Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Amy Conroy

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 373 of the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor, and

Tom Mighell:

I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy:

In our last episode, we had another guest in our Fresh Voices in Legal Tech series, Amanda Brown of Lanyap Lawlab. So must listen. 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 in Legal Tech interview series with Amy Conroy, who among other things is principal data scientist at Mishcon de Reya, LLP in London, the co-founder and director of Law School 2.0, and a visible and insightful contributor in the legal tech world. We want our Fresh Voices series to not only introduce you to terrific leaders in legal tech space, but to provide you with their perspective on the things you should be paying attention to in legal tech. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Amy Conroy to our Fresh Voices series. Amy, welcome to the Kennedy Mighell Report.

Amy Conroy:

Thank you for having me.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit about, more about you, about Mishcon de Reya about Law School 2.0, what your audience should know to get started?

Amy Conroy:

Yeah, of course. So at Mishcon de Reya, I am a data scientist and here I’m responsible for a few different strands of work. The first is our litigation data strand of work within our data science team, and that’s really looking at how as a firm we can collect more information around our litigation work and in the future do predictive analytics on that work. So the more exciting can we predict outcomes, things like that. But in the first instance, we need to start collecting that information. So I’ve developed a strategy around that within our data team. The second strand of work is our MDR research strand of work. So we collaborate with a few different universities and other institutions on different research papers and studies as well, which we’ve published a few articles on really focusing on how we can make legal tech more accessible. We’ve done some research on predicting outcomes, things like that.

And then the final strand of work, which takes up most of my time at mishcon, is our automation strand of work. So that’s primarily working with power apps and power automate, so the power platform to build out different applications for data collection and really automate a lot of the processes that we have. So it’s not what a traditional data scientist does if you think about big tech companies such as Google, et cetera. But within Mishcon it’s really around the initial stages of a data scientist journey. So we’re looking at the collection and centralization of data so that we can make more informed decisions and serve our clients better. Then the other hat that I wear as you mentioned is as the co-founder of law School 2.0. So law school 2.0 was founded by myself and Annabel Pemberton and Nathan Core a few years ago now because we were fresh out of law school into the world of legal tech, we realized there was no traditional path to get into legal tech.

So we decided to build out this organization to bring people together to help them understand what they need to know about legal tech to work, whether they’re want to work in a law firm, work for legal tech company, et cetera. And so we started doing what we called Legal Tech Summer Vacation Scheme. So each summer so far we’ve run a one week long program where we teach people problem framing, solution creation and solution adoption. So really a tech agnostic approach to legal tech, which has now gone on to really underpin the curriculum in our course, which is the legal service innovation course. So those are kind of two key offerings which are both available for free.

Dennis Kennedy:

That’s great, Amy. First of all, it’s so awesome for us to have you as a guest on the podcast. You’re doing so many cool things and I can already tell that Tom is going to be your new best friend after this podcast. So sometimes I get a little frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology old and new and its benefits to those in the legal profession. You’re in an even harder area in some ways in data science, but so would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology and topics like data science that lawyers often find complex intimidating, and as lawyers often say too much like math?

Amy Conroy:

Yeah, of course. It’s something that always pops into mind when I think about communicating with lawyers. In my last role at a legal tech company, we were helping one of the users troubleshoot an issue that they were having and they had to reset their password. So we were on the phone with them, they received the email to reset their password and it had a button there that said, click here to reset your password and this user copy and pasted the words, click here to reset your password and then put that into Google and searched click here to reset your password in Google. And so that was kind of my first experience being like, you have to really appreciate the fact that people won’t approach things or think about things the way that you do, and you have to think about what’s the simplest way to approach this.

So when I’m speaking to lawyers, especially about something as complex as data science, I like to think about it from the what’s in it for me approach. So rather than starting with the side of it that I really enjoy, which is here’s everything we could do with all of your data. Think about well, if we’re going to build out this new application for collecting data, actually it’s going to save you a lot of time because you’re not having to go into Excel spreadsheets and free type. We can pull in other information and speed up this process. So making them understand the value of what’s in it for them. And I have both a legal and computer science background from university, so I find it, I could get really swept away with the technicalities of explaining different sides of what we’re doing in data science, but I think it’s really important to, rather than focusing on how we do certain things within data science, it’s really the why side of it. So it’s all about avoiding jargon when explaining what our team does.

Tom Mighell:

It’s funny when you mentioned that story that takes me way back to when I was still working at the law firm and I was helping the other lawyers with legal technology, and I believe that we had just gotten our very first Windows computers, and it was in the nineties at some point, and I walked by the name partner’s office and he had taken the mouse and he was holding it up in the air and pointing it at the computer screen, like a remote control. And I thought then this is what job security looks like. And it was for a while. But that kind of leads into the next question, which is something that we talk about a lot on the podcast, which is technology competence here in the United States we have a lot of discussion about it. It’s been written into the ethical rules of most of the states and the nation, but we see very little enforcement of it. And to be honest, Dennis and I are a little skeptical about the level of technology competence. What are you seeing on your side of the pond in terms of technology competence in the lawyers that you come in contact with? Do you feel like it’s improving, it’s staying the same? How does it look like from where you sit?

Amy Conroy:

So I think generative AI has really changed things in the past couple of years. So from when I first started working in legal tech, it felt like it was a lot more of a struggle to get people to understand why you wanted them to implement certain types of technologies and then all of a sudden what opening AI and what they did with chat GPT with their marketing strategy was just amazing. They made such a complex technology, so simple to use, and what really excited me was how many people kind of came to our team and they’re like, how can I get my hands on this? Can I use it to draft documents? Things like that. So as a firm, it was a really interesting time to be like, well no, let’s not use chat GBT to do that. We have these other tools that you can use.

So it’s kind of a pivoting point where you could start to direct them to the other legal tech that they have. But I think as a whole across the UK, there is this increasing awareness about the importance of technology. A lot of this is stemmed from generative ai, but there is still a lag in the expertise that we have. So there’s sometimes a gap speaking to in other firms as well between the lawyers and the innovation teams in a firm. So the innovation teams who are there to implement these legal tech tools. But I think lawyers can be quite keen to get involved and to be like, I really want to use this cool tool that I saw on LinkedIn or a friend at another firm is using, but they jump straight into the solution stage and one firm is going to have a very different problem than a different firm.

So that’s the gap that I think we’re seeing now is now we need to understand as a whole how we implement new tools, how they should be addressing a specific problem. There is of course still a resistance to change. I think there’s always going to be the people who’ve been at the firm for 40, 50 years who are like, I don’t want any process to change. This is the way I’ve always done it. But now with a new generation of graduates coming into the work stream who have been using these technologies through the entire time that they’ve been studying, it’ll be quite a shock for them to get into a law firm and then have to go back to writing things down. I did work experience when I was in university and it was working for a small firm back in Canada and they were drafting wills, and I remember I had to go through, they didn’t even have square brackets, they just had things highlighted.

So I had to go through and type everything in. And at that point I had no idea about document automation, but I was still like, surely there’s a better way to be doing this. And I think we’re going to have that same approach now where people will be using generative AI or similar tools in university because some universities are starting to adopt that and then they’re going to come into firms and expect there to be this technology. So now it’s about really having those innovation teams and the lawyers identifying the different problems within their firm and then deciding which solutions they should implement to actually address those problems.

Tom Mighell:

I think they’re in a better position now to do that than they were in the past. When I was still working at the law firm, the younger lawyers, what I would call digital natives rather than digital immigrants, they were comfortable with technology, but they just sort of accepted the way that it was being used at the firm because they didn’t want to make waves. They didn’t know better, but I think that they’re starting to know better. So I hope that evolution is taking place.

Dennis Kennedy:

So classes at Michigan State Law School start next week and I’m looking forward to it, but one of the things I’m really looking forward to is seeing the experience of the students when they come back with the technology they’ve had, especially AI during their work experience. And I always tell people, they say, what do students think of technology? And I say they all feel like they’re taking a giant step backwards when they go into law firms. So what’s interesting is I try to figure out ways to teach them and to come up with projects and things to help them move forward. What’s the best way to do that? And I like what you’re saying about there is this tendency among lawyers and firms to say, to go solution first and then problem. What problem do we even need to think about problems? And I think that causes a lot of different issues.

I was talking with somebody yesterday who asked me, how would you use generative AI to analyze litigation data? And I was like, well, I would want to use better tools for one thing. I said, but I think it’s useful in that it lowers a barrier to entry and I could try some things that maybe help point me to the right tools and make decisions and get some directionality. So I’ve talked to students about data usage, data protection a lot, and I kind of want to get some suggestions of how do you think you help, what are the best ways to help lawyers get some level of competence or literacy about the technology they’re using? And is part of the answer what you’re doing with law school 2.0?

Amy Conroy:

So one of the first things that came to mind was in our legal service innovation course, we actually had Dan Ley, he was at Mishcon, he is now at v ls, but he did a module on data-driven thinking and the importance of that for law students and lawyers as well, which covered on the ethics point too, but I think data underpins everything. All of these generative AI models have been trained on data, and if that’s bad data, then you’re going to get bad outputs. And it’s the same thing in a law firm. So what I always like to say when we’re talking about the importance of collecting structured data, so everything is rather than having dates that are typed 10 different ways, we have some sort of structure there. Or rather than calling a court that you’re in 10 different names, you have a list that you use across the firm so everyone’s using the same name.

So having that kind of structured data is so important so that our lawyers, rather than going to a client and saying, well, listen, I think you’ll probably win this case because I’ve done a bunch and I’m tied to be really good at them. Instead, they can go to their clients and say, well actually I’ve done 20, I’ve succeeded at 18 of these applications, and we did it in three to five months on average because you have that structured data. And right now most firms aren’t really collecting that litigation data, but this is something that people can start to do when they’re in university too, that you’re structuring your notes so that you can really easily search that information, which you don’t need generative AI for. You can structure everything in whatever tool that you use. And then the same thing when they come to a firm, you can start to use Excel to track this type of information and then you can just be a much better lawyer.

Because I always think about it, if I was a client and I was spending a lot of money on a lawyer, I would want them to give me data-driven insights into why they think they’re going to be successful or why they think I need to spend 200,000 on a case to get X amount. So you want to understand why they’re approaching it that way. So I think that’s the real importance of why we should be thinking in a data-driven way. And then the ethics side of it is it really comes back to generative ai. I don’t think people fully appreciated that with all these tools that you’re using, if you’re putting client information in there, suddenly you have a breach of all the agreements that you have with your clients. So it’s really important to understand where this data is going, the obligations that you have to protect personal information.

And in the same way, if you’re going to be tracking the outcomes of your cases, if you have personal information in there, you do have to be checking with your firm to make sure it’s okay that you’re collecting that wherever you are collecting that, if you’re going to try and put it in a tool that you’ve signed up to on your own, your firm needs to make sure that that complies with their policies. So there’s all of these different considerations that in the long run I think will just make them better lawyers really, because I do think we’re heading towards a data-driven. While I’d like to think we’re heading towards a data-driven legal practice in the future,

Tom Mighell:

Let’s take a right turn and talk about a different topic, and that is collaboration. We love to talk about collaboration tools and technologies on this podcast, and so we’re always interested to learn about what our guests use for collaboration. What are the tools that are most effective for you either working with people at Mishcon or with law school 2.0 or just the people out in the world that you deal with?

Amy Conroy:

Yeah, so I’m a very old fashioned, I like to take pen and paper notes. I have my pen and paper agenda that I do. And when we’re in person as a team, we really like to get a whiteboard out, get some sort of big old paper and put sticky notes down so that everyone’s interacting, you’re actually drawing out things together. I think people have a real tendency of speaking and speaking and speaking, and I’m the type of person zone out after five minutes if you’re just talking at me. But when you have a meeting where everyone’s engaging and they’re using sticky notes, they’re providing ideas, they’re writing things down, it’s just going to be a lot more interactive. And with the shift to hybrid working at law school 2.0, we tend to use mural and we all live in different, Nathan lives in Scotland. I live in London and Annabelle’s currently in Prague, so we’re running law school 2.0 across different countries. So we use mural to work together and then we use Slack to communicate. And then at Mishcon we tend to use teams built-in whiteboard feature as well so that you can mimic some of the things that you do in person online.

Tom Mighell:

All good tools. All good tools. We have lots more questions for Amy Conroy at Mishcon Dere and Law School 2.0. But first we need to take a quick break for a message from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Amy Conroy, principal data scientists at Mishcon Dere in London. We found in the Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience does as well. Would you talk about your career path and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus? And I’m especially interested, I look back at my time at MasterCard, given your background, it’d be really tempting for me to try to talk you into becoming a lawyer for our whole data group or to have you into some of our info governance or the whole data team. So how did you make the choice and could you talk about your career path maybe as a way to illustrate to students and others how they might do something similar?

Amy Conroy:

Yeah, of course. So like I mentioned, I’m actually from Canada originally and I came over to study law at the University of Bristol fully with the full intention of going back to Canada and practicing as a lawyer there. But while I was in Bristol, I fell in love with the UK and during my undergrad degree and during my law degree, I did an IT law module. And so at that point within the eu, you have the right to be forgotten. So you have the right to contact Facebook or any tech company, any company really, and ask for them to erase your personal data. And I wrote my thesis on how compatible is that with machine learning algorithm, so if they’re anonymizing your data, is that still protecting your personal data rights? I found that incredibly interesting, but I had no idea how machine learning algorithms worked.

So then I went on to do a master’s of computer science. So this was a conversion program that Bristol offered. So it was one year program that kind of takes you up to speed as if you’d done a full computer science undergraduate degree. Again, found it really interesting coming from, I hadn’t done math in five years I think at that point. So it was quite the transition then to jump into computer science where you need quite a math C brain, especially switching from doing my law degree, but again, really enjoyed it, didn’t fully want to be a software engineer. I wanted to still use my law degree and I did my thesis during my computer science degree on creating a automatic judgment summarization system. So this was before its time with generative ai, but this was just using supervised machine learning, so it’s quite simple in that we had annotators go through and annotate different judgments for their outcome.

They animated sentences based on the rhetorical role that that sentence played within the judgment as well. So whether that was a fact sentence, these were appeals, so whether that discussed the proceedings, things like that. So that was the kind of data that we were using. And then the annotators compared actual summaries of the judgments, so manual written summaries against the judgment itself. And they went through and said, yeah, this sentence corresponds to one from the summary, and that’s how we decided whether a sentence was relevant or not. And then we used all that information to create a system that outputted summaries at the end, again, really enjoyed that. We wrote a couple papers on that with Bristol, and then I took the dive into working at a legal tech company, their document automation startup as a legal engineer, did that for about a year and a half.

And then I decided that I still wanted to use some of the stuff that I had done in computer science and this opportunity popped up at Mishcon and I realized it was the perfect way to combine both of my degrees and still be a bit technical, but also work within law. So for me, it was a number of different things that made me realize what I was passionate about, and I really love taking my kind of joy within my job is taking a problem that’s presented to me and thinking within the tools that we have at our firm, whether that’s coding something new, whether that’s power apps, power automate, how can we design a solution that solves that problem as best as possible? So working within the constraints of what we have at the firm, but definitely not the path that I expected to go on, which I think for most people in legal tech it’s a very similar story. You just kind of have ended up where you are, but it’s definitely been an interesting one.

Tom Mighell:

So I want to go back to something you said at the beginning of that answer, which is I am incredibly interested to know what your conclusion was from the paper on whether machine learning can appropriately anonymize personal information. Can you give me a short answer yes or no?

Amy Conroy:

At that point I said, yes, it would comply with the regulations as long as you took it basically as far as possible in anonymization and took out their data at the point that it’s not anonymized.

Tom Mighell:

Awesome. Okay, that’s good. That’s good. Good, good. Alright, we’re going to talk now about our obligatory chat GPT question because it is the only thing that people are talking about, generative ai. There is the hype cycle that is obviously still in play but probably has morphed a little since last year. I think it feels different this year than it did last year, but we wanted to talk about what you are seeing about how generative AI chat, GPT and similar tools, Claude, other things are playing in legal technology and how you feel like that’s going to mesh with data science, with information governance, knowledge management, anything that you might be working on with Mishcon de Reya or even law school 2.0.

Amy Conroy:

Yeah, and I think the way that it’s affected legal tech so far, and I’m sure you’ve seen this as well, is on the one side of it, we have existing legal tech tools that are now incorporating generative ai. So lots of document automation startups for example, trying to pull in some form of generative ai. And the other side is we have a whole other kind of field of tools that have popped up that are essentially chat GPT for law firms. And from speaking with a few different firms, I think how most of them are approaching it now is they’ve realized that they need to have some form of generative AI for their lawyers. And it comes back to what we talked about before where you have this new generation coming in who are using these tools on a day-to-day basis. I use chat GPT personally all the time for different things.

And so to not have that at work kind of feels like a real blocker and I think there will be a wave of talent who will just kind of look for the firms who have that type of innovation. So then there’s the firms who are either piloting these kind of legal tech tools who are doing these generative AI platforms for legal. We have firms who are building their own in-house tools, so they’re building chat GPTs for their firms. And then we do have firms who are waiting and seeing what happens with everything else. For me, what I find really interesting is going back to what I said before where I felt like generative AI has kind of opened the door for people being really excited about legal tech and actually being interested in using technology on a day-to-day basis. These tools can really start to provide a real hub for all of the information, all of the data that sits across the firm.

So right now, for instance, and this comes back to the litigation data strategy as well, but if I wanted to know if a colleague had worked on a similar case before, the best way to do that really in a firm is to go and talk to that colleague because it’s going to take you a long time to search across your time recording tools, your documented management system, wherever you keep all of this different information. There’s no centralized location. So what we’re really looking at is how can you start to pull all of these databases together and make it accessible so that our lawyers can chat with their assistant really, and that’s what our internal tool will do. But yeah, everything really comes back to this data point. So how can I easily access the data so that I can help my clients? And it comes back to those questions, how can I give them the information that they want? So whether that’s past budgets and their cases, precedents, et cetera, how do we pull all of that together and make it more accessible and also extracting information way faster? But I think especially in London, having spoken to different firms, what it’s coming down to is that a lot of clients are using generative AI technologies in their own work as well. So now they’re starting to really ask whether law firms are doing it when they’re putting their pitches out to the firms.

Tom Mighell:

Real quick follow up, what do you see in terms of law firms using copilot, good, bad, ugly? What are you thinking?

Amy Conroy:

I think it’s been hit or miss and it really depends on how well you’ve structured your data. Up until that point, we ran a really small trial with it, but it really does come down to, again, it’s making sure that you have everything structured and in place because it’s only what you get out of any of these tools is only as good as what you’re putting in. So that’s what we’ve been really focused on is how can we actually structure all of this information that we already have to make it more accessible first

Dennis Kennedy:

Information governance.

Amy Conroy:

Yep, absolutely.

Dennis Kennedy:

It always comes back to that, doesn’t it, Tom? It does. So I’ve been kind of thinking around the topic of that we have with the structured data, the tools that we have, tools that you’ve mentioned, we sort of have this layer of really mature, robust, powerful tools that are hard to, for the average lawyer, the average person to access in a really useful way. And so I’m intrigued with generative AI as helping on the input side to make that easier and on the output side to pull out information in the ways we need. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that, and I sort of think it comes down to this notion that law firms need to figure out, and I don’t know how they’re doing it actually because I’m not sure they have the right talent to do this yet to decide what should generative AI be used for, what is it good at, what is it not good at, and can we kind of assign it to the right rules? So that’s an observation. My question for you is that I have a habit of, and I have heard a long time of saying the European firms, especially the London firms, are way ahead of US firms in terms of legal technology and ai, and I just routinely say that, so I like to ask people who are in Europe, whether I’m still right in saying that, or how do you rate what’s happening in Europe to the US and to the rest of the world? Where do you look for the coolest things happening in legal tech?

Amy Conroy:

It’s a good question, and I would say that we often look to the American firms now when we’re looking at what’s happening, but I wouldn’t, it’s hard with generative AI and AI in general now because everyone’s kind of been fighting the same battle for the past year, year and a half. And when you look at the press releases that are coming out from different firms, you kind of sit back and go, oh, well we’re all building the same tool, aren’t we internally when you’re building internally? So I think it’s a new ball game in terms of figuring out who’s actually ahead and I imagine it will settle in the next year or so and it’ll start to become a lot more evident how successful certain things have been because it’s one thing to put press release out saying you’re piloting a tool. It’s another thing to actually have had a successful pilot with that tool.

Tom Mighell:

We’ve got more to talk about with Amy Conroy, but we need to take a quick break for a message from our sponsors. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy my report. I’m Dennis Kennedy, and I’m Tom Mighell, and we are joined by our special guest, Amy Conroy, principal data scientist at Mishcon de Reya and co-founder at Law School 2.0. We’ve got time for just a few more questions. Amy, I would like to ask what I consider our best advice question, which is can you give our listeners kind of what’s the best advice you’ve ever been given by somebody or what’s the best advice you have for our listeners? Or maybe if you got time for both and both,

Amy Conroy:

Of course. I’ll start with the best advice given, which I think also feeds into advice for listeners, but this one I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily advice that was given so much as something that I learned. So at my past role, we were trying to sell a and this document automation tool, and I remember how keen I was to just get this law firm to use it, even though I didn’t take, I was doing the shiny things syndrome where I was so excited and so swept up in them using this tool. I didn’t think about the problem that they had. And it was when I took a step back and we kind of crunched the numbers and we’re like, oh, the document that you’re interested in automating, you’ll do maybe four, you’ll draft four of them a month, which just isn’t worth the licensing fees. You may as well stick with what you have basically just drafting manually.

And that was when I realized that again, it comes back to that idea of making sure that you’re solving a real problem with the tool that you’re implementing. Otherwise you’re going to spend so much more money on a legal tech tool just for the sake of feeling like you’re using really advanced technology. So there is a lot that you can do, whether that’s with a PDF form, if it’s simple enough, something like that where you’re still doing some layer of automation, but it’s not costing you a lot. So the real focus there, whether you’re on the vendor side or whether you’re coming from the law firm, is making sure that you’re solving a problem with that solution. And especially if you’re coming from the vendor side, that’s going to earn you a lot of trust in this client. They’re going to be more likely to recommend you to other law firms because you are the one who said, actually, I don’t think our tool is right for you.

But then you can recommend other tools as well. And again, that’s what we really tried to focus on with law School 2.0 and Legal Service Innovation course is making sure that we took a really tech agnostic approach with it to make sure that people understood to start with the problem. Because sometimes you’ll realize that the solution to your problem is something that you never even thought of when you actually sit down and frame your problem. And then the other side, in terms of advice, I would say stay curious and keep learning. A lot of what I’ve learned about technology has come from other industries and looking at how they’re implementing technology as well. Law can be really quite far behind other industries. So keeping an eye on new technologies that are coming out like chat, GBT, being curious and thinking as a new tech or you see a new tech tool or you see another industry doing something, think about how that can apply to the legal services world as well, because things are rapidly evolving, so you have to keep up to date with new developments. So just keep that curiosity

Dennis Kennedy:

Going. It’s interesting how many of our guests talk about, look to the problems first, ask fundamental questions. And I find myself going to more and more saying, the simpler the questions, the better. So people ask me, how might I use ai? I can’t even imagine any way I would do it. I would say, look at the place. Where do you write off bills right now? Where do you write off time? Where do you give discounts? That is a really fertile place to start looking for experiments to try. But I want to wrap up with two questions. So first is, as I approach this next year of students, how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths like yours in legal tech and other non-traditional careers in law? And then second question we’d like to wrap up with, which is our lazy web question is who are the other fresh voices in legal tech you would like to signal out that you’d like to hear from and maybe see as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Amy Conroy:

The one piece of advice that I always give to people who ask how to find untraditional traditional career paths or how to find out more about Legal Tech is really reaching out to people in the industry. So finding them on LinkedIn. I was shocked when I was a fresh graduate to find out just how receptive people were to giving you 10, 15 minutes to chat through what they were seeing in the industry. And that’s how you’re going to learn what problems the industry’s facing as well, because it’s one thing to be like, I want to go into a firm and work in innovation. It’s another to kind of get a bit of an edge and say, oh, this firm, they’re really struggling to figure out how to use generative ai. Let me see if there’s any companies out there who are doing things. And then you can kind of start to weave down these less traditional paths.

And that’s really how I got my first role is I followed Catherine Bamford amazing legal engineer on Twitter, and she was the one who actually reached out to me and she’s like, I’d love to have a coffee. You have such an untraditional career path going from law school to doing a computer science degree. And then she introduced me to Annabel and Nathan, and then we founded Law School 2.0 and she introduced me to Dan Ley, who brought me into Mishcon. So everything happens for a reason, and I really think it’s making those connections and finding the less traditional people within the legal industry. And your second bit on Fresh Voices, I’d really have to recommend one of my friends and former colleagues, Kate and McCabe. So she’s now working at Barberry legal tech or legal education company, sorry. And she has some really fresh takes on how we can transform legal technology or legal education rather in light of legal technology and how we can use different tech tools when we’re delivering legal education. And I just love speaking to her about it because she does just have a really fresh perspective on that. And Catherine Bamford, of course,

Dennis Kennedy:

We had Catherine on and we could have her on a hundred times and keep learning new things.

Amy Conroy:

Yeah, she’s amazing to speak to

Tom Mighell:

And legal education is something that we haven’t done a lot of, so except when Dennis talks about his own. So that’s something we need to think about. Alright, we want to thank Amy Conroy, principal data scientist at Mishcon Dere LLP and Law School 2.0 for being a guest on the podcast. Amy, tell us where our listeners can get in touch with you or learn more about what you’re doing.

Amy Conroy:

Yeah, of course. I mean, you get in touch with me on LinkedIn under Amy Conroy and I’d also check out Law School 2.0 and our website is law school two-oh.com. And our legal service innovation course is legal service innovation.com. That course is available completely for free, takes about six to eight hours of your own time on demand. So I would really recommend checking it out as kind of like a starting point into the world of legal tech if you’re interested.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, thank you so much, Amy. You were a fantastic guest, great information, great advice for our listeners, and I think you might’ve found a new friend in Tom, but now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Amy, take it away,

Amy Conroy:

And I think you kind of touched on it a bit before, but the one tip I have is if you’re looking to innovate, you don’t have to wait for a big problem to pop up. You can start now. So if you think about one routine task that you have that you do daily, whether that’s spending 10 minutes summarizing, meeting notes, something like that, think about how you can frame that problem, think about what’s causing that problem, and then look at the solutions that you probably already have access to that you can use to innovate and solve that problem so you don’t have to wait for a whole firm-wide problem to come and land on your feet before you can start innovating.

Tom Mighell:

I have so many of those, I don’t know where to even start with that. It has been a while since I have had a headphone slash earbud tip, but I will bring up one this time, and I’ve been doing this in a slightly different way as I’ve been looking for earbuds that I can use while I’m sleeping, whether either I’m using it to push out the noise or listen to some soothing rain or water or if I want to listen to soothing voices or something when I’m sleeping. The problem with earbuds are they are not made for side sleepers. It is very painful to wear earbuds if you are a side sleeper, which I am I trying the anchor sound core sleep a 20, and they are amazing. They are fantastic for side sleepers. You don’t feel them at all, have great battery life, so they’re going to last through the night if you want ’em, if that matters to you, if it doesn’t matter, then just they’re perfect for that. But a great option if you are looking for earbuds for the purpose of sleeping, these are great. If you’re a side sleeper,

Dennis Kennedy:

You remind me time on if you’re using Bluetooth earbuds for sleep, I can say this from experiences, if it says a five hour battery life and it beeps when the battery’s going out is the worst thing you can use for sleeping,

Tom Mighell:

And these do not beep, they just turn off with the battery life. I agree because there’ve been a bunch of sleep. I’ve tried a bunch of sleep headsets and things and these are the best by far. There’s no beeping.

Dennis Kennedy:

So my parting shot is, so Amy’s in London, Tom just vacationed into London, so I had to up my game. And so we’ve been watching reruns of this fantastic show on Netflix, but it’s out of BBC originally called Time Team. It’s about archeology. It’s like an hour show. They go dig up things, you learn a ton of stuff. I can now identify certain types of Roman pottery and I’ve learned a ton of things and it’s just a great, one of these great things that you need to do if you want to innovate, is just kind of immerse yourself a little bit in a non-threatening way with some new area. And it’s really been interesting, some of the insights that watching this show has thrown for me that I’m using in unexpected places.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up for 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. If you’d like to subscribe to our podcast, you can do so again on the Legal Talk Network website or on your favorite podcast app. If you’d like to get in touch with us, remember, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn or we still love to get your questions. So leave us a voicemail at 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 two that helps us out. As always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. And we’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

Announcer:

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