Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Megan Ma

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 376 of the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy:

In our last episode, we had another guest in our Fresh Voices on legal Tech series, Cat Moon from Vanderbilt Law School. Check it out, especially if you’re interested in the intersection of technology and legal education. 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 Dr. Megan Ma, who among other things is associate director, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, also known as Codex 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 to provide you with their 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 or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Dr. Megan Ma to our Fresh Voices series. Megan, welcome to the Kennedy MA Report.

Dr. Megan Ma:

Hi Tom and Dennis. Thanks for having me.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit more about you? What’s happening at Stanford Codex? What’s your role, what our audience should know just to get started?

Dr. Megan Ma:

Yeah, sure. So as you were saying, I am the associate director at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. We CallRail it codex here, and we’re a bit of a unique research center. We’re housed in the law school and we’re part of the law school, but we’re also a joint initiative with the Department of Computer Science. Everything that’s been top of mind right now is kind of right on topic with legal education. I’ve been thinking since the emergence of large language models, especially kind of as chat, GBT started to creep into all facets of our life really. I’ve been exploring specifically uses and integrations into the industry as well as the profession. But as I continue to kind of walk this thread, I realize that what really matters is the human question and more specifically, what’s the talent pipeline going to look like moving forward? I think a lot of these legal AI vendors are starting to market as if they are our associates, our own human capital that’s being fed into the industry. And so sometimes I stare into my students and I wonder what’s left for them. And so a lot of my work right now is about leveraging actually these highly capable models and highly performant models and finding ways in which I could almost leverage them to simulate legal experiences. And so what I mean by that is I’m trying to find a way where you are learning how to use the technology but not really realizing that actually you’re honing in your legal skills. And so it’s a two birds with one stone.

Dennis Kennedy:

Megan, first of all, it’s so awesome for us to have you as guests on the podcast. We met last summer at the sub tech conference where you were talking about some of the things you’ve been doing with gamification in education, which I found absolutely fascinating. And then we have also talked about the use of virtual reality in education, which is sort of like one step further after AI in some ways. But let’s go back to the basics. Sometimes I get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology, both old technology and new technology and its benefits to those in the legal profession. I mean legal profession is all over the risk, but not so much the benefits. Would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology and what you’ve found works well for you?

Dr. Megan Ma:

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a great question. It’s really hard because it’s sort of a profession that’s been largely capable of resisting change and quite well and they argue for, and that’s kind of a strength of being a lawyer, is their persuasive kind of characteristics to it. I think when I speak to a lot of lawyers historically, one thing that I always mention is the fact that the tools that they’ve had, they’ve had to bend over backwards in order for them to work in the way that they want it to. Thinking about lawyers obsessing over formatting with Microsoft Word because Microsoft Word was not built for lawyers. And then strangely enough, tools like Word Perfect, the lawyers were the ones that were using it and actually is probably single handedly still holding up that whole industry. And so to me, I think I always approach it by seeing for the first time we have a raw material that could be built for you with you in mind.

And that I think is a very, to me, powerful point for them because I said it’s no more about struggling or wrestling with this technology that is retrofitted for you. Think about it as building from scratch a capability that will harness exactly the way that you want to do things. This type of hyper customization is something that’s going to be really powerful for them. I think a lot of the legal vendors have tackled this idea that we can find all the areas of standardization, but in kind of this world going forward, it’s actually about the heterogeneity of the practice. And I think that this is a tool that is really, really capable of tapping into that. And so all of this experiential knowledge, very hyper-specific expertise, all of that is capable to be captured today. And I think that that really honestly is a great point in which it resonates with some of our senior partners, for example, that we work with.

And some of them are starting to think about succession and especially partners that sort of see retirement on the horizon, something that they think about is how do I capture some of the legacy that I am going to be leaving behind? And so for us, one of our projects is on creating a legal AI persona. So it’s trying to help young lawyers walk in the footsteps of their partners and understand and see from their perspective what they’ve learned so that they don’t actually make the mistakes that the partners had. So all of their scar tissue, all of their war stories, we see those and simulate those in advance and those young attorneys can learn exactly in that way.

Tom Mighell:

So that’s sort of AI as knowledge management in a way sort of that interesting adjacent to that topic, adjacent to what you’re talking about, lawyers are wanting to make technology do certain things, but we also are in sort of a constant struggle with many lawyers on just their overall competence in using technology. That’s a topic that Dennis and I talk a lot about on the podcast. We have sometimes rather dim views of the current state out there, but you’re out there, you’re talking with the senior partners, you’re talking with all the lawyers out there. What are you seeing in terms of technology competence? And then maybe to follow up on that, what do you think a lawyer needs to be doing or what does a technologically competent lawyer need to know today?

Dr. Megan Ma:

Yeah, I mean that’s a really great question, Tom. So I think a lot of us probably agree that lawyers are never going to be power users. And what I mean by that is if you ask a lawyer to prompt an LLM, it’s actually much harder than you’d think. Lawyers are great at being precise, but they’re precise when they’re within their own comfort zone almost. I think when you ask them to give a directive or ask even their junior associates to complete a task, most of the junior associates that we have talked with, they’ll always say sometimes I just can’t understand the shorthands of these partners and the comments that they write in the margins. And it’s the same way is that they use shorthands, they use their own jargon and all of that implicit knowledge and try to put it into a very abstract prompt.

And that is really quite problematic because what you create is this misalignment and this expectation gap. And I learned from a partner this great story and how he frames it is when he asked his kids to mow the lawn and what he’s really asking is the end to end of that workflow that you would take the lawnmower out, you would mow the lawn and then you would learn to put it back, you would rake up any leaves that might be in the yard. It’s a whole kind of distillation of not just one task, but it’s actually a series of tasks. And I think that it’s the same way with partners. They’ll just say broadly, one particular broad task that they think like bake the cake or something like that, but don’t realize that there’s all these substeps and they actually don’t know how to concretize it or to make it more granular because that was not in their purview in the past.

And as a senior associate or a junior associate, you sort of over the years have to learn the person more than learning the task. And it’s the same way. And the problem is is that the outputs that come out of these machines, they just don’t infer things from at this level of abstraction yet it’s starting to get better. I mean with the release of oh one, some of the things that we’ve seen so far in our own tests, it’s changed this a little bit, but still there’s a certain level of abstraction that only humans and even humans struggle with. And that I think is the whole point. And so some of the things that I’ve been thinking about in how to remediate that is do we need to create better IDE sort of so this development environment almost for lawyers so that they can communicate at the high level that they do, but on the back end have a number of prompts that do the different widgets and pull the strings so to speak.

Dennis Kennedy:

That’s great. And you reminded me in the class I taught at University of Michigan Law School last year, one of the groups came up with this idea for this AI mentor for new associates, and part of it was just the translation of what a partner meant or what their style was because the partners are too busy to tell them exactly what to do. And I thought one of the best questions for that tool would be to say, tell me what business casual means because nobody really knows that. But I want to switch over a little bit to legal education, which is where I initially heard you speaking and sort of your area of expertise. And at the conference we were at, I just remember hearing a lot of discussion about the need for more research and discussion and then what was actually people were talking about putting into the classroom seemed like was sometimes people were talking even a year off. And I feel like outside the legal world, the things I’m involved in, people are moving really very quickly forward with generative ai. So I think the generative AI has implications for almost every aspect of legal education and I think including the entire curriculum as we see it now. So premier’s perspective, what are the areas that you see need the most attention and how can we get people to pay attention to those areas?

Dr. Megan Ma:

Yeah, I mean that’s a really great question. I’m a hundred percent with you, Dennis, that legal education should be changing. I think there was already an issue where in North America, a JD is a professional degree, and in Europe where it was then brought over, it’s still considered a kind of branch of philosophy almost. It’s hyper theoretical. And I think that law school still taps into this, how do you think like a lawyer, but you go from how to think like a lawyer and then you’re in practice and you have to do how to do a lawyer, but that’s not showcased to you in law school. And I think that’s really troubling because even if you think about down to the tools, the law school, what they’re offering their students as available tools is not what they’re necessarily exposed to in practice. So it’s almost like not only are you learning how to be like a lawyer, you’re also learning how to use the tools that will support you.

And that’s just a huge gap that you’re going to have to figure out ways to remediate and it’s only going to get exponentially bigger for us. So far we’ve seen a couple of tech companies actually approach the law school here and say, Hey, I have this tool available, we think that it could be really helpful for a law student. What are some ways we’re happy to co-create with you? And quite frankly, there are so many law school professors that have just said, no way, there’s no place for this here. And I was really, really surprised and because some of these tools I thought were an excellent opportunity for us to almost extend our own capabilities as teachers. And so what I mean by that is you can create hyper-personalized feedback which you want to dedicate time to, but you might not have with hundreds of students.

The other thing is you might want to again extend your office hours. And what’s interesting is that these tools you can throw in your lecture notes for example and everything within the universe of what you’re teaching that week down to that level and then create actually a podcast out of it. And so a student could absorb it in a very dynamically different way. The other thing you can do is tap into the personality of that professor. And so what I mean by extending your office hours, they could literally have you as office hours anytime to understand that lecture or that week’s lecture. And then when they go to your real office hours, you have much more focus, much more specific questions. I think that this methodology is going to be really, really useful because so many young students I’ve seen or so many young lawyers, they go to office hours because they know they have a question, but they actually are feeling around trying to identify what exactly it is that they don’t understand.

And it’d be nice if they had more time at home and at more of an ease because sometimes speaking with professors is more daunting than you would expect as a teacher and they could almost workshop what they’re not understanding. Again, I’m honestly consistently amazed that we don’t have much more of that integration into our classrooms. I’ve been trying to do bootcamps on the side. So one thing that we hear actually from partners is to be honest, I would like to know if I had more business acumen to actually run a law firm like a business. And that is not taught in law school either. And so some of the things that we’ve been doing is we’ve been brainstorming maybe a bootcamp which will bring in kind of McKinsey style like business analyst school and get them to do a little bit of these studies and almost reframe their thinking so that they actually exit out of law school with not only how to think like a lawyer, how to kind of do certain practices, but also a little bit about the client relationships that you’re going to have to learn how to form over time.

Tom Mighell:

One of the things you’ve mentioned about turning those lecture notes into a podcast we just talked about on our last podcast, we talked about the fact that Google Notebook has the ability to turn your text into podcast. It’s really amazing what you can do with that. I want to switch gears a little bit here again and talk about collaboration. Collaboration is a favorite topic that we talk about here on the podcast, so we’re always interested in getting the perspective of our guests to figure out what is the method of collaboration that works best for you. So when you’re working with people at the school, with students, with colleagues, with others, what it could be a tool, it could be just a philosophy of collaboration, what works best for you? How do you like to approach collaboration?

Dr. Megan Ma:

I’m a big fan of whiteboarding, so I mean those listening can’t see, but I have a big whiteboard behind me, but I like everyone in the same room and I like to whiteboard. Or if it’s remote, then we asynchronously use these type of whiteboarding tools anyway, because I just want to throw out the ideas. And one thing that is really important is we do so much interdisciplinary work at our research center that everyone actually speaks their own language. And it’s not common that you’ll have people from very different, almost like underlying philosophy. So you have the humanity social sciences with the STEM backgrounds, and so obviously you speak very different languages and coming together, it takes time for you to level set and almost scope out projects. And so we do an exercise where we just basically actually go through what we think are jargon words and put definitions on the board.

And that’s one area that we do different types of collaboration. And I think the other word for collaboration to me is almost translation because we have to translate between different disciplines. We also have to translate between different working styles. And so everyone knows that with translation there’s going to be losses and there’s going to be gaps, but there’s also creation and that’s the stuff that I’m most excited about. And what I mean by that is when I was a kid, my grandma had raised me and so she only speaks Cantonese. My parents were actually just two full-time working parents, so they didn’t have as much time growing when I was growing up. And one thing that was really, really interesting was that there were these home lunches that we would get or hot lunches at school and it was meant to basically support the local business that was facing my elementary school. And so they had these things called Jamaican patties and it’s basically a puff pastry and inside it’s kind of mystery meat almost that’s not so good for you, but I really love them,

Tom Mighell:

They’re delicious.

Dr. Megan Ma:

And I would bring one home and show my grandma who would give me a dollar to get them on Fridays. It was like my special treat. But the problem is is that because this doesn’t exist in this sort of Asian culture, this particular pastry, I had to create a word for it and the only way I could do it is sound it out phonetically. And what was phonetically closest, I basically described this Jamaican patty as such. So the closest kind of phonetically as a 6-year-old was a panda. And so I called them pandas and I would tell my grandma, I need a dollar on Friday, don’t forget my dollar to get my pandas. And I remember my parents overhearing me and thinking she buying and selling endangered animals or is she’s supporting the school’s sort of charity program or something like that. And over time I ended up having to bring all these patties to reconcile this gap, but I thought that this kind of ability for us as humans in order to work together and understand each other, there’s something very creative out of it and all of these things I’m very hypersensitive to and that’s how I see as well as we bring in new technology into the legal industry into education, we have to be super sensitive at every stage when someone had to make the active decision to create something in order to mitigate that gap.

Tom Mighell:

I think that is something so important that we don’t talk enough about in collaboration, which is at the very beginning you have to consider whether the people who are coming together have the same ways of working, have the same ways of thinking about it and getting to that. Sometimes if you don’t do that first, then collaboration down the road becomes much more difficult. Totally agree with that. Alright, we’ve got a lot more questions for Dr. Megan Ma from Stanford, but we first need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Dr. Megan Ma at Stanford Codex. We found in the Fresh Voices series that we’d love to hear about our guests career paths and our audience really does as well. Would you talk about your own career path and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus?

Dr. Megan Ma:

Yeah, sure. I’m always what I think is a bit of a mixed bag. I originally kind of started out my career realizing that I wanted to always be at an academic institution. I did my PhD in law and linguistics and so I come from a place where I always have enjoyed interdisciplinary work. It’s kind of funny because when I was doing it, I have heard from so many scholars that have said to me, people who do interdisciplinary work, you might think that you’re the jack of all trades, but honestly you’re a master of none. That was the position that I had always heard was that as someone who is supposed to be in the knowledge industry, your goal is to be narrow and deep. You have to know so much and everything about this really small sliver of the universe. But what’s fascinating is that then you tend to start splitting hairs and you forget kind of this bigger picture and how actually a lot of the disciplines share the same problems.

And when you find this overlap, there’s a lot of interesting creativity out of it. And so I think maybe that has sort of fueled how I work. I actually find that different disciplines have a lot to teach me about my own practice and how I should be thinking about either working with other collaborators or thinking about how the law is actually moving out of a different language. And so legal language is kind of a subset of natural language, but before large language models came into play, people were using programmatic languages or formal languages to automate the law in some way. And so again, going back to translation, there were these gaps where what happens when you put a non-deterministic language against a deterministic language and what do you have to bend around or find other ways of reconciling things that are just fundamentally not isomorphic?

And so I think all of this possibly had down the line now informs how I think about almost natural language programming. That’s what everyone says about prompting or using these tools and just going down to the level of how meaning is formed, what communication is like. I think those are all things that probably have some impact at least on how I just do any of my work. So I think that that’s kind of the mixed bag and that’s kind of the weird background that I had. I also did, for example, a stint in the government on self-driving cars. And I had learned a lot from this particular area, not because I was in the tech side actually I was working for the government at this point. And what was fascinating was that this working group, their biggest question was, Hey, how do we take the lessons from the state of California who is doing really well with self-driving cars and translate it to snowy Canada?

And for us, they’re top 10 tidbits and advice to our government was make sure that you retrofit your traffic lights because these cars actually read LED lights better than the current ones. Make sure that you put little flashers so that these cars can see between lanes. And then the response from everyone in our group was you’ve never considered inclement weather. And just to the traffic light point, these LED lights don’t emit heat, but the old lights do and the heat is so important because when it snows, it melts the snow off the traffic lights. Whereas with the LED lights, this multi-billion dollar project could end up collapsing all of the put your day on standstill if all your traffic lights basically collapse at the site of snow. And so these types of things, it honestly boils down constantly for me to translation because it’s not only translation of jurisdiction, it’s translation of different elements in how we’ve acclimated as society to new technologies.

And the other thing about self-driving cars that really fascinated me was for a long time everyone was obsessed with sort of the trolley problem question, what are the sort of moral frameworks that we need to be thinking about this new technology? But at some point there were technologists that cared more about the intelligent alarms that allow us humans to take back the wheel. And so there were really interesting research scientists going down to the types of decibels and sonar signals that allow someone to be alerted versus scared. And so people were like, oh, it’s so easy to just ring the bell or something like that, but that actually shocks someone and maybe paralyze them and actually leads to the accident. And so that type of very technical guardrail and being measured about the type of signaling, that’s kind of where I hope we will be going with generative AI and these other frontier technologies wherever we might take us, is that we move out of these abstract questions and down to the brass tacks. And that all comes down to working together as an interdisciplinary area.

Tom Mighell:

So this would ordinarily be the time that I would ask a question about generative ai, but I feel like we’re talking a lot about it already. We’re already in it. And so I’m going to pivot just a little bit and ask a different kind of question. You mentioned earlier on something that really stuck with me, which is that the legal vendors these days are positioning their tool as your new associate or as a replacement for an associate. And I had not really thought about it. It seemed like that may be counterproductive for them, but I’m not sure. And I guess I would see that partners at law firms might think, oh, that’s great. I can cut overhead and I can hire this tool to do this work for me. Maybe talk about where you see that going in the future because it feels like that’s the legal tech vendors aren’t doing themselves a favor by, I mean I get the business reason why they’re doing it, but it seems like we’re headed for maybe potentially bigger issues if they continue to position it this way. Am I thinking wrong about that or where do you see that headed?

Dr. Megan Ma:

I think it’s absolutely right. That’s exactly what I was alluding to. For example, one of the legal tech vendors, they’re called spell book their new AI agent, which they literally label it as associate and that’s the name of the product. And I think the one big issue to me is that you’ve never articulated what human machine collaboration is going to look like. And so to sell these tools, you are basically framing it as nothing other than replacement. And I think that that’s just obviously not the positioning we want to go for. And I think the other legal tech incumbents, a lot of what I’ve been seeing is that they treat generative AI as a plugin as opposed to thinking about the technology as its own raw material to work with. And I think all of these things, again, it’s like you look at an existing tech stack and you’re just adding a layer or you’re thinking about this product and you’re just saying, let’s just insert it where we think is the marketing language, right?

Oh, it’s like a first year associate where it gives you the first draft or whatnot. But some of the stories that I’ve heard in practice in talking with law firms that have had global rollouts of big legal AI tools, you have first year associates that actually are extremely dependent on these tools to the point that they’ve never been able to write a contract kind of by hand and not necessarily type one from scratch, but just even the idea that you have to take the template and what to look for, how to do issue spotting, none of that is almost necessary for them. They can just click a button. And so what does that mean in training a young associate? We’re not saying that paperwork or this grunt work is a mechanism to be a lawyer, but we have to showcase what was the reasoning behind this volume.

A lot of what we’ve been trying to figure out is as a senior associate, part of what you’re asked to do is actually the strategy work. And so when you see curve balls, which is natural for society, how do you react to them? And I think what we’ve been trying to think about is can we almost create strategy builders and integrate them with other AI tools so that your workflow, even if it’s automated, you have additional insight into what you should be flagging and what you should be understanding from it. And so that to me, again, is going back to the problem. You can have tools that are doing the kind of grunt work, the sort of mundane components, but you’re doing it while also finding other mechanisms to remediate what the initial intention of that grunt work was for.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, it was such an interesting set of conversations out there. I sometimes say if I want to quiet, bring a, basically silence a room of lawyers, I say I believe that AI’s big potential is in replacing partners, not associates, just to get their shocked and silent reaction. So I recently read Salmon Khan’s, great new book, brave New Words, and I’m in awe of the potential of developments like personalized AI, learning assistance and AI that can help you learn the way you learn best. Would you talk about what you’re seeing from your vantage point in this sort of use of AI to help people learn? And then some of the things that you might be working on along those lines, a plan to be working on at Stanford? And I know that we’ve talked a bit about both gamification and virtual reality.

Dr. Megan Ma:

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, what we’ve been seeing is actually sort of these general purpose tools. So I know Tom, you mentioned Notebook, lm, they’re definitely kind of pretty high profile when it comes to personalized learning. We’ve also seen a lot of creative ways in which people have built in AI mentor and they’ve sort of just thrown everything from their lecture notes to kind of other textbooks, other videos in that sense and kind of use those to find ways of walking alongside them, ones that actually are in legal education. From the perspective of practice, we actually haven’t seen that many. And so because of that, we’ve been trying to build our own. So for example, at Codex we’ve built our negotiation simulator or m and a negotiation simulator. And the idea is we worked with m and a partners of 40 years of experience and we wanted to build a tool which will help them catch some of these linguistic cues almost that you might see from opposing counsel.

And you can kind of tap into the brain of what a machine counsel is thinking about and it breaks it down to you down to their fundamental beliefs or understanding of you what they think you’re saying, and then what the action they took is. And this is all done pre-sign of letter of intent. And so it makes sure that the position between the buyer and sellers still somewhat a little bit more level. And the whole goal is there’s also other elements to it where we take them to a client room, for example. And this allows the young associate to learn what are the types of questions you might want to ask a client. And so we have one module that we teach that is on corporate structure, a junior associate, it’s intended for them to learn in addition to asking the question what kind of corporate entity you should be also asking the questions like how do you file your taxes?

Because even if someone says that they’re an LLC, filing their taxes as a corporation, as a partnership or as an S corp all have implications down the line in what you can optimize for your client. And so all of these things we want to try to tease in different experiences and get them to have a preview. The other element of this tool for example, is you can CallRail an expert for example. So again, using the corporate structure example, there might be times where you need to actually review the entire negotiation with a tax expert or a tax specialist in your firm. Knowing when to ask for help is another thing that’s maybe not natural for a lawyer. And so we have to teach the skill and talking about collaboration, this is one area that we’re also working on. So this is some of this stuff for example, and other areas is we’re trying to build more partner personas so that you can expand your comparative learnings. And what I mean by that is the analog example is a transaction partner going to their litigation partner to see whether or not there are issues or whether the contract is truly ironclad and kind of get their perspective on it. At the associate level, you don’t really get something comparatively, so while you’re learning, you can kind of choose multiple partners as opposed to just the one that you work for and you can get their insight as well and see which strategy actually plays out better. You’re sort of expanding the scope of that.

Tom Mighell:

That’s awesome. That is amazing, amazing stuff. We’ve still got more to talk about with Dr. Megan Ma, but we first need to take another quick break from our message 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 are joined by our special guest, Dr. Megan Ma at Stanford Codex. We’ve got time for just a few more questions. The question I want to ask is what we CallRail our best advice question. We like asking all of our Fresh voices guests this and we get a lot of great advice. So what is the best advice either that you’ve been given or maybe that you have for our listeners or both if you want to do both?

Dr. Megan Ma:

I guess the advice that I would give is probably the inverse of what I’ve received, which is going to the point of being a master of none. I think we’re starting to operate in a world where we might have actually AI agents capable of being very narrow and deep experts to a point that even as humans we could not attain this level of knowledge. And so probably it’s better to operate in the opposite direction where we start better communicative tactics to interact and collaborate and organize things together. So I would say sometimes there are benefits to being a master of none.

Dennis Kennedy:

Cat Moon and our last episode talked about this sort of humble inquiry and I think that’s also part of that being open to say if I don’t CallRail myself an expert or consider myself an expert on any things that I can learn more things except more input willingly and eventually get to a better place. So I want to end with two questions. So first is I have a lot of students who, especially their third year say, I’ve been to law school and I’m not sure I want to be a lawyer anymore, but there’s this stuff happening around tech ai, project management, legal operations, all these things that are happening, policy, other things like that that I never thought about until now and now I’m about ready to graduate. So how do you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths in legal tech and other non-traditional careers? And then the second question is, who are your fresh voices in legal tech that you would like to signal out and maybe see as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Dr. Megan Ma:

Those are both great questions. So I have been thinking a lot about that because I felt like even in law school I was pretty pigeonholed into doing one particular thing. What I’ve been trying to do, maybe it’s to heal childhood harm, if you can CallRail that childhood, but we are hosting now in alternative legal careers, fair to target exactly this, at least our center runs it. We basically try to bring in mines that have done very different things that didn’t want to take the run of the mill path to go into big law or anything that is similar of sort or actually went in-house or they are working in tech company as a legal engineer or doing project management and that type of work. And so we actually are going to run this again this year. We always want to highlight that if you teach in the law school to think like a lawyer, those are actually really, really valuable skills.

If you don’t teach the practice as well or you don’t offer enough practice oriented classes, then at least allow our students to realize that those skills are valuable in so many other industries and to offer so many different other perspectives. And so just as an example, we have people that have either started their own companies in legal tech, those who are actually pivoting from law into engineering. We also have the opposite where we have people with STEM backgrounds that decided to go into legal academia or you had folks that are working in the vendor side or you have what it’s like being a GC in a tech company. So we try to lift those different careers and we also tend to highlight different almost quirky personalities that we find in the legal space. And then to your point about a fresh voice, one person I would really bring up is Lon la Anova. She is the director of practice innovation at Cleary right now. She is a huge pioneer and I think that she has such an interesting perspective. She was McKinsey and she kind of has a very refreshing view on what it means to kind of reinvigorate the law firm.

Dennis Kennedy:

I enjoy reading her stuff on LinkedIn.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, well this has been a great conversation, Megan. We want to thank Dr. Megan Ma Stanford Codex for being a guest on the show. Megan, before we go, can you let our listeners know where they can find out more about you or get in touch with you?

Dr. Megan Ma:

So you can just either find me on LinkedIn, I’m also on X Twitter, and then if you want to find out more about Codex, certainly just all you have to do is look us up, codex, Stanford, and you should be able to find our landing page and join our mailing list if you want to attend more events. If you’re interested more in research, again, just reach out to me via socials and I should be able to get back to you.

Dennis Kennedy:

So thank you so much, Megan, you were fantastic guests, great information and advice for our listeners. Once again, I find so many topics to discuss in so little time, so we’ll have to get you back on the show and I kind of hope maybe to talk about some projects that we decide to work on together some more down the line.

Dr. Megan Ma:

Yeah, I mean just as Meta is releasing Orion, I wanted to reach out to you about that and see if we can figure out a way to use this form factor for what we’re teaching.

Dennis Kennedy:

So now it’s time for parting shots. That one tip website or observation you can use. The second this podcast ends make it away.

Dr. Megan Ma:

So I would recommend the book The Language of the Law. It’s written in the 1960s by Davidoff, and one thing that always stuck with me and continues to is he likes to describe the legal language as a visy of verbiage. And so whether or not that’s true and how we can edit that and change that going forward, that’s really what is going to bring this home.

Tom Mighell:

That’s just such a vivid visual description right there. Alright, my parting shot is health related. Those who’ve been listening to the podcast know that I’ve started talking about health technology and other things that I’ve been taking advantage of. And one of the things that I’ve always been interested in but have never used is a continuous glucose monitor. And primarily because in the past you’ve had to have a doctor’s prescription to do it or they’ve been prohibitively expensive. But there are now a series of different companies are coming out with over the counter continuous glucose monitors that you can buy on your own just to see what your blood sugar is. I’m not diabetic, I just want to see how food affects what happens to my blood sugar. One of those companies is called stello. It’s from Dexcom. They’re one of the main creators or manufacturers of the continuous glucose monitors. They have a low cost version. So for less than a hundred dollars a month, you can get two glucose monitors that you monitor with the app. It’s really a great tool to see how food that you eat affects what you’re doing to see whether it really has affected some of my eating choices, unfortunately over the past month that I’ve been using it. But it’s interesting and I like it that it’s now a lot more cost effective. So stello.com, Dennis,

Dennis Kennedy:

We’ll let you opt out of testing you after you have ice cream because that would be an essential thing for me.

Tom Mighell:

You’re either all in or you’re not.

Dennis Kennedy:

So my parting shot is a way of thinking about generative ai and I kind of think of it as going back to the basics and creating simple tools. So I was reading this article about logical fallacies called Logical Fallacies, seven Ways to Spot a Bad Argument. And I was like, Hmm, this is interesting. It’ll be hard for me to remember how to do all those things, especially things go in the future. What if I could have AI summarize that argument and then create it into a prompt that I could reuse? And then when I have something where someone’s making an argument or I’m reading an article, I can just run that prompt on that article and it will identify the logical fallacies in it. And that could be a really helpful tool, especially when Tom is trying to convince me of something I don’t believe here on the podcast. It could be, which happens all the time, all the time, but think people are just trying with ai try to boil the ocean and say like, oh, I want to create the perfect Supreme Court brief with one little prompt and it ain’t going to happen. But there are amazing things you can do if you kind of go back to the basics and just say, how might this AI help you?

Tom Mighell:

There’s so many prompts that I should be using that there’s so many prompts in so little time, lots of all these great ideas that I need to take advantage of. Alright, 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 also on the Legal To Networks website where you can also subscribe to our podcast or you can actually do that within your favorite podcast app. If you’d like to get in touch with us, reach out to us on LinkedIn or you can leave us a voicemail. We still love getting your questions for our B segment. That number is 7 2 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy:

And I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy Mighell report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. We wanted to remind you to share the podcast with a friend or two, especially these Fresh Voices episodes that helps us out. And as always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing the podcast. We’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy, my report on the Legal Talk Network.

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