Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Jason Tashea, Georgetown’s Judicial Innovation Fellowship Founding Director

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 386 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, Tom and I interviewed Peter Duffy as part of our Fresh Voices on Legal Tech series. Check the episode out because Peter had a lot of great insights. 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 Jason Tashea, who’s joining us today in his personal capacity, but also happens to be the founding director of the Judicial Innovation Fellowship at Georgetown Law, as well as a visible and insightful contributor to both the legal tech and legal AI worlds. 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, an observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Jason Tashea to our Fresh Voices series. Jason, welcome to the Kennedy Model Report.

Jason Tashea:

Thank you so much for having me.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, the what’s happening with you at Georgetown University and what should our audience know about what you’re doing?

Jason Tashea:

Sure. So I run the Judicial Innovation Fellowship at Georgetown Law, as you said, and we are a program that takes designers and technologists and gives them tours of duty inside local, state, tribal, and territorial courts to make those courts more responsive to public need. As I think your listeners probably know, the majority of cases in civil around the country, at least one party is not represented by a lawyer that is putting downward pressure on these institutions to be more responsive to non-represented people. And there’s a services gap essentially between where the courts are at and what the public needs. We are the first model of its kind to do this in the court space. This has been done in the executive and the legislative branches, but we were the first to take a run at the judiciary.

Dennis Kennedy:

Jason, first of all, it’s so awesome for us to have you as a guest on the podcast. It’s not always easy to talk with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology, and I actually do get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology, old technology 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 and I guess in the whole justice space about technology, especially in these days of AI and what you found works? Well when you’re talking to people,

Jason Tashea:

I think my biggest lesson has been that when people come to you and they say, I have a technology problem, it’s not usually a technology problem, it is a process problem, it’s a people problem, it’s an education problem, it’s a solution problem, fit problem. It’s not a technology problem. At the end of the day, usually when people say we want to do a technology thing, what they mean is they want to digitize a bad process that wasn’t working analog and can we just make it faster digitally? And that’s not the way to do it. So I think detangling the actual problem that they’re talking about and not worrying about the solution for a while is the quickest way to get somewhere meaningful because if nothing else, lawyers know process and they tend to know people pretty well as well. And those are two competencies I think you can leverage to have a smarter conversation. And then you can get to the point where maybe there is a technical aspect to the thing that they’re talking about, but it’s largely not this technology’s going to deliver us from all evil type situation that I think a narrative that a lot of people had bought into.

Tom Mighell:

Well, let’s tie that into the other type of competencies. So the competencies you just described I agree, are more important than the solution. But in this country we have arguably anyway a requirement of technological competence that most of the states have put into their rules of professional conduct. Dennis and I generally have a skeptical view of the current state of technological competence. We wanted to get your input on that. What are you seeing from your vantage point about technological competence and how far do you think lawyers have come since these requirements have sort of come into being?

Jason Tashea:

I’m excited to have this conversation with you guys. This is not the conversation I have a lot. I work primarily with justice system actors like courts and public defenders and legal aid attorneys. So this is fun for me. So we’ll see how quickly I get out over my skis. I think lawyer tech competence is better than their business competence, and I think a lot of that is because they’re incentivized by billable hour as a business model, which doesn’t incentivize efficiency. It doesn’t incentivize a lot of these models that would or pay models or technical models that would require them to act differently. And I think also theBar associations are protecting lawyers for having to operate in a more modern way. If your law firm has a CTO in most states that CTO cannot have an ownership stake in that law firm, and that doesn’t make any sense.

So I don’t know how you’re going to get good tech talent within a large functioning organization if you’re not going to be able to give them equity in that organization when there’s plenty of that would give them equity. So I think the way that the bars have created a monopolization for lawyers in the owning of law firms as well as the giving of legal advice has actually stagnated or the way that we think about business, which then has a downhill effect of I think, impacting technical competence. That being said, I am not convinced that lawyers fall outside of the general adoption curve of technology generally. I think lawyers look a lot like people in the general population. You have your early adopters, which you two definitely are. You’ve been talking about these topics for years. Then you’ve got the big fat middle of everybody that picks up on technology once it’s been tested, once it’s tried and true once it’s easy to use. And then you have the laggards. And I don’t think the legal community has a larger than usual laggard component than the population at large. And I’ve never seen anything that proves me otherwise. I think our narrative says that that is true because there’s so much interesting stuff happening in other fields that is not yet happening in law. But I’m not sure if the narrative matches the reality. I’m curious to what you guys think.

Tom Mighell:

Well, when I think of that narrative, I am brought to mind of the stories of the lawyers who insist on using chat GPT for their legal research and get sanctioned for it, which to me suggests a lack of competence in at least that area. So I think that the struggle that I have is in that there are lawyers who are getting up to speed on certain kinds of technology but still can’t format a word document appropriately. And so maybe we need to talk about what’s the priority, what’s more important to have? Is it more important to know all of it or just some of it? So maybe it’s really in the terms of the context of what technologies they’re using, where ai, eDiscovery, those things might be more likely to impact client work and things like that than formatting an email appropriately or learning that if you don’t whitelist the court, then it’s going to go into your spam filter and you won’t see the notice of a hearing.

Dennis Kennedy:

I agree with you on the adoption curve. And so when I talk to students about it, what I’ve said is that in law, I feel that we have that same adoption curve. It’s just elongated, so it’s stretched out longer than you might find in other industries. So you see the sort of same bell curve and the same thing’s happening. It feels like it’s not, as you say in the tech world, it’s going to be super compressed, but in law you’re going to be out longer. But when I hear people in other professional surfaces, accounting and other things like that, they’re all saying, we’re so slow. Lawyers even do better than us. So I think within that framework, that’s how I see it. It’s just like the curve is just kind of lengthened out a bit.

Jason Tashea:

So a couple things to respond to in there. I think, Tom, your point about the lawyers and media loves these stories, the media that publish some document with the help of chat, GBT hallucinates, a bunch of cases that don’t actually exist, didn’t go back and check the citations. I don’t think that’s a tech competence problem. I think that’s a basic lawyer competency problem, right? If an intern, a law student, a junior associate attorney were to bring you a document, you would edit it, you would read through, you would make sure that it’s decent. That’s not a new competence that chat GBT is just the new intern. So I push back on the idea that that’s a tech competence problem.

Tom Mighell:

I would push back on that. If I’m a partner and I’m reviewing a memo from someone, I am not going to go on Westlaw and check out to verify that the case law is relevant, that it’s actually true. I’m going to review it for content and persuasiveness and all of that, where the technical thing is the lawyer should have known the chat GPT hallucinates to me, that’s where the tech confidence comes in.

Jason Tashea:

That’s fair. That’s fair. And I think the other point, Dennis, to what you were talking about in regards to segmenting out legal more the CEO of Anthropic, which produces Claude, one of the big AI players right now, he was talking at the World Forum a couple of weeks ago about what’s the status of their company, and they are increasing revenues and they’re particularly increasing revenues from the use of their product for the development of software. But where they’re getting that money from is from startups. Startups that are cash strapped, they don’t have the money to be able to build out a huge dev team at the moment, they’re not seeing that revenue come from the big players. And so I suspect you would see a similar trend line if you break out the large entrenched law firms versus the startup just hanging out of shingle law firms, especially as Gen Z starts to come out of law school. So I would imagine, again, I don’t think legal in that regard looks much different than the business world who we always hold up as being more innovative, quicker to adopt and more nimble.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah. The other thing I would say that I really noticed is that lawyers are so darn as a group, are so darn afraid of math. And that just translates to tech. And what surprises me that lawyers who are willing to learn any legal theory to try a case and to really go out on the edge to learn stuff when it comes to tech just won’t do it. They just freeze. And that my whole career has always surprised me.

Jason Tashea:

Say more on that. I remember writing a piece for the A, a pushing back on this notion that the LSAT doesn’t test math and therefore law school is self-selecting for people that don’t do equations. But draw the line for me between, and I don’t believe that’s true as far as lawyers are concerned, but what I’m interested in with what you said was this idea that lawyers don’t do math, therefore they don’t understand technology. That’s not a bridge. I understand how to cross.

Tom Mighell:

Well, and I’ll say, Dennis, before we go on, I am deathly afraid of math and I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp on technology. So explain me.

Dennis Kennedy:

I’m not saying that there’s a logical explanation. I think it’s a visceral thing that I see. And then the examples I would give is that in the world of ai, I think to really be comfortable in this world, you have to know probabilities and statistics, at least at some basic level. If somebody’s telling me this AI is 87% accurate, or facial recognition is 94% accurate, I need to understand what that means. As a lawyer, I also need to understand that if I say facial recognition is 94% accurate and somebody tells me eyewitness identification testimony is 75% accurate, I need to know what that means. And I think that we sort of abdicate from trying to figure that out.

Jason Tashea:

I think that’s a good point.

Dennis Kennedy:

That’s my approach there.

Jason Tashea:

Statistics should be taught in law school. I think that’s, I’ll plant my flag on that

Dennis Kennedy:

One. So I want to segue, and some of this does official recognition I think does segue to access to justice and technology and well, you said at the beginning was really interesting with the things you’re doing around self-represented litigants. So one of my projects this year is going to be working with the National Association of Women Judges on how courts might use ai and what I would say this simple ways to help with the self-represented litigant issues that we have out there. And Jason, I might talk to you later about seeing how we might get you involved in that, but where do you see in the access to justice, justice tech, however we want to address it, where do you see the places that we need the most attention paid right now? And I know this is really becoming a moving target here at the first part of 2025, and how do we get people to pay that attention when there’s a million other distractions?

Jason Tashea:

Well, there’s a top level issue that’s come to the fore in the last couple of months and it’s been building for a while, right? It’s like we’re losing the rule of law debate. If we don’t have rule of law, then your question is a moot point. And so if we don’t believe that courts are a check and balance on the legislative and executive branches, then it doesn’t really matter how you’re going to deploy AI because the premise of the system has been wrecked, right? So I think that’s step one. If we lose that, that is foundational technology does not matter at that point, it’ll probably just be used to harm people more than it already is going to be used to harm people. Secondly, and I think also a foundational point is when it comes to courts and you’re working with these judges is my lesson from fundraising for the Judicial Innovation fellowship was an education on what the world thinks of courts themselves.

So beyond people like us that think about courts and as institutions and places that we go to work, right? The general population doesn’t think of it that way. And I think even more damning is that courts are not seen as a vector for social change. So they are the backwater of the philanthropic world. Philanthropy is going to focus on administrative agencies, they’re going to focus a little bit on executive. They are going to focus a little bit on legislative. They don’t think at all about courts. So it became my job in those calls not to convince funders that we had a good program worth funding, which we did, but that courts matter. And if we’re not able to convince people that courts matter, then it doesn’t matter what we’re trying to do in the courts because they don’t believe in the premise of the project itself.

So I think that’s a really important piece of education that we need to be doing more broadly as far as the AI question itself is concerned, the judicial innovation fellowship started right before the generative AI boom. And so we started fundraising before everyone wanted to know what are you going to do with generative ai? And that proved somewhat of a challenge, but in large part because the projects we were working on are not sexy tech projects, they’re not cutting edge tech projects because courts are not cutting edge by their very nature and nor should they be. We do not want this anchor of our legal system to be willy-nilly trying new things and just seeing what happens, move fast and break things does not translate into the rule of law. Those are antithetical theories. And so I have been doing the tech and justice thing for 13, 14 years now, and that whole time someone has been promising me a chat bot for people that do not have a lawyer, a chatbot to manage courts, that chat bot does not exist.

It does not matter what ad copy you have read or what demo you watched. Chatbots do not have that capacity. So what we were trying to do with the innovation fellowship was focus on institutional capacity that could lead to the development of better AI in the space. So for us, what that looked like was trying to figure out how to make court data useful, how to standardize it, how to structure it, how to be able to export it in a meaningful way that you could actually begin to use it to build a model on top of, I think one of the things that people overlook so much in this space is that legal data and court data are held up in duopoly. They’re ostensibly public data. But when you look at the way that it’s caged up in Westlaw and Nexus, or when you see court data being caged up by Tyler Technologies, which is the major court vendor in the United States, or just the incompetence of court backend data infrastructure generally, then you don’t have access to the gasoline you need to make the AI engine run.

And so long as that is true, whatever AI is being developed is either going to be for the very rich or is going to be completely useless for everybody else. And so I think that’s the core thing we need to be talking about is how are we going to build the infrastructure that creates equitable access to ai that’s good for all of us and not just the people that can afford the $1,200 per seat Harvey account, right? That’s not feasible for legal aid. It’s not feasible for any government attorney. It’s only the big firms that are going to be able to do that. And so if we start with this premise that all technology is going to exacerbate existing power dynamics, the real conversation isn’t about the specific technology itself. It’s about how do we put guardrails on those new technologies to make sure that we’re bringing everybody along and we’re not just going to exacerbate the current problems that we have. This goes back to the digitizing the bad process thing, right? It’s the exact same theory when it comes to the AI discussion as well,

Tom Mighell:

And that feels a lot like a whole separate podcast that we might want consider someday. We’ve got a lot more to talk about with Jason Tashea. But first we need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors,

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Jason Tashea at the Judicial Innovation Fellowship. 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 own career path and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus?

Jason Tashea:

Well, I wound up in law school in 2009, thanks to a recession that I think a lot of people are familiar with, and law school for me was really an education that I didn’t actually want to be a lawyer. I think a lot of people feel that way going through that process. And then when I graduated, there weren’t really jobs. This would’ve been 2012. The legal market was still reeling from what happened in 2008. And so I first went abroad, I worked in Kosovo, I worked in Armenia on rule of law projects. The theme that keeps popping up in this conversation, and I was focused on criminal justice reform at the time. And in Kosovo, I remember having a coffee with a colleague that worked at the Supreme Court there, and he was like, why are you here? I was like, what do you mean?

I’m trying to do good. I’m trying to help out and help build up your nascent juvenile justice system. Kosova only became an independent country in 2007, and he was like, well, America has the juvenile justice problem. You arrest a lot of kids, you jail a lot of kids. That’s a rich country problem. We are a poor country and we don’t do that. And so that’s kind of what sent me off of my international trajectory and back to the United States to work on these issues. But while I was in Kosovo, I saw for the first time a civic technology scene, this idea that you could build technology that better aids the service of government to the public itself. And Kosovo was well positioned for that because it had high internet penetration, it had a super young population because of the war in the nineties and had a government that didn’t function particularly well, and those young people wanted to see better function.

And so when I came back to the United States continuing on the juvenile justice work, I was trying to find that intersection between technology and the communities that we were trying to support. And so it’s been a slow climb from there. It started with an expungement project, which I think was a lot of people of my generation’s gateway drug into the space. Since then, I’ve worked on policy. I’ve been a law professor at Georgetown. I’ve been a product manager at a justice tech startup. I was a consultant for the World Bank on their digital governance work and now running this program as a confluence of all those lessons I’ve learned. I was a journalist at the A BA as well, which is really just allowing me to go feral on any technology and law project that I was interested in, and they were very generous to me to let me do that.

And so now I’m trying to pull those threads together into something that’s functional and not something simply that’s either optimist, which I think is the wrong way to look at these issues because the technology gets ahead of the problem and then there’s just no going back. And those projects tend to fail while building up the capacity of the institutions themselves to do this on their own. I think this isn’t from the outside in project. This has to be from an inside out project when we’re talking about these government agencies modernizing and looking like how we want them to work in the 21st century.

Tom Mighell:

One of the things we like to talk about in this podcast is collaboration. Dennis and I love to talk about it. And so we always like to hear from our guests how they like to collaborate. It’s always different. We always get a different perspective. So what are the ways in which you collaborate with your courts or the lawyers who are in the courts or the people who are part of the work that you do? And it can be the technology, but it’s also the process too. So what’s important to you about collaboration?

Jason Tashea:

I’ll use the innovation fellowship as the example, and I think there’s two answers to it. So when we started this program, what we were really doing was we were taking a version of an idea that had happened in legislative and executive branches and trying to mold it in a way that made sense for courts and it made sense for the public that’s accessing the courts. And so I got this great advice early on from one of our advisors, Elizabeth Grossman, where she said, only go make new mistakes. That’s your job. It’s a pilot. If you make old mistakes that people have already made, then you failed. So I talked to over 120 people that had worked in this space in other branches of government, and we built a roadmap based on that, and that was a way to build buy-in into a new program as well as help us make sure that we were only making the newest of mistakes and not the mistakes that these organizations that came before us.

Secondly, when we were trying to figure out who to work with, what courts to work with specifically, we had applications from all over the country of these courts that wanted to work with us, and we only had three fellows. And so what we did was we asked for the applications to focus on their problem identification. We didn’t want to hear so much of the solution. Ideas of a were fine, but we really wanted to hear how deep they were in their problem. And from there we collaborated our statements of work with each court, which each finalist court of which there were five. And through that process, not only did you work towards a solution that made sense for the model of the program that we were running and the time that we had to run it, our fellows had 11 months in their court to make an impact, which is not as a long period of time.

But secondly, you find out who’s easy to work with, who plays well with others, if you’re going back and forth on a draft pretty quickly, who’s going to be fun and who’s going to be dynamic and who isn’t? And we were lucky to use that process to find three really dynamic courts in Utah, Kansas state courts, and then the Hamilton County, Chattanooga area in Tennessee is who we worked with. And I think that collaborative approach of taking a problem and building towards a solution not only gave us a roadmap for how the year was going to look, but it set expectations for everybody. And it helped once we onboarded our fellows to actually go do that work, to give them something to hold onto. So we just weren’t dropping them in the middle of an ocean and saying, good luck. We hope you can find land. And I think that hands-on development approach to our programmatic work was one of the reasons why we were so, so successful.

Dennis Kennedy:

Great. So let’s circle back to ai, and I want to kind of get your perspective maybe in a novel way on this, but so AI is both a challenge in an opportunity for the legal profession, legal education, access to justice, I mean the whole system as you pointed out. So I’m curious, I hear a lot of things that people are really concerned about with AI and there’s good reason for that, but what are you seeing that with AI that really excites you? What do you think the real potential might be? If by chance, we actually do a great job with AI in how we figure out how to use it?

Jason Tashea:

I laugh because I’m not the excited about AI guy. I’m not that guest. Where there is practical application is, again, the stuff that I don’t think we think of is very sexy. It’s research, it’s first drafts, it’s analytics. This is nothing new. It is high. Data analysis is where AI is very, very good. As soon as you start needing sentiment or any type of human empathy, the whole thing falls apart. And even when it comes to factual stuff, it’s not that great. I’ve seen court chatbots recommend self-represented resources that don’t exist at universities that don’t exist, right? If you’re a person trying to win custody of your children or get out of an abusive relationship or avoid eviction, that’s not helpful. That is compounding the problem. And the thing that worries me the most, I was at a justice and AI conference back in January, which was great put on by the American Bar Foundation, and there was a judge there who said that only 3% of self-represented litigants e-file in the state, which is very low.

They have, they are a state that allows self-represented litigants, which is not true in every state. And he’s like, AI can be a thing that can help fix that. And I’m like, that’s curious. I do this for a living, and I don’t know what AI would do there. So I go to the county’s webpage that he’s talking about. I go to the e-file page as if I’m a person looking to file their case or a response and the website’s, right? So the website on my phone is bigger than my phone screen. So you have to scroll to the right, you have to scroll to the left to be able to see everything, and AI doesn’t fix that, right? That’s a core technology problem. That’s a procurement problem that should have been in the RFP to whatever vendor made that God awful website said The website has to be made in responsive design.

And this is where we have to meet these institutions where they’re at, the development that they’re at, which is why I think going back when we were talking about AI building data capacity in our project in Hamilton County, which was our data project last year, the court came to us because they said, we want to be able to analyze court data to understand the intersection of criminal recidivism, homelessness, so eviction data and debt, so civil and criminal court. And the reason why they could not do that is because they use two different case management systems for the criminal and civil system, and they do not talk to each other. That is a fixable technical problem, not an AI problem. That’s there’s probably some contracting because one of the systems was proprietary and one of the systems was homegrown. But you can code yourself out of that without ever having to discuss artificial intelligence.

And that’s where these institutions are at, and we need to keep that in mind. I gave a talk a couple of years ago to a state, to every district judge in the state of Michigan. It was about technology and the art of judging and what technology can do to help with judge. And the first question I got once I was done talking, is AI going to take my job? I can’t point to anywhere where AI has taken a judge’s job, let alone a clerk’s job, which would make I think more sense for where the state of the art is on artificial intelligence. But that’s where the hype cycle is in the conversation. So I think we need to dial it back. We need to be more realistic with where these institutions are and where the technology is. And I think that’s the thing that we can do as opposed to talking about the promise of ai.

What can AI do today? A colleague of mine at Duke, Keith per carro likes to say, why would you buy a piece of software that promises to be better tomorrow? Which is what every generative AI system is, and especially when people’s rights are hanging in the balance, even something as old as machine translation, which has been good for a while. When you go English to Spanish, may I search, your car gets translated to May I help you find your car? That mistranslation has constitutional implications, right? That’s a fourth amendment violation waiting to happen. So if that’s the state of the art now, we are far off from seeing the AI revolution change the way justice is served in the United States.

Dennis Kennedy:

I so agree with you when I talk to people, is that I would call it the diagnostic element is what’s missing? People jump to this thing and say, we need ai. I’m like for when people have said, what’s the best scanner for me to buy? This is my favorite example. I had a law partner who did this and their desk was covered with files and papers, and they’re like, what is the best one for me? And I said, to be honest, whichever one will hold the most weight on top of it, when you stack papers on top of it and won’t break because that’s all you’re going to ever going to use it for, there’s a different problem that you have there. Yeah, it’s interesting. I see a lot of experiments out there, actually. I don’t see a lot. I see some experiments out there that are interesting. I think what China is doing in small claims courts kind of interesting, at least to give us an indication of what might happen. But I think it’s really difficult in the hype cycle in legal ai, as you say, in six months, every six months, it’s going to be something just totally unbelievable. And I think we’ve gotten away from what it can do, which I think is quite interesting, but limited in its way, especially in legal. But there’s things I really do.

Jason Tashea:

Yeah, I think that’s right. Well, what I told the judge that asked that question, am I going to lose my job to ai? It was like, well, did your spam filter cause you to lose your clerk? Right? It made your clerk’s job better because you’re not getting ads that you didn’t sign up for in your inbox. And so I’m not saying that AI doesn’t exist or can’t function in a way, but it’s being embedded in things that we don’t think about as opposed, I think, to this new future. And then to just briefly to your point about China, as I wrote a little bit about them both before and after being at the A, B, A, and I think the grain of salt to take there is because the Chinese government is telling us what the courts are doing is that we don’t know what’s vaporware and what isn’t. And there’s no third party way to know what’s real and what’s not when it comes to the technology that’s being deployed in the Chinese court system. So they’re probably doing stuff to what degree and to what quality. We’ll never know because that information is just never going to be shared.

Tom Mighell:

Well, we’ve got a few more questions for Jason Tashea, but we need to take another quick break for a word from our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy:

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, Jason Tashea. We have time for just a few more questions.

Dennis Kennedy:

Jason, how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths in legal tech, access to justice, non-traditional careers, sort of what you expect to see in the future? And I would say your experience in rule of law is going to be interesting to students that I teach. So how do you encourage students these days?

Jason Tashea:

I mean, the best advice I think is probably to just start experimenting and see what happens. You learn more from your mistakes than you do your successes, which I think is the hallmark of my career. And you’ll slowly figure out what it is that you probably at first don’t like doing, and that’s just as valuable as figuring out what you do like doing. And so you’re slowly taking this piece of clay and molding into something that looks like the career that you want. I think there’s a certain freedom as well if you don’t have to worry about income. I was willing to be broke for a number of years, making less than $20,000 a year after law school that gave me a lot of room to do a lot of stuff that no one was ever going to pay me to do. With all within theory in the back of my head that technology was only become more important to, at the time, the criminal justice system, but the justice system at large.

And that was the right bet to take at the time. But at the moment when I would go to civic tech conferences in 20 13, 20 14, everyone was confused on why the criminal justice lawyer was there. We just did not exist in those spaces. And so I guess the other piece of that is just being confident enough to believe you’re correct, right? I think the weird thing about trying something new is you simultaneously have to believe that this is going to work and also most new things fail. And I don’t know what it takes to train your mind to do that, but that’s been something I’ve been able to mostly bifurcate for the majority of my career, which even in success, we’ve had failures. Our pilot for Judicial innovation fellowship was super successful. We could not raise funding for a second year, and that is super disappointing, especially after all the hard work that went in from so many people. But I mean, that’s what you sign up for. And so long as I think your expectations are set realistically, then I think the lows feel a little bit less low. Which doesn’t mean they don’t suck, they do, but there’s some expectation management there. That’s helpful.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, our last question is our selfish question. We find that we get lots of great recommendations for new future guests on our podcast by asking our current guests on our podcast. So Jason, who are the voices in legal tech that you’d like to single out to maybe see as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Jason Tashea:

Sure. I mentioned Keith Perro. He does a lot of great work around data management and data controls out of Duke Law School. Sarah Logon at Rutgers, she does a lot about digital criminal records and what it looks like to have a perpetual record online. Colleen Chen at Berkeley has been doing great work for years in the justice space. And Miguel Willis, who’s at the University of Pennsylvania and runs a similar program to ours for law students interested in tech and law, are all great people with different perspectives on many of the issues that we touched on today.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we want to thank Jason Tashea for being a guest on the podcast. Jason, tell us where people can learn more about what you’re doing.

Jason Tashea:

Judicial Innovations website is judicial innovation.org, and my personal website is Jason Tashea, T-A-S-H-E a.com.

Dennis Kennedy:

Cool. Thank you so much, Jason. You were a fantastic guest. Great information, great advice, great opinions. That kind of expands my thinking and hopefully our listeners as well. So many topics, so little time. I know we could go back and have many more things to talk about. We’ll have to get you back on the show. But now it’s time for our parting shots at One Tip website. Our observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Jason, take it away.

Jason Tashea:

I recommend people go and watch Mr. Bates versus the post office. It was a four episode TV series out of Britain. If you want to see how technology can be used by government to hurt people, which I think is going to be a big theme over the next four years, then that is a good show to watch.

Tom Mighell:

Second that though I didn’t see it, but I listened to the BBC religiously and they talk about it constantly. Even today, they continue to bring it up and it’s just a horrifying experience a lot of people had to go through. Mine is not a technology related topic or tip. I have been, as we’ve talked about on the podcast before, I’ve been getting into various more healthy things to do and think about. And one of the things that I’ve been paying attention to more lately is that a lot of times falls happen to people getting older, such as myself because the feet are not strong. And I found a website called Gate happens.com, that’s run by some physical therapist physiologists who are specialists in the feet, who showed just a couple of ways to show just how weak my feet were. I don’t have any foot problems, I don’t have any foot issues, but I have incredibly weak feet and I didn’t realize how much just strengthening the income one make me feel better and hopefully two help my stability. They’ve got a Fit Feet program, I think that’s what it’s called, where you can take a couple of questions, answer a couple of questions, they’ll tell you kind of what feet you have, and then suggest some strengthening exercises to help improve the strength of your feet. And I got it, and I got to tell you, I really love it. It’s great. It’s called Gate happens.com. I’ll put the link in the share notes.

Dennis Kennedy:

And that’s GAIT, right?

Tom Mighell:

GAIT? Correct.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I have two things, a little self-serving this time, but this kind of grew out in a way of my thinking around the Fresh Voices series. But somebody asked me to do an AI and law webcast and I said, I’ll do it if it’s like once a month. And it’s freeform and it’s very practical. And we have new and interesting voices, diverse voices. So we’re doing it. And you can find, it’s called Legal AI Live. You can find it on LinkedIn. It happens on the second Friday afternoon of the month. And I think the old broadcasts we’re about to do. The second one tomorrow will be available for download and watching. So you have that. And then I’m working on a new handout I would call it, putting together the information I do on the thing I call my personal quarter early offsites and kind of updating it for a lot of my new thinking and ways to use AI in connection with that. And so I made the old one available for free download, and you can find that on my website and blog.

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 also on the Legal Talk Network website where you can also subscribe to the podcast. You can also do that within any of your favorite podcasting app. If you like to get in touch with us or suggest a topic for an upcoming episode, you can always find us on LinkedIn or we still love to get your questions for our B segment. Please, if you have a question, leave us a voicemail at 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. That helps us out a lot, especially with 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.

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