridays where they experiment with technology, where they learn things, where they just kind of get up to speed on different technology tools. I think that’s a really, really smart way to approach it. Just block 30 minutes. It could be 30 minutes every two weeks or something like that, but don’t cheat and use that time for something else. You really need to make it part of your practice that you are and your team. So I also see a lot of law firm leaders where they’re sort of like, look, my practice has been going for 30 plus years. I’m not going to really be changing things dramatically, but I want my team to know how to use it and that’s how our firm is going to benefit from it. So that’s something that every law firm can implement today.

Tom Mighell:

I haven’t practiced law in 15 years and I think that’s a really wonderful way to look at. It kind of reminds me of Google’s 20% time that they spend on their projects that mean something to them. Just spending a little bit of time on what is important to them I think is kind of a new dynamic in the law firm environment that at least I wasn’t familiar with when I was practicing. We love to talk about collaboration technology on this podcast. We wrote a book about it. We love to talk about collaboration as much as we can. So one of our questions to our guest is always, what are your favorite ways to collaborate? How do you collaborate with your customers, with your colleagues? What’s the best way that you find to keep in touch and work with people?

Jackie Schafer:

Sure. Well, I’ll talk a little bit about Clear Brief because I’m the product leader and so I think a lot about collaboration. So one of the biggest problems that we’re solving with Clear Brief is when you’re trying to get a brief or motion filed, and there’s a lot of moving parts, maybe there’s 30 exhibits, and when I was a big law associate for example, I remember I might get the first draft going and I’d be super stressed sending it to the partner because I know the partner’s going to review it, they’re going to find some typos and that’ll be the only feedback I get from them. By the way, your period wasn’t italicized and whatever, and I’m like, I stayed up all night writing this. So what I really love about the way Clear Brief is designed is that the associate has a matter folder in the word add in where they can drag in all of their factual sources.

So we are talking 10,000, 20,000 pages of documents. They’re writing their brief and their motion and every time they cite to deposition transcript at 27, clear Brief will automatically display that page. So that means when I sent it to the partner, the partner, when they click the analyze button in clear brief, the partner opens up clear brief, the matter folder has been shared with them, the document becomes alive, the word doc becomes hyperlinked like you put on 3D goggles. And so that partner can see all those evidentiary sources so they know, okay, Jackie didn’t just invent that fact or whatever, they can see and verify themselves. But it also has this tool called did you mean where a clear brief will actually flag for me the associate, maybe I made a mistake, blue booking or from the California Style Manual that it should be formatted differently.

It will also automatically display the law. We partner with LexiNexis and Fast Case VL, so it displays the case. So I can double check did I accurately describe the case? So I’m kind of getting some help from AI before I send it to the partner. So when the partner gets it, those little tiny mistakes, they won’t find any hopefully. But the other nice thing is that the partner, this is something that I hear a lot by the way from law firm partners, they’re like, just don’t make ’em like they used to. Associates are just, I often get this poor quality draft sent to me and it’s frustrating. I don’t even know where the record is. I have to go find it and do my own research because I know that there was this evidence that they didn’t talk about. And so with Clear Brief, the evidence has already been dumped into Clear brief and stored in our SOC two type two certified environment. And so the partner can actually just kind of use a Google search type thing in clear brief if they’re like, I know somebody said something about the birthday party, and they can find that page and they can insert it themselves so they don’t have to know the Relativity password or whatever. They can just have that evidence at their fingertips to get what they need so they can add their own flavor to the brief. So those are some of the key ways we really see a very satisfying collaboration during the writing process.

Tom Mighell:

I have not been a litigator for now 16 years, and I will tell you that just hearing how that works just makes me, I can’t believe I’m saying I would want to be a litigator again, I really never want to be a litigator again, but just being able to use tools like that would be so interesting. Alright, we have a lot more questions for Jackie Schaefer, but first we need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Jackie Schafer at Clear Brief. We founded in the Fresh Voices the series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience does as well. My students loved hearing your career story when you spoke to my class. 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?

Jackie Schafer:

Sure. So I’ve had a lot of different experiences in the legal profession that I think really shaped what clear brief my company has become and the impact we’re able to have. So I started out, I went to law school wanting to change the world as one does, and I was lucky enough to have a summer associate position at Paul Weiss in New York, and I graduated actually in 2008 when it was actually the day Lehman Brothers collapsed was my first day of work at Paul Weiss led to a very actually busy litigation season. It was very scary in a way of feeling like, oh my God, I wonder if that feeling of just uncertainty did somewhat shape my approach to my career. But it was a wonderful place to start and really learn about excellence in legal writing. Paul Weiss has such a strong legal writing culture and just such brilliant attorneys there, but also you’re working on a very large team to get something done.

And I really wanted more ownership and to kind of be in the arena and sort of see what I could do without being in a large firm. And also at the time I met my husband who’s from Alaska, so it was very surprising to everyone at Paul Weiss when I told them I was moving to Alaska and I actually, I went to work at an Alaska native corporation, which was super interesting and I learned a lot about contracts and HR, giving advice to HR and that sort of thing, and as well as really complex securities type information. And it was a really fascinating environment. And then I realized I wanted to get back in the Courtroom, so I applied to an opening in the appellate section of the Alaska Attorney General’s office, and I stayed there for several years. It was an incredible role where I got to regularly brief and argue cases before the Alaska Supreme Court and I really had that experience of working on briefs from start to finish.

And of course you’d get input from colleagues, but it was actually similar in some ways to being a solo practitioner where you don’t have as much administrative support as maybe you like or would want to have if you were in a bigger firm environment. So that also ended up shaping my understanding of what I wanted clear brief to do when I founded the company. So from there, I actually was recruited by the Washington Attorney General’s office and then I went in-house to try to change the world in a role that leveraged my experience. When I was at the ags office, I did a lot of child welfare appellate work and Indian Child Welfare Act work. So I went to Casey Family Programs and so that’s a national nonprofit. It’s like a 3 billion nonprofit that’s trying to bring data science to government agencies. So it was there that I really started learning about data science and AI and just sort of felt like if I’m going to take a risk in my career, it should be, this is the time I’ve sort of tried a lot of different roles and I always sort of felt this desire to work on systems change and to really have ownership over ideas and initiatives that I wanted to pursue.

So there was a sort of foundational moment where I was working on a pro bono case, an asylum case, and I had to write this massive 50 page brief and I went in for that final hearing and I felt like immediately the judge was just very hostile towards me and my client and he just was really frustrated. She was pregnant and he made some comment about that and I just thought, oh my God, we’re going to lose. But I ended up pointing him to my brief and then some of the underlying evidence that I had cited to him, which was like a declaration from a therapist, and I saw the judge review that and he changed his mind and I really saw the power of that where it wasn’t my advocacy, it was looking at that source document and those evidence documents that changed his mind and we won and he granted my client’s asylum and it was such an incredible moment for my client and it was probably one of the most satisfying moments you can get as a lawyer.

But that experience really influenced what I thought was missing in the legal writing process, which is how do you keep that evidence visible and how do you share it back with the court in a very simple way at the end of the process. So Clear Brief has a tool like at the end you click a button that it makes a hyperlinked version of your document that you can securely file and share with the court. So I’m so proud that this is being used now daily and shared with courts across the country. We have courts themselves using it. They hyperlink themselves parties, briefs so that they can read them with that insight into the evidence, and that’s really how Clear Brief was born.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, so for listeners at home who have the Kennedy Mighell Report bingo card up, it’s now time for the obligatory generative AI question that we talk about in every podcast. Lots of hype around generative ai, lots of tools that are coming out. What role are you seeing tools like Chat, GPT and other generative AI tools playing in the legal field in legal technology, how it can be used now and then where do you see it maybe changing in the future? That was a bunch of questions there, sorry.

Jackie Schafer:

Yeah, absolutely. So I don’t recommend that lawyers use Chat GPT for anything really in their actual practice in terms of the actual legal work that they do. If you pay for the special version, you make sure you click all the right things so that everything you’re exempt from their training, their data sets, et cetera, then you could I think use Chat JPT, I mean the latest version basically for certain tasks related to your practice. But I strongly recommend using a legal tech product that has been specifically purpose, purpose-built for lawyering as I think it’s just going to be a much less frustrating process. And my particular philosophy, so Clear Brief has several generative AI tools that are built into the platform. They’re optional though. So the core platform, I explained some of the core features are using what I’m calling classic ai, things like it’ll extract everything from a document and make a chart for you with hyperlinks to the evidence.

So if you search, you’re like, I want to find everything the witnesses said about roses, it’ll make a chart like that that doesn’t need generative ai. However, we do have certain features. We have one called Instant Hyperlinked Timeline, extremely popular where you can dump in 10,000 documents, click a button and Clear Brief will create a timeline that extracts every date, summarizes the events that happened on that date and provide a link to the source. So it’s helping with that task of just making sense of your documents and that chronology that most lawyers do at the start of the case. Then another generative AI feature is you can click a button and it will turn that you’re edited, you can edit it right in Microsoft Word, turn that timeline into a demand letter or turn it into a fax section with the hyperlinks after every sentence.

So this is solving for one of the biggest issues with chat GBT type things where you can upload sources and it might sometimes give you citations to things, but it doesn’t allow you to visualize and see the source side by side. It doesn’t allow for that collaboration and sharing. It’s not necessarily at the security level that you need. So clear brief has just been purpose built for that legal writing process, and that’s probably the thing everyone says when they see this like, oh, obviously a litigator built this product. This is actually designed for what we do and how we think and all of our little quirks and fears we’ve thought about it. So that’s probably I would say the biggest challenge with generative AI is that it can summarize away from the actual evidence to make hallucinations. That’s the kind of terminology around things that are not accurate to the source, but it can also just summarize away the details that you actually care about as a litigator. So we’ve really put a lot of thought into how our generative AI is structured. We also don’t have prompting in our product, so it’s really a set workflow where it’s almost like a wizard workflow where guides you through each step, and that seems to help a lot of folks who struggle with getting good results from just classic sort of chat GPT that requires you to develop a totally separate skill, which is prompting.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, it is interesting. I like the way you described it. I sometimes think that you as a lawyer, you don’t want to rely on a chat GPT type of tool for something that I would call a deliverable, a legal service deliverable, but it makes sense if you’re using it as an assistant or for things that don’t ultimately end up in a deliverable. There’s one thing I really have always liked in clear brief where it will, and I think this is a sort of a new direction that AI is going with the notion of hints to say, oh, the AI is going to give you a hint, but I always like the thing where you could say, oh, you refer to exhibit page 26, hint, maybe you met page 27 or this is like 80% of what you want versus a hundred percent. So those are the things I think are really interesting.

And as I know our listeners to the show, and probably everybody who knows me is familiar with, I’ve been a fan of Clear Brief since I first saw it and I mention it all the time, and what always struck me about it was that it has this great focus on a problem that really needs to be solved or as we often say on the show, a job to be done. And that’s why that sort of hinting notion is really appealing to me when you were talking about it, but the use case I saw right away and the first time we ever talked that I’d like you to talk about is how judges, and I think really importantly, they’re law clerks can use the tool and how they’re already using it.

Jackie Schafer:

Yeah, that has been so cool to see. I feel like I’m finally achieving what I’ve always wanted when I was talking about my reason for wanting to go into the legal profession is to really have an impact and to help with systems change. I just love being able to help law clerks and judges who are really burdened with so much busy work, so much tedious work that technology can really, really help them with. So in order for them to make good decisions, they need to be able to understand and get a grasp of the evidence. But if you think about their dockets and how many cases they’re having to look at at any given time, it’s almost like superhuman what we’re asking them to do. The pages of the record, there’s just, like I said, maybe 10,000 in a small case, 10,000 pages of evidence that you’re expecting the judge to understand.

And so they can’t only rely on the parties briefing. They need to also kind of do their own digging in order to make sure that they’ve made a fair assessment of the case. So by using Clear Brief themselves, they can drag in the record clear brief it that allows them to actually hyperlink the party’s briefs automatically inside Clear Brief. You can drag in A PDF and it will convert it into a Word doc, make all of the citations to the law, clickable, invisible, and then if you’ve uploaded the facts, it’ll connect the facts as well. So that lets them read one of the party’s briefs with much better understanding of what they’re talking about faster and allows them to quickly do their own searches and kind of do their own diligence into the case. And I think that will really help ultimately as we get more and more courts using it. We already have several courts across the country, including the state appellate courts, a handful of federal judges and clerks using it, and we definitely hear from ’em about how it helps them with site checking with efficiency for their own writing as well.

Tom Mighell:

We’ve got a lot more questions to ask Jackie Schafer from Clear Brief ai, but we need to take a quick break for another message from our sponsors. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Dennis Kennedy, and I’m Tom Mighell, and we are joined by our special guest, Jackie Schafer of Clear Brief. We have time for just a few more questions, and the question that I usually like to end with is sort of a tradition we now have for this Fresh Voices series, which is sort of what I’m calling your best advice question. So what’s the best advice that either you’ve been given by someone that you’ve used or the best advice that you have for maybe our listeners or both, but anything that you would consider to be best advice that you’d like to share with our listeners?

Jackie Schafer:

Sure. So I actually had the pleasure last week of being invited to speak on a panel to law school deans across the country. They happened to be meeting in Seattle, and the question was around sort of how could law schools change or improve in order to address the impact of AI in our profession? And my advice was based on a recent viewing of Back to the Future too, where Michael J. Fox was blasted forward to the future, which was 2015. He was coming from the eighties and there were still bullies in 2015, and he had to escape the bully. So he saw a hoverboard that some kids were using and he jumped right on the hoverboard and just figured, Hey, my skateboarding skills will be applicable here probably and just ended up using it to escape the bullies and win the day. I think there’s a couple of lessons there.

First of all that I do think that just like his skateboarding skills, the classics of legal education, like being a strong writer, doing really significant preparation, having good issue spotting skills, these are going to continue to be very important in the future in the age of ai. But the thing that Michael J. Fox did that most lawyers are not doing is he jumped on the hoverboard. Okay, so he just went for it. I think most of us wouldn’t do that. We’d just be like, well, I’m going to wait and see what the other people ride hover, see what it looks like, figure out. He just jumped on the hoverboard. And I mean, yes, he was trying to escape Biffs offspring of the future, but I think the lesson there is that we can’t really hang back. We need to just jump right in. We need to be experimenting with it. That’s the skill that I’m seeing really differentiate the folks that I’m meeting with lawyers across the country who I’m seeing how they are standing out at their firms, they’re getting clients that the firm is sort of punching above its weight and getting new clients that want tech forward law firms. It’s just a huge opportunity. And if you’re not jumping on the hoverboard, you’re missing out.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, exactly. So I’ll end with two questions. So one 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 you are very encouraging to my students on this. And then we’ll end with who are the fresh voices in legal tech that you might like to single out and see as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Jackie Schafer:

Okay, sure. So in terms of how to build a unique career, how to get involved in legal tech, I think you’d be surprised if you see a startup that you really think what they’re doing is really promising and unique, reach out to the founders on LinkedIn. And that doesn’t mean just send them a blank connection request. It means write a tailored message. It means maybe figure out their email, send a really nice cover email. I think we’ve actually hired students from your class, professor Kennedy because they’ve done that. You’d just be surprised at the most innovative companies, we definitely, it’s hard to hire when you’re so busy and you’re building things and everything’s moving so quickly. So when you have somebody reach out who just is offering their services in a way that really speaks to what you’re doing, they’re going to get an interview.

So that I think applies across the board. A technique that I use a fair amount actually is probably also volunteering throughout my career where it kind of even goes back to that story I told about the asylum case I worked on. I was really interested in helping with the asylum crisis in our country and sort of, I wasn’t going to be able to apply and get a job doing that with my, I just didn’t have any background in that. But for volunteering, there’s just so many pro bono cases that need help. It can really be a way to grow your skills, to spark your creativity. So I strongly suggest doing pro bono work in an area that you feel compelled and that you feel like this might be pulling me in a certain direction. Let me try and experiment here. It builds your resume, it builds your networking connections.

In terms of legal tech voices, I would say I love folks who approach this area with humor. So Conn Hines is one who’s standing out to me recently as he’s doing a lot of really funny posts. Matt Margolis is hilarious, and Alex Sue. I think just finding the folks who see the humor. I try to make my posts funny. I don’t know if there’s exceeding, but I think finding the folks in the legal tech profession who have a sense of humor about this insane transformation we’re experiencing, I enjoy that so much. And I feel like just you should be following all different types of thinkers, not only just in legal tech, but in AI in general. If you passively follow on LinkedIn, that’s what I mean by follow these different leaders and Ethan Molik and different people who are constantly posting about the latest developments in ai. You’ll absorb the technology terms, but I feel like in terms of just brightening your day and helping you cope with constant change and transformation, it’s good to follow comedians.

Tom Mighell:

I love that you’ve given us names we haven’t gotten before, so that’s even more potential guests for the show. So I’m glad to know, even though our listeners will also benefit from hearing that as well. We want to thank Jackie Schaefer, founder and CEO of Clear Brief AI for being a guest on the show. Jackie, before we go, can you tell people where to get in touch with you, where to see what you’re doing at Clear Brief? How do you want people to either get in touch with you or learn more about you?

Jackie Schafer:

Yeah, so please email me. You can email [email protected] and it will get forwarded to me. I would love to connect with any listeners. Also, I’m on LinkedIn. That’s probably my biggest social media outlet, so if you can just look for me. Jacqueline Schafer, you’ll find me on LinkedIn, the founder and CEO of Clear Brief.

Dennis Kennedy:

Great. Thank you so much, Jackie. You were as expected, a fantastic guest with great information and advice for our listeners. Now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can use this second, this podcast ends Jackie, take it away.

Jackie Schafer:

So I would suggest any litigator listening, you should never be doing your table of authorities manually ever again. You can go to the Microsoft AppSource store search for clear brief. We make it available to download and test yourself, and you click a button, it will instantly create your table of authorities for you. It’s quite amazing. It will save you so much suffering.

Tom Mighell:

Amen to that. Alright, my parting shot is travel related. I just got back from a trip to the United Kingdom, a vacation, and I have in the past couple of years not been happy with how my mobile provider has handled roaming data. And so I realized that my phone has the capability for an eim, a virtual SIM card. Never used it before. So for those of you already doing it, congratulations. Thank you. Welcome me to the club, but I will call out an app called, I think it’s called Pronounced alo. A-I-R-A-L-O. Alo is a tool that will sell you virtual sim cards for about 20 countries, and you can purchase it for, I bought for $36. I bought 20 gigs of storage of data for the uk. I didn’t even get through half of it. That resulted in no further charges to my account. But I will say it was nice because I was still able to get calls and text messages through my regular mobile and I was able to use the EIM for mobile data. So it was a terrific experience, highly recommended. If you want to stop using going and purchasing the travel packages or dealing with your mobile provider, ALO is a great option, Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy:

So you’re right, Tom. I do have an AI thing and last week I was at a conference where people were talking about all these esoteric and really difficult experiments they were doing with AI that I got to confess, I don’t know exactly how they’re going to work, but I like to give people examples of stuff that I do that I think work. And so what I now realize is that I have a personal project manager for every project that I have, whether it’s professional or personal, and it’s in chat GPT-4 oh, and it’s in Claude 3.5. Have a prompt that defines a persona that is an expert project manager, and then I just give it my project with a little description and it applies some project management techniques and puts together timelines and stuff like that as a first draft. And it’s amazing. And the ROI on it for my $20 a month is absolutely incredible.

Tom Mighell:

Is it reaching out and keeping you on track with your deadlines? What a good project manager does, Des, is it pinging you?

Dennis Kennedy:

I will connect it to Apple Reminders soon,

Tom Mighell:

But we’ll save that discussion for another podcast. Alright, so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mall report. Thank you 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’s website. If you’d like to follow us, you can reach out to us in iTunes in your favorite podcast app or from Legal Talk Networks site. If you want to get in touch with us, you remember, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn and we still would love to get your comments or questions at our 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

Dennis Kennedy:

I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to this 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 two that helps us out. And it’s really great for the Fresh Voices series. 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.

Announcer:

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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