Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with April Dawson

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Web 2.0 innovation collaboration, 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 Mile. Welcome to the Kennedy Mighell report here on the Legal Talk Network

Dennis Kennedy:

And welcome to episode 402 of the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in n Arbor.

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy:

In our last episode, Tom and I talked with Legal Tech pioneer Mark Tson as part of our Fresh Voices on legal tech interview series. Be sure to give it a little lesson and hear Mark’s deeply informed and historical view of legal tech combined with some of his fresh innovations and approaches. In this episode, we have another very special guest in our Fresh Voices on legal tech series in Fresh Voices. We want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. 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 April Dawson, associate Dean of Technology and Innovation and a professor of law at North Carolina Central University School of Law. She oversees the operation of the NCCU Technology, law and Policy Center. She’s the author of Artificial Intelligence and Academic Integrity and the soon to be co, I guess, co-author of the Soon to be published AI and Legal Reasoning. 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 perspective on the things you need to be paying attention to right now. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start using the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome April Dawson to our Fresh Voices series. April, welcome to the Kennedy Mighell report.

April Dawson:

Tom and Dennis, thank you so much for inviting me to be a guest on the show. I’m a longtime fan, so I’m delighted to be here and to engage in conversation with you.

Tom Mighell:

We love to hear that. That means we ask all the easy questions. So before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself than I did? What’s all happening at NCCU and your role there? What should our audience know about you?

April Dawson:

Yes, well, it’s an exciting time at NCCU School of Law and Legal Education just kind of generally, as you noted, I am the Associate Dean of Technology and Innovation, so it was a new position that was created when we received a 5 million grant from Intel in 2020. And with that grant, we used it to help students with scholarships and we also created a technology law and policy center. And so through this center, we have been able to develop a law and technology certificate and build up our law and technology curriculum. So we have some courses that focus on skills development. We have some courses that focus on legal tech substantive areas. And one of the things that we’re really excited about and proud of is that we have developed programs and courses to help students earn professional legal focused certifications while they’re still in law school. So a lot of lawyers have gone on to get the CIPP US certification, so certified information privacy professional US and E. One of the most recent certifications is the AI Governance Professional certifications, and I’ll be happy to talk more about this, but we taught our first AI governance class in the spring and we had some students who actually earned their A IGP certification. So we’re really excited about the program and what we’ve been able to do.

Dennis Kennedy:

That’s great and definitely want to talk more about that. But first of all, I always enjoy talking with you, so it’s so awesome for us to have you as guests on the podcast. So what I think a lot about these days is I find it not always easy to talk with or teach lawyers and law students about technology, and sometimes I do get frustrated with that, how difficult it can be to explain technology and its benefits to people in the legal profession. Now I really like the way you’re able to talk about these topics and I’m always interested in learning about the approaches people take and your approach in particular is communicating with lawyers, law students and others in the legal profession about technology and what you found actually works well for you.

April Dawson:

Dennis, we met years ago, and I had heard about you well before we had met because you as well was someone who just really enjoyed technology. And so for those of us that really kind of geek out over it, we can sometimes put up barriers because we enjoy it and other folks just don’t have that same affinity towards a technology law. Students and lawyers will often say, I decided to come to law school because I don’t like math. If you think about tech, tech is based on zeros and ones math and algorithms. But one of the things that I share with students and law professors and judges when I talk about the technology is that yes, it can feel overwhelming even for those of us that enjoy this space, but you don’t have to eat the elephant all at once and it’s just about baby steps.

I have been talking about using technology in teaching for years, almost 10 years now, and I always include a slide of a turtle at the beginning of my presentations and it has a caption there that says, slow your roll. And I tell the audience that I want you to think about a turtle when you start feeling overwhelmed, all you have to do is just one little thing. And so just know that you can take baby steps and you’ll get there eventually. The other thing that I tell law professors in particular is that we tell our students when they enter into law school that you’re learning a whole new language. You’re being exposed to things that you couldn’t necessarily predict before you came to law school. And we tell our students to embrace a growth mindset. Well, we as law professors are now in that position where we have to practice what we preach. So it’s challenging, yes, but we’re going to have to do it. We’re training the next generation of lawyers, and so law professors have a responsibility to understand the technology as well. So go slow baby steps. And then I guess the other thing that I would say is we’re all in this together, so let’s work together. I

Tom Mighell:

Would say a lot of professors are having to take the baby steps too, right? I mean, it’s a little bit not used to thinking about the growth mindset, some professors in the past. That leads into the other question, which is technology competence, which is kind of a different way of thinking about how you’re communicating about technology. We talk a lot on the podcast about how skeptical we are about lawyers competence around technology, but I want to ask a question around law students in particular what you’re seeing. When we interviewed Mark Lorton in the previous podcast, he made a very, I think, telling comment, which is it’s impossible to have total technology confidence so much out there depending on what it is. And the fact that AI is changing every three days, it’s very difficult to be competent the way that people might think about it. How are you thinking about it in terms of the law students? What would you view as success for NCCU School of Law as saying we’re producing technologically competent lawyers? What do you think of a law student needs to know coming out of law school?

April Dawson:

Well, I think during this moment in time when generative AI has really kind of changed the playing field, I mean, we all know that AI has been around and been used within the legal profession for decades, but it’s this moment of generative AI that’s really kind of changing the game. And I think what success looks like for law students is that they understand how the technology works. You do have to have an understanding of what’s going on under the hood in a way that we didn’t have to in the past. Because once you have a better understanding of how the technology works, you can apply that with other technologies that continue to emerge that are kind of built on large language models or generative ai. So you don’t have to master all of the tools, but if you have an understanding of the underlying technology, then that will help you be able to determine the best use cases, the potential pitfalls.

One of the things that we’re seeing just about every day, and I know you two follow it as well, are lawyers that are filing briefs that have hallucinated cases. Well, once you understand that large language models are not oracles or encyclopedias, that they are statistical word and actually token predictors, then you don’t look at it like magic. And you also understand that you absolutely need to verify any type of output that you get, but if you don’t have an understanding of what’s going on under the hood, that may be lost on you and you think it’s doing something that it is not. So I think that every single law student very early in their law school career, I would say certainly the first couple of weeks, they need to have an in-depth class that focuses on this technology, one so they can understand how to use it. But then two, to also talk about academic integrity. Why is it that we do not want students to offload their learning and the difficult work of learning and producing on with these tools? We have to have real conversations about how we learn and that it takes effort and hard work in order to master information. We should be having those conversations on the front end.

Tom Mighell:

I would only add to that very quickly that those lawyers who have been using hallucinated citations, I totally agree that if they knew how the technology worked, that would stop. But I would also say all they have to do is read the news. I can’t believe that we’re still getting hallucinated citations with all the published news about It just drives me nuts. Okay, sorry, that was just

Dennis Kennedy:

Mine. Same thing

Tom Mighell:

In

Dennis Kennedy:

The no comment. Same thing in the metadata era. Well, that’s true.

Tom Mighell:

Metadata has never changed. You’re right. You’re right. We’re still seeing that.

Dennis Kennedy:

It’s really interesting to think about that because in my class, one of the projects I gave my students was to create an AI personalized learning assistant, and it could be on anything. Then I had them reflect on that. And it was interesting because a lot of ’em didn’t use it for something related to law school. It might be to create recipes or play on a vacation or something like that, but by doing that, they would see what it did well and what it didn’t do well, and they had this learning that came from that. So you have this unique vantage point, I think in seeing what’s happening in legal education and the legal profession. So what are the areas these days that you think need the most attention and how can we get people in the profession to pay that attention? I know there’s a lot of candidates, I think in terms of systems, I’m going to be speaking in a couple of weeks about self-represented litigants and what is truly a crisis situation there, but what are the things that you think need the most attention these days?

April Dawson:

I would say, and I don’t think we can overstate the competency that tech competency and Dennis, I do the same thing with my classes where my students are actually required to get a subscription of, and we’re using chat DPT in this particular class, but I’ve had other classes where they could use their tool of choice, but they were required to get the subscription. There was no book fee in the class because they had to use the tool. So tutorials, some type of tutor that they built, we’re going to be doing some vibe coding in my AI legal reasoning class. And so the point is that you cannot understand the technology if you don’t use it. And so I think it’s just really critical that we let our students actually use the technology, in fact, require them to use the technology because that helps lead to tech competency.

The other thing is that there’s not a single area of the law or within society that is not being disrupted by AI in some way, shape, or form. So we have to make sure that our students are thinking about society and justice and equity through the lens of how AI could actually wind up doing more harm than good. So all of the problems that we’ve talked about, and we think about lawyers being, I went to Howard University School of Law and we talked about how lawyers are social engineers, Charles Hamilton, Houston, and you can trace any systemic issues that we have within our institutions, and artificial intelligence will exacerbate that. So thinking about challenges that we have within society and recognizing that if we don’t have lawyers at the table when these tools are being designed or even thought about and developed and deployed and tested, that you need to make sure that you have these multidisciplinary teams who are at the table. And the teams have to include lawyers who not only understand the law, understand society and the role that law and justice plays in society, but that also understand the technology as well.

Tom Mighell:

Talking about multidisciplinary teams leads very nicely into the next question, which is collaboration. You’ve listened to the podcast, so we like to talk a lot about collaboration. I confessed to another guest recently that I asked these questions because I want to know about all the tools that everybody’s using to see if anything’s cool. And I usually don’t get the answer back about technology. It’s usually about the people or the process, which are all very important pieces. So I’ll just ask you what to you defines successful collaboration, whether that’s with your colleagues at the law school, with students, with anybody?

April Dawson:

Yeah. When I think about collaboration, I’m thinking about people first. I love the technology, but when I think about what we as humans bring to the table and the discussion, we are uniquely human and we want to develop and encourage that. So I always think about people first. And so the first thing that I would say is that the legal tech community has always been incredibly collaborative and welcoming, and it’s just a really wonderful space to be in. So Dan, Lena and I were working on this AI legal reasoning book, so being able to collaborate with the colleagues at other institutions. He’s at Northwestern Pritz School of Law. We also started this AI law prof group, and right now we have over 330 professors, not necessarily law professors, but professors who are either teaching or are interested in teaching AI and the law related courses.

And the reason why we created this group is because there were more and more AI in the law related courses that were being taught, and we wanted to kind of share or have a place where people could share that information. And I’m going to give another shout out to Dennis. One of the classes that I teach is a legal technology equity and leadership course, which I designed from his legal technology leadership course. And he was just as so many professors in this space, just so willing to share what it was that he was doing. So I was able to look at his course and add to it. And so this particular group allows people to post their syllabi, their materials, their questions, and so again, we’ve got folks within this space just being very supportive. The other thing that I really love about this moment in time is law schools can be in their silos, especially if you have law schools as part of larger universities.

But when we’re thinking about technology and we’re thinking about the need for these multidisciplinary teams, this is the perfect time to collaborate with other departments within the university. So I’ve taught an AI in the law course with a professor at the School of Library and Information Science. We have a cybersecurity program, and so our cybersecurity specialization that we’re developing, we work closely with them. We’ve put on workshops, entrepreneur tech workshops with our school of business, so to be able to break out of our silos and talk about the technology and the law and societal implications with folks who are doing other things. And the point is that we can’t make progress when we’re thinking about improving society if you don’t have multiple stakeholders who are providing different information at the table as we’re thinking about the technology,

Tom Mighell:

It’s funny that what’s interesting about these interviews is that I frequently find myself wanting to do the things that our guests are doing and wanting to change my career. And although I’m not quite there yet on the law professor thing, would love to be a fly on the wall of that AI in the law group that you have. I think that to be able to participate and listen to that. Oh my gosh. All right. We have a lot more to talk about with April Dawson from North Carolina Central University School of Law, but we first need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors,

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with April Dawson at North Carolina Central University School of Law. We found in the Fresh Voices series that we’d love to hear our guests 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?

April Dawson:

Well, my undergraduate degree is in computer science, and so I’ve always loved technology. I started coding when I was in high school almost 60 years ago. So I’ve always loved technology and I’ve always used technology in every role that I’ve ever had. I was a programmer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for two years before going to law school. I had a love of law as well. And what’s interesting is when you have a tech background, oftentimes folks will encourage you to consider patent law. I had no interest in patent law. I wanted to be a trial attorney. I wanted to be in the Courtroom. So I went to DOJ right out of law school. And even though I wasn’t doing trial work, I did do appellate work. And so I got a chance to argue cases before the ninth Circuit and seventh Circuit and fifth Circuit, and that was a great job.

I was there for two years, and then I did a clerkship with US District Judge Emmett Sullivan in Washington dc. So it was great being in the trial. So even though I didn’t practice primarily as a trial attorney, it was really wonderful doing a clerkship at that level. And then I went to a Washington DC law firm, which was a telecommunications law firm. And even though I thought I would be doing trial work, we know when you’re a young associate, you were not in court. But that was an interesting learning experience and that’s how I got introduced to teaching. So while I was at the firm, I was an adjunct legal writing professor at George Washington University school of Law, which was in walking distance to the firm. So it was just really wonderful for me to be able to get out of the building and walk and kind of interact with the students and just really fell in love with teaching and legal education and being around that youthful energy. And so I was in DC for, gosh, I guess that was about five, six years of practice. And then I moved to North Carolina and started a family law firm in my own practice. And the teaching bug was still with me. And so I decided to become an adjunct legal writing professor at North Carolina Central University School of Law, and then decided I wanted to make it my full-time career. So in 2026, I became a full-time professor. And so it’s going on almost 20 years that I’ve been teaching.

Tom Mighell:

Wow. Wow. Alright. The script that we use says, let’s dig into ai, but we’ve already been digging into ai. So let’s continue talking about ai, I guess, and let’s talk about it in law schools. If you had a magic wand, you’ve told us a little bit about how you’re currently working with students and having them think about generative AI and AI tools. But if you could wave a magic wand, how would you see law schools approach the use of ai? And then do the HBCUs have a unique opportunity in our new world of ai?

April Dawson:

Yes. So I think what makes this moment so exciting when we think about how law schools can use AI is that it gives us a chance to rethink education and how we learn and how we teach and how we support the learning of information. Because the old way of doing things, many of those approaches do not work. Take home exams, they do not work. I mean, anything where the student produces something outside of the classroom as an artifact, you cannot use that to assess their mastery of the information. We just can’t. And sometimes I get pushback on that because professors will say, well, I tell them not to use it. And this is the challenge. Some students won’t use it, but some students will, and the students who would not otherwise use it feel as though, and they are in fact at a disadvantage. So they will use it not because they want to, but because they don’t want to be at a disadvantage.

We can’t set up our educational system in such a way that there’s no integrity in the assessment or in the grading, which means that there’s no integrity in the degree. So we as educators, we need to think long and hard about what do we want our students to learn first foremost, and does that change? Do we want them to learn how to create a good first draft? If the technology can create that, well, maybe we do want them because that’s part of the hard work. Well, if that’s the case, then what’s the environment in which we have them do that? Maybe we have them do that actually in the classroom as opposed to outside of the classroom. We also have to think about how do you actually assess mastery and knowledge and learning? And one of the things that I’ve done, and I know there are other professors as well, I have much more presentations and dialogue and where the students are articulating their understanding as opposed to just writing it.

One assignment that I just gave my AI legal reasoning students is we were talking about the rules of professional responsibility. And the A recently issued its guidance on generative ai, so the five 12 report. So I had my students read that, and then I had them to create and present for their legal colleagues information about five 12 and about the rules of professional responsibility. So they had to read it, we talked about it in class, and then they had to put together a presentation and record themselves. So the assignment that they were submitting to me was an actual recording of them giving a presentation to lawyers about the rules of professional responsibility, which is great for them because it allows them to engage with the material in so many different ways. But it also allows me to see how it is that they are explaining their understanding.

And when I asked them about the exercise, I said, do you feel like you engaged and you understand this information more? And without a doubt, they say yes. And one of the things that we know as educators is that you learn more when you teach. So is that something that we can do a better job of incorporating within our classes, actually allowing the students to do more presentations and clearly showing that they understand by talking about it, engaging in dialogue as opposed to just turning in something that they wrote maybe or maybe not outside of the classroom. So when I think about the use of AI tools, how do you leverage the tools to help you in your learning? And so this goes back to using these tools to create a tutor using these tools to help students maybe be more efficient in some way, shape or form that doesn’t undermine their learning. But then also, how can we as educators use the tools so we actually have more time to have face-to-face one-on-one contact with our students. They’re coming up with multiple choice questions. We don’t need to do that from scratch anymore. I remember that was the thing that just took me forever to do. I can actually leverage the tool. So how can we as professors create more time and space to have that human to human contact with our students?

What I will say about HBCUs is that we are at a moment in time where generative AI is new for all of us. So it doesn’t matter what resources you have at any schools, I don’t feel like I’m at a disadvantage at NCCU School of Law because we don’t have the same types of resources as Stanford, at least when it comes to the availability of these generative AI tools and my ability to accelerate my students’ level of tech competency. Because what it takes for me is understanding time, and I can also share that information with them. So when you think about schools that are, oftentimes this is a moment in time where we can actually leverage the tools to try to level the playing field.

Dennis Kennedy:

There’s so many things to follow up on there for me that I’ve been thinking about, but there is this moment for true innovation. And then I also always felt from the beginning, which two and a half years I got almost three years ago, that AI drove us to the most found foundational and fundamental questions really quickly. So the first time I talked to AI in law class at the end, I said, I think the topic of this class is really trust. It really does come down to that and how do we think some of these things are going to work? And yeah, I think the challenge in law schools is how does the student experience need to change? And so I found doing some of the same things that you’ve done, but do a lot more group work. And I encourage students to use AI to say, you’re missing a perspective on something.

Ask the AI to be a standin for the client, for the partners in the firm. If you’re thinking about what the partners might feel about it for their standin things, I use scenario planning matrices to say, here are four possible futures. How would we think about that? And those things were hard to do before ai, but it gets students into the saying where we say, can I bring them in discussions up to a much higher level really quickly so it becomes more productive. And the thing I found last semester that surprised me, and I touched on this a little bit, was that when I asked them just to do ungraded reflections, that those were just so revealing to me so I could see the improvement they made and they thought about like, oh, here’s what I initially thought, here’s what I’m now thinking. And that gave me confidence in what I was seeing that they were producing as well. And it is a changing workplace, but you’ve talked about some of the things you’re doing, but what do you see in AI and maybe what are you hearing from your students and former students that they’re doing with AI that really gets you excited these days?

April Dawson:

Well, one thing that excites them and me as well as a professor in this space is when they go to, when they’re talking to potential employers, when they go on their job interviews and they mention that for those students that are getting the law technology certificate and they talk about the certificate and they talk about the classes that they’ve taken, there’s a lot of interest on the part of employers. And one of the things I’ve been underscoring for my students is new lawyers to the extent that they’re able to build up their tech competency skills while they’re in law school, will be bringing a unique value proposition that I wasn’t able to bring when I started practicing 30 some odd years ago. And so they can actually assist other lawyers who may have been practicing for decades to really figure out how to use the technology to be that expert, at least in the tech space or understanding the technology and how you might be able to leverage the technology while they’re learning about the substantive expertise. So a new lawyer is not going to have that same level of substantive expertise, but they can actually go into the firm or the government institution or wherever they’re working, bring some real value that they could not have even maybe five or six years ago I would say. So I do think that’s really exciting that they can see themselves being a value in a way that they may not have predicted when they started law school.

Dennis Kennedy:

And if I can ask a follow up, because I’ve had conversations with a couple of law students in the past few days who have already done legal AI chatbots while they’re students, and they’re starting to say, how can I pursue this? I’m not sure I wanted to be a practicing lawyer, but I’d love to pursue this. So I guess I’m interested, are you hearing some of the same things and what are the success stories that you hear out there?

April Dawson:

Yes, absolutely. So AI governance is a great example of other areas that allow students to explore the technology and the intersection between AI and the law AI governance. That was not a term that was really used two or three years ago, and there was no real kind of AI governance area of expertise. Now, we definitely had governance, security governance and risk management and compliance. That’s all existed. But because of where we’re seeing AI going and how it’s moving so quickly, there now needs to be those that are experts in the AI governance space. So I tell my students to one, you need to be talking to practicing lawyers and not just your professors. The vast majority of your professors were in law school when these fields did not exist. And so if you are very narrow, if you’re just talking to the folks in the law school building, you’re going to think very narrowly on what your job opportunities might be.

But if you start talking to folks who are actually in those fields and those fields that didn’t exist before, and then even ask them What is coming? What do you see coming? The other thing that I encourage students to do is to, a lot of these conferences, these legal tech conferences are available on YouTube, watch these sessions. And I always tell ’em, I say, you don’t even have to watch it or listen to it on normal speed, accelerate it. You can strip the audio, you can put it up in your pot. I mean, there’s so many ways that you can consume information and learn more about what’s going on in the space. And to that note, I actually want to plug, we have our fourth annual law and technology summit, which will be October 17th here in North Carolina at the Durham Convention Center. However, there’s also a virtual attendance option, and it’s free for law students.

And one of the things I know that always frustrates me when I go to a conference and there are concurrent sessions, if they’re not recorded, then I have to choose, right? And I’m not going to be able to go to the other one. Well, we are recording all of our sessions and all the attendees will have access to on-demand recordings for all of the sessions. And so you can kind of pick and choose. You can watch the live stream and then go back and watch it again. But the reason why we decided to design our conference that way is because we want to make this information available for students. And we’re bringing in practitioners and scholars and deep thinkers about where we are in this particular moment, but also where we think we might be going and the need for lawyers within these spaces. It’s an exciting time to be a law student, and I really encourage them to think outside the box and talk to those lawyers and policymakers who are on the front line and who can see where the puck is going. You don’t skate to where the puck is, you skate to where the puck is going, and that’s their task as well.

Tom Mighell:

That is a great way to run a conference. We have to ask. We have more to talk about with April Dawson, but we need to take another short break to hear from our sponsors. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Dennis Kennedy. And I’m Tom Mile, and we’re joined by our special guest, April Dawson at North Carolina Central University School of Law. We’ve got time for just a few more questions, Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, I think you’re already doing a great job of this, and you’ve talked some about this, but maybe you talk about the professional certifications during law school, something that we thought a lot about at Michigan State and did some experiment there. But how do you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths in legal tech and non-traditional careers in law, especially in ai? And some of it’s just pure awareness, but what do you do to when somebody says, I don’t know that I want to practice, but there’s these other areas that seem really cool,

April Dawson:

And I think the certifications are really a good introduction to what the possibilities are. And so we have an educational partnership with the IAPP, and so that’s the organization that administers the CUS and the sippy and the A IGP and our students are able to get access to the materials at a reduced rate. Many of our students come into law school. Well, and this is true of a lot of law students, they decide to go to law school because of what you see on tv. And what you see on TV is not necessarily the privacy professional or the cybersecurity professional or the AI governance professional, it’s the trial lawyer and a lot of law students, that’s how it was with me. That was a reason why I decided to go to law school. But when you show them what all the possibilities are, then they may realize that I actually really like privacy and the implications of privacy policy and the things that I really care about, say marginalized communities, that privacy is wrapped up in that space as well.

And so for those students that want to explore it is to their advantage if they can get the exposure to the material, if they can get that foundational mastery and at the same time earn a certification while they’re in school, because when they’re applying for jobs, and there are several lawyers who don’t have these certifications yet who are trying to get them, they’re applying to jobs and they can say, I have earned this certification. It’s more than them just saying, I have an interest in this space. They have demonstrated their commitment to this space, and they’ve demonstrated that they have this foundational, they have mastered the foundational information because you cannot get the certification without. And so I’m not aware, quite frankly, of any other law school that has the same type of robust certification support, but my guess is that give it about five years, and this will be table stakes, especially for those students, that if you want to be in the tech space, you’re going to have to demonstrate more than just lip service. You’re going to really have to be able to demonstrate a certain level of tech competency. And the certifications we know are big in the tech space. They get certifications all the time.

Tom Mighell:

I think it’s what’s interesting is I work in the information governance space. I spoke a year ago, October, to the Association of Corporate Counsel on AI governance. And I think that what you’re doing now is the first step. The next step to me, which is the harder step, is getting everybody else to care about this because, because right now they’re still in their honeymoon phase with AI and they’re still saying, what can we do? And they’re not even thinking about governance. And it’s going to be very interesting when people start to realize, oh wait, we really need to do something about this. So at least you’ll have people in place to do that. So I think that’s important to be prepared for that. So yeah, super important. Okay, so we like to end the podcast by picking our guest brains on who else we should bring to our podcast. So who are the fresh voices that you think our listeners would want to be interested in?

April Dawson:

So the first thing that I would say is the AI Law Prof group. Anyone can access that. So you can’t join the group unless you’re a professor in the space, but anyone can go on and see the list of folks who are there

Tom Mighell:

And all that.

April Dawson:

Yes. And we have a tab where folks who have indicated that they’re available to speak. And so if someone is looking for a speaker who is in the AI technology law space, I would definitely encourage folks to do that. I am working on another book on AI and social justice, and my colleague at the University of New Mexico, Sonya Gibson Rankin is just a wonderful professor there. She is deep in the AI and technology and legal space. She also has her undergraduate degree in computer science. Not that you need to have that to be in this space, but she’s someone I would definitely encourage folks to check out. She’s wonderful.

Tom Mighell:

Awesome. Alright, new names. Yay. I love it when we get new names. Alright, well, we want to thank April Dawson at North Carolina Central University School of Law for being our guest on the podcast. April, tell us where people can learn more about you or get in touch with you or where can they find out more?

April Dawson:

Yeah, the best place to follow me would be on LinkedIn. I try to post there and if I’m not posting, I’m typically liking something or reposting something. And so that’s probably the best place to keep up with the going ons of April Dawson.

Dennis Kennedy:

So thank you so much, April, as I knew you would be. You’re a fantastic guest, great information and advice. I always love talking with you and as usual, so many topics to discuss and so little time. But now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends, April, take it away.

April Dawson:

So my parting shot is I will, as so many of us got so many things going on, sometimes I get out of my workflow because my mind is just kind of popping around thinking about all the things. When that happens, I will record a voice memo and then I will put it in chat GPT and ask it to organize. So I just do a dump, just do a brain dump and then put it in chat, GPT say, organize this based on priority. And then I know I’ve got it captured somewhere and then I just go through the list. So that’s been a real helpful trick that I’ve been utilizing.

Tom Mighell:

Okay. I’m glad you had that trick because mine is also a, I wouldn’t call it a trick, but it’s what I’m doing, and you all are going to probably come back and say, Tom, everybody’s been doing this. So that’s fine if that’s the case. But back in the day, and by the day, I mean three or four or five years ago when I wanted to learn more about how to use a tool, I would be looking at YouTube videos or finding articles or finding all sorts of stuff. And I don’t have to do that anymore. We are and listeners of the podcast get ready because we are getting ready to sell our house and potentially build a new house. So that is a long and involved process that we’ll be in. And I’ll probably be talking about it periodically, but I wanted to be able to track it, and we decided, I decided to use Trello as the tool to track all of our tasks and all this stuff, but I haven’t used it very often.

And so rather than go to look at the videos I went to and I use chat GPT, and I said, chat GPT, you’re a Trello expert. I need you to give me best practices for how to set this up for a house sale, for a house purchase, for a house design. And it said, here are the boards you need to create. Here’s how you need to use Butler. Here is how you need to do X, Y, and z Stuff that I knew, but also it gave me ideas and I was able to, it didn’t, usually when I sit down to do something, I am struggling, even though I know how to use the tool. I’m struggling with the best ways to use it, and this made it so easy for me. So let AI be your software guru if you are even looking for just inspiration on how to make the best use of it.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I think that’s great. The caveat I have is I think it’s fantastic for that sort of overview and getting you going in the right directions and what to do. Sometimes you need to work with it a few times on the step-by-step because you’ll definitely see what are properly referred to as hallucinations. You sometimes have to work through it a little bit, but it’ll get there.

Tom Mighell:

Even copilot hallucinates about its own Microsoft projects, though step-by-step for its own Microsoft projects are bad too. So yeah, I’m no stranger to that.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I also have a prompt, and this is one I use a lot, and I think a lot about what is AI good for and what is it not so good for? So I’ll sometimes have this long chat session that we’ll go through all these different areas and I’ll kind of come to some conclusion about what I want to do or something. And then at the end, I will just do this prompt that says, what might I be missing? Then it will say, well, and it’s usually pretty, some of it’s no surprise, you haven’t really thought about the ethics components or you haven’t thought about the impact on your family or something like that. But a lot of times it will surface some things that you’re like, oh yeah, I should have thought of that. And I think it’s a little bit different than saying like, oh, I want AI to critique what I’ve done. Because if you do like a devil’s advocate type of prompt, it will talk you out of everything that you’re ever thinking of doing because it’s really good at that. But the what might I be missing is a more creative approach to help you move forward.

Tom Mighell:

All right. 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 to Networks page for our show. You can find all of our previous podcasts with transcripts on the legal to network site as well. If you’d like to get in touch with us, please reach out to us on LinkedIn or remember, we’d love to get your questions. Leave us a voicemail at 7 2 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mile.

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 really helps us out. And as always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. We’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

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