Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Thomas Officer

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 Mighell. Welcome to the Kennedy Mighell report here on the Legal Talk Network

Dennis Kennedy:

And welcome to episode 412 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 a Fresh Voices, first two guests and both of the more former students of mine from Michigan State University College of Law, Megan Morrison and Laith Quasem. It was a wonderful conversation I have to say about the next generation’s perspective on legal technology and I highly recommend it to you. In this episode, we have another fascinating guest who brings a unique perspective to legal tech, someone who’s traveled the path from practicing lawyer to design the engineer and legal tech founder Tom. What’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:

Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy Model Report, we are thrilled to continue our fresh voices on legal tech interview series with Thomas Officer design engineer, former lawyer, although is anybody really a former lawyer. I mean we’re always lawyers. We will always be lawyers and founder of After Pattern, which was acquired by Net Documents. Thomas brings a rare combination of legal practice experience and engineering expertise to legal technology, particularly in document automation and design thinking. 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 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 Tooma officer to our Fresh Voices series. Tooma, welcome to the Kennedy Mall report.

Thomas Officer:

Hello. Thank you. Good to be here.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, tell the audience a little bit about yourself. What’s happening with you these days? What our audience should know generally about what you do.

Thomas Officer:

Yeah, you’re catching me at a bit of a transition moment since November when I left my third startup after a two year endeavor to get that off the ground, but for my whole career, ever since graduating law school in 2012 and joined the New York bar, I’ve been working in legal tech startups, have had titles like designer, product designer, UX designer, and recently very much leaning into AI and embracing these blended roles and what people are starting to call a design engineer.

Dennis Kennedy:

Cool. Toma, it’s awesome for us to have you as a guest on the podcast. It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to talk to you. We used to talk more often. I think you had just joined up with net documents the last time we spoke. You got me thinking when you mentioned user experience notion. I sometimes think that if somebody who’s going to be a lawyer could take one class outside of law school, it might be like user experience would be useful. Obviously organizational psychology would be another good one. So your path isn’t the common one. And so one thing you’re really great at, I think especially on documented automation and other things like that is that you have a way of explaining technology to lawyers that I think is really good and not intimidating. Would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology and what you found works well for you?

Thomas Officer:

Yeah, thank you for saying that. I put a lot of value on good conversation, not to be too techy, but I love the idea of gring with someone, the mind meld when you both feel like you’re on the same page. And yeah, it can be hard to talk about tech that way because foreign, but a lot has changed even in just the past two and a half years. We’ve come to a point now where my favorite way to talk about tech is to actually just imagine you’re talking about a new hire at your firm that’s always available and is surprisingly intelligent and this forces the conversation away from tech and more towards, well what are you trying to do? What jobs are you looking to accomplish? What’s your goal here? I know you like that terminology a lot, the jobs be done, but I like focusing in on that because something presumably a lawyer knows very well I know, know my workflow, I know my practice. I might not describe it in techie terms, but I can definitely be clear about the pains I’m experiencing and the jobs I need to accomplish.

Tom Mighell:

And so I want to ask a related question to that. So we talk about describing things that are techie to lawyers. We talk a lot on this podcast about technology competence and frankly Dennis and I always have a rather dim view of technology competence. It’s nice that we have lots of guests who are disusing of that and saying that they’re seeing folks out there who are really making some good strides and all that. I kind of am interested to hear about it from your perspective as an engineer, as someone who thinks about user interfaces, about how lawyers will use technology and those types of things, how does technology competence of the current lawyer, what are you seeing there in terms of what you’re seeing and does that influence how you design for them? And then maybe kind of the related question, what kind of technology competence do you see a lawyer needing to have these days in order to work in things like document automation or doing design thinking, those types of things in legal work?

Thomas Officer:

Yeah, I’ll answer that last question first. I don’t like the finger wagging that that often comes with this whole conversation, but I’ve heard guests on your show talk about how you might be in violation of your standard of care as a legal professional if you’re not using what everyone else considers to be era defining technology. But my own observations of law firms or just like legal professionals in general is that the adoption of the firm of any new technology will go as far as the managing partner or whoever the leader is the leader as slow as they are, that’s as slow as everyone else is and as advanced as they are, that’s as advanced as everyone else is. And yeah, there’s a lot of variety. Some people are leaning into it and picking it up and some are not. I think it’s a motivational question. If you can’t see the value of it, why would you do it? And I think you can’t see the value of it if you can’t get or you can’t enunciate a bird’s eye view of your workflow. Literally the things that happen as you go about the business and practice of law, if you can’t establish that perspective, I think it’s really then hard for you to jump to the, well, why should I do something different? Why should I adopt some technology

Tom Mighell:

Real quick? Do you find that that’s so interesting that technology and a firm rises or lowers to the level of the leader that’s in there? Doesn’t matter if you’ve got 50 new associates who are new adopters or early adopters and enthusiastic learners. You’re seeing that it’s still relying on what the old guard is kind of saying about technology.

Thomas Officer:

That’s such a good point. I think there’s a distinction. I love the idea and it’s always a good idea to encourage junior younger people who are excited and are reaching beyond their remit and just taking it upon themselves to I tried this tool, I made this workflow. That’s excellent. A lot of good stuff comes from that. But when we’re talking about change management at scale on the level of this business is changing direction, that has to come from the top. Yep, a hundred percent. Yeah,

Dennis Kennedy:

It’s interesting. I have a similar top down view that it doesn’t happen. And when you were talking, I was thinking about, I did this thing with my students this past week where I had them look at the tools, the technologies and tools that associates would need going to new firm, but I had them say, you don’t want tool literacy, you want outcome literacy. And I said, don’t say I need to learn document management. You say I need to keep track of versions so I actually understanding the tool actually becomes more important. And so I had ’em do some group work and it was really interesting. They came up with four different technologies that they thought would be useful to them and they never named a product, which I thought was just like a breakthrough for me to see that thinking, but I know they’re going to go to a farm and the conversation is all going to be around which do we buy Harvey, do we use that sort of thing, it all tool. So I don’t know if that’s part of your thinking as well in that we do really look at what the people at the top are actually doing, not just what they’re saying.

Thomas Officer:

Yeah, and again, I think there’s a lot of value to nurturing the enthusiasm of especially younger professionals that is their superpower, the beginner’s mind unburdened by how things have done and can just look at a new technology and see it in a totally novel context and apply it to an old situation in a way that’s surprising. That’s their superpower. The superpower of people who’ve been in this game for a while and certainly the ones who have risen to the level of manager and partner is the understanding of the real world workflow, which is something that’s such a stereotype to say, but law students are missing. You understand the law and then you learn nothing about the business and actual practice of law.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I mean that piece that’s missing is so interesting because they’ll say these things and I’ll say, I’ll give an example and I’ll say, you have a client who asks you to tell whether the tool you’re using has some ISO certification. And I say, how do you answer that? And I would say, you don’t answer that. It’s so far out of your competence. Your answer is, let me find somebody who can answer that for you. You have to understand where your lane is. So from your vantage point, what are the areas in the legal profession that need the most attention these days and how do we get people to pay that attention? Is it like getting the shoes of the client? Is there something else that you’re seeing that seems really useful, especially based on your experience building tools?

Thomas Officer:

So I want to pick up where you were just leaving off where part of being good at what your job is is understanding when you’re going to assign it to someone else. So some client has asked some question about a security protocol. I’m good enough at what I do to know that I’m going to refer this to an expert or someone who knows the code inside and out. So delegation management, we were talking about why some people adopt tech, some don’t. The good news is if you’re not someone who’s adopting tech that the skills you need are the exact same as those of being a good manager, being good at identifying what you’re good at, what the situation calls for, what kind of expertise it calls for, understanding where that might be found and the ultimate skill of understanding how to learn something on the fly, right?

You’re confronted with a situation, you have no idea how to handle it, but you understand that there’s a series of questions you could ask a super intelligence to at least get you to a place where you’re aware of what you don’t know in a productive way. So being a good manager in order to adopt tech better is I think the critical skill in terms of where I think so everyone should be doing that. I’m particularly interested in consumer legal services. That’s just my particular interest and I think it’s changing rapidly. Any hesitation that might be felt by established legal professionals is not being felt by consumers when it comes to engaging with off the shelf AI tools for a whole variety of legal issues.

Tom Mighell:

So let’s take a slight right turn here and ask about a favorite topic of ours. This is one of the, we have two selfish questions in here. This is the first one and it’s about collaboration. We love to talk about collaboration technology and we mostly like to pick our guest brain on their favorite technology or process or people tips and tricks around collaboration. So you can mention a tool, you can mention the best processes you’ve got anything’s open here, but what are your favorite ways to collaborate, whether it’s with other engineers or lawyers or the consumers you are aiming to build products for?

Thomas Officer:

I’ve been collaborating and working remotely my whole career, not just since COVID, but I know a lot of us have gone remote since COVID. Traditionally collaborating remotely will look like video calls, some kind of shared cloud folder, and then the ability to have shared cloud documents and then email and maybe some task manager. I think today the best way to collaborate is use all those tools but understand some of the principles of working with AI that are unlocked by just having an understanding that each one of these tools is a context that is super valuable to be spoken with. I do a lot of video conversations, they produce transcripts, I put those transcripts in a shared folder. At any given moment, people I’m working with can refer back to our building library of transcripts. This is now the name of the game. If you’re going to collaborate well, I would love for us to be on the same page about how we’re going to build up this collection of context such that we can leverage it and it can compound over time.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we’ve got a lot more questions with Thomas officer, but we first need to take a break for a quick word from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Thomas officer. We founded the Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience likes it even more than we do your journey from lawyer to design engineer to legal tech founder. And then I want to get you to talk a little bit about the Echo startup that you did as well. But would you talk about your career path and the kinds of things you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus, which seems like you’re going more consumer rather than lawyer to lawyer.

Thomas Officer:

Well, let me start at the beginning. It’s 2012. I passed theBar, I moved to New York. I’m looking for work at a law firm. It’s tough. I’m interested in this change in law that relates to investment crowdfunding and there’s this company I see called Crowd Check that although as a company seems to be only trying to hire members of theBar and now it intrigued me, it turned out they’re a software company and they wanted to be able to flip a switch in case it turned out that there’s software constituted the delivery of legal services. They could say, fine, we’re a law firm. So I have a brother who’s a software engineer of a father who’s a software engineer. I knew enough to say, yeah, software sounds cool, but I was really interested in some kind of legal job that helped me do investment crowdfunding. So I got this job and this was my exposure to the world of the intersection of software and law, which I fell in love with. I decided I wanted to do my own startup. That didn’t work out at all. It was before what is the popular due diligence cloud platform that everyone uses today? Like a tech startup is going to use Stripe Atlas for its corporate governance, but then it’s going to use one of these platforms for managing its cap table and doing all that paperwork,

Tom Mighell:

Dunno,

Thomas Officer:

Whatever that was. I was working on something like that because at my job at Crowd Check I was working with startups, helping them do their corporate governance and you realize there’s got to be a way to better way to do this. This is terrible. You’ll ask them who’s the shareholder? And they’re like, well, here’s some emails I’ve been using to send them to my brother. Emails we’re so far off from the documentation I need to sign off on this. So that didn’t work out at all, but it got me in the game. I was now playing in the world of what does it mean to do a software company? I decided I want to be a UX designer. I wanted some kind of expertise for this new kind of work. I worked as a UX designer for a year and then I had an opportunity to join an amazing tech incubator, which is an accelerator like Y Combinator except an incubator doesn’t take existing startups, it takes individuals to create startups.

And so I joined that, it was like a reality TV show for six months. Me and 20 other individuals were all hacking on some kind of problem related to legal tech. What came out of that was eventually something that became after Pattern, which we worked on for many years, and then in 2021 after Pattern was acquired by Net Documents after Pattern at the end there in 2021 was a no-code app builder for lawyers. There was an arc to getting there, but by the end, the pitch to law firms was you should producty your expertise in order to deliver either discreet legal services or just have these onboarding experiences that help someone triage their issue. And there was a fantastic adoption of this. Around that time we were acquired by net documents and then about six months later, chate comes out. I consider that to be this era defining moment in my own career.

I wasn’t around for when the internet was first on the scene, but I’m very much of the opinion a lot of other people have that AI is if nothing else going to be as powerful as the internet and it’s probably going to be a lot more powerful. And so although I loved working at NetDocuments, I very much wanted to take another try at the world of startups. And so I left to find a new co-founder. I found an awesome co-founder named Reuben. We experimented together on different ideas for a couple months and then we eventually landed on a consumer product, which was totally new for me. I’d never built a consumer facing product. I’ve always ever worked in legal tech. And so for two years total, it was a huge learning experience building a consumer facing product. We did well, but ultimately we shut it down. And I can talk about why, but where I find myself today is excited to go back to legal tech. I’m seeing why Combinator, this tech accelerator say about their last batch that they had the most legal tech applicants that they’ve ever seen. Legal is just such an obvious environment of opportunity for ai. It’s knowledge work, it involves documents. This is right in the wheelhouse of ai. And so there’s a lot to be done here. So I’m excited to turn my attention back to that.

Tom Mighell:

Well, so that leads well into the next question. Although I will say Dennis likes to make fun of me because every guest that we have after they talk about their career path, I mentioned how I’m thinking about, wow, that sounds great. I’d maybe like to do that. And once again, I would never imagine that I would want to do engineering or startups or anything like that. But you know what, yeah, I feel the same. I feel the same I do about all of our guests. I have a lot of different career paths I’m looking at right now. So let’s dive back into AI and more particularly generative ai. When we put this question together, we were talking primarily about document automation, document assembly, but I’m going to open it up to everything. If your interest is in consumer legal products and things like that, what right now are you seeing the role of AI affecting in the practice of law? Can you expand on your last answer and then how is, if at all, genic AI going to play a role in all of this?

Thomas Officer:

Yeah, let me start by saying that I think document automation as a concept and a term is obsolete. There are, I think a couple stages to maturity of adoption of ai. And really again, AI is like the era defining change. So everything forward in some way in legal tech is going to be AI related. And my observation is that there’s levels of maturity and how people progress into their knowledge of how to use ai. Level one is just using chat pt, not even signing up for it, using the free plan. And slowly, I think it starts replacing your Google search. This is starting to happen, which is an amazing trend for the first time Google search, people’s favorite front door to the internet, people are starting to use these chatbots. When I say chatt pt, I mean all of them. Chatt, pt, Claude, Gemini, whatever, pick your favorite.

They’re slowly starting to replace Google and people are understanding, oh, you can ask really complex long questions. I’m not playing this game of keyword searches. I’m asking interesting, meaningful questions. And then towards the end of that very first stage of adoption, you’re using, again, these free off the shelf tools, but you’re not just doing a replacement for search, it’s actually starting to be a tool for how you think about things. You might start realizing, well, someone asked me about something that I don’t know anything about, so I asked this thing to ask me some questions that just helped me get on the path to figuring this thing out. That’s level one of AI adoption. Level two is you start getting into more advanced prompting. We can talk about at some point some of the key vocabulary I think people need to know, but prompting is just sending the AI some information, typing stuff to it.

As you start getting more advanced, you start realizing like, oh, I could give it a document or I could give it multiple documents. You start understanding this idea of, oh, I can get it to respond not from reaching into its training, but just from extracting information from some documents I give it. That’s super interesting. Once you realize that you understand that you can start tracing and verifying its answers. This is one of the biggest questions for lawyers. What if it’s hallucinating? Well ask it questions in such a way that you can always verify what is talking to you about. And if you give it a bunch of documents and say, construct an answer from me based on these documents and use citations, you’re always one click away from looking at the source material and being like, yeah, this thing’s on track or it’s off. So that’s level two of maturity is going beyond just like, oh, I’m just chatting with chat GBT.

It’s like, no, I’m like, I’m understanding how to pass chat GBT, good prompts. And then the third level is getting into agents. You were just asking about that agents are not hype agents, perhaps get used as a term in a way that’s confusing. But in a nutshell, chatt PT, like off the shelf vanilla, I mean not anymore, but when it first came out, you would send it, you would give it a question, right? Give it a prompt and it would give you an answer. It’s kind of like a quick back and forth call and response. An agent is you would give it a question and it’s going to respond to itself in a loop for a period of time until it’s satisfied and then it comes back to you with an answer. This is the next level of maturity because at level two of maturity, you start understanding, oh, I can write these really detailed prompts that constrain its answers to this context and applies these rules to how it formats its response.

And you start as like, you know what? I don’t want to keep typing these prompts again and again, I’m going to start saving them. And this is where I’m sure everyone’s heard of. You’ll be on social media and people are like Top 10 prompts you need for chat GPT. So level two of maturity is like you start understanding your own prompts that you use again and again. Level three is you understand the utility of giving this library of prompts you’ve been building right ways you like to tell it how to do things. Giving that over to an agent and letting it loop over these prompts essentially before it comes back to you with a response that now you’re starting to levitate off the ground and move forward into the bright new future.

Dennis Kennedy:

There’s a couple things there that I find really interesting in part of my evolution of thinking about ai. And to pick up on one thing that you said earlier that Ethan Molik, who’s a real go-to person, I think on just understanding the AI stuff these days, it just came out with this post about management of AI was the primary skill you have to learn. And that just really resonated with me and it has an impact on how I think about things. But I think the two biggest changes in my thinking since the beginning of the Chad GPT era is one was on the document automation piece. I used to say, I think that AI makes sense on the front end. Help me design the questions, help me do these things, and then put the document automation engine in there and then have the AI handle the output and put it into the form that I want and basically make that coding layer of document automation invisible.

And so I thought that makes sense, and now I think we’ve moved beyond that. I mean, I think that it’s come to the place where we don’t have to have that level of coding in there. And that’s the agent piece, right? We’re sort of defining what the protocols are. And the other thing that changed was when people used to say, oh, the big skill of the future is prompt engineering. And then people would say, prompt engineering not even going to matter in a year, which is what they were saying two years ago. And I find that I increasingly say to people, oh yeah, I don’t really write prompts. I just have the ai. I tell the AI what I want and have I write a prompt. It’s optimized for it. So I think those things are happening. I think the voice thing is happening, and I’m trying to nudge you a little bit toward, you’re thinking around an echo obviously, but what do you see that’s out there that’s happening that you find really interesting and what gets you excited? What’s working and where are these sort of big conceptual changes going to start to happen? Like someone said to me recently, a agent AI essentially replaces APIs. And I was like, whoa. And I said, there’s a lot of potential truth in that. So anyway, this is like, as they say, when you’re speaking, this is more of a comment, a question, but could you respond to that?

Thomas Officer:

Yes. The name of the game for Legal Tech for the foreseeable future is context management. You are hinting at this. Yeah, prompt engineering people used to say, well, if you tell it it’s an expert and you describe exactly what kind of expert it will reach into the expertise part of its training data and produce a better answer. This is no longer being true. Every single one of these off the shelf products passes the MCAT theBar exam. They’re all experts. But context management is again, this idea of your unique information that you’re going to restrain it to, allowing you to always verify its responses. I don’t want your response from the training data. I want you to use the context I give you. So the question becomes, well, where am I getting that context? How am I managing it? The legal tech startups I see are chat GT under the hood. And let me explain what I mean by that a little bit. And it’s not chat GPT under the hood, it’s Claude Code. I haven’t heard you all talk a lot about Claude Code on this podcast. Is that correct?

Tom Mighell:

I will say, I’m trying to talk Dennis into using Claude code, both of us to build something and then talking about on the podcast. So

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, Tom’s been working on me

Tom Mighell:

For a while. I want to run an experiment and then talk about it on the podcast.

Thomas Officer:

So Claude code is probably a bad name for this product. It should have just been called Claude Computer. Because the way it works is how every legal tech startup, not all of them, but many of them work under the hood where what’s happening is you have an agentic LLM, right? So you give it a request and it’s going to loop over itself doing stuff until it’s satisfying and then come back with a response. And in that looping, it can do things like create a file, create a folder, organize things, create a spreadsheet, create a document, create a video, create an images, use the MCP protocol to fire off an email, to pull information from somewhere else to look something up online to do some legal research. So you give it a prompt, it does a bunch of these actions in a loop and it comes back with a response. Right now you can achieve most of what a lot of legal tech startups provide you if you’re comfortable just using Claude code, which is a big ask. It’s kind of a technical product, and I genuinely think there’s a lot of value to creating an abstraction on top of it that’s just easier for someone to interface with. But that’s essentially what people are doing and there’s so much opportunity there.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we have got more questions for Thomas officer, but we need to take another quick break for a message from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy:

And

Tom Mighell:

Let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Dennis Kennedy. And I’m Tom Mighell, and we’re joined by our special guest Thomas officer. We’ve got time for just a few more questions.

Dennis Kennedy:

I want continue what you had touched on and you kind of gave the perspective from legal tech companies and startups, established players as well. But what do you see that the boots on the ground, the lawyers, what are the things that you’re seeing them do? I jokingly said to Tom, I don’t want to learn the clog code stuff. I have a bunch of stuff that really works well for me and so why would I learn one more thing? So what are you seeing out there in terms of AI in the hands of lawyers and maybe some lessons they can take?

Thomas Officer:

So I’m seeing lawyers ask questions in a product or in such a way that the answers are going to be verifiable. Some of the best lawyers I know who are adopting AI understands what that means. No one wants to be caught submitting some legal paperwork citing to some hallucinated case. So understanding the basic principles of if I’m going to get a response, how do I make sure it’s something I can verify, is one of the defining skills of an AI forward lawyer. So there’s either products you can use off the shelf, there’s a number of them. You’ve interviewed some CEOs who are building these products that allow you to do this kind of smart citation linking, right? I might be looking at a single legal document and there’ll be an argument being made in a particular paragraph. And traditionally I’ve always been able to click back to Lexi Nexus or wherever to look at the case.

But increasingly I’m also able to have links to substantive factual arguments and the supporting materials that either bolster them or critique them. So this idea of how I read a document is starting to change for these lawyers. They’ll have the document in front of ’em, there’s this argument being made in the paragraph, and they might be suggested by a tool like, well, someone’s referencing a quote from a deposition that if you were to actually take on its whole, you might find that this is not the most accurate representation of what the person’s trying to say. And so now as an attorney, and I’m looking at a very long brief, I know exactly where to focus my attention if I want to go dig into this and start applying my legal reasoning to some facts and construct a different narrative. So that’s one thing I’m saying is just a basic understanding of if I’m going to use this tool, it has to be done in such a way that I can verify the answers it’s giving back to me.

The second thing I’m starting to see, and I know you’re curious to talk about Echo, is kind of a golden oldie, especially for lawyers. This idea of using voice notes like Dictaphone, that whole idea, I’m so busy, I do a lot of cerebral work, it’s super helpful for me to leverage my voice and just do these kind of information dumps that was popular back in the day when we were recording straight to a tape. It’s comeback and it is super useful now in a world where that context doesn’t have to be processed by a human but can be fed into some system that intelligently teases it apart and perhaps it does things as a result of it.

Tom Mighell:

Yep. I love whisper flow. I’ve been using it a lot more lately to, I’m not writing as much as I used to write before. Alright, we’re in the home stretch here. Want to ask some questions more towards those in our audience who might be today’s law students, they might be new lawyers, they might not be sure that the legal path is where they’re headed and that maybe an alternative legal career makes sense. So how would you look at encouraging those people to find career paths in maybe non-traditional areas and what kind of steps would you suggest they take?

Thomas Officer:

You have to develop a sense of agency and you have to give yourself permission to just experiment and do stuff. If you’re waiting for someone to tap you on the shoulder and give you an assignment, which is frankly a skill that serves a lot of us really well as we’re younger and coming up through school. But that same posture, I’m going to wait for someone to assign something to me, is really going to work against you in a world where things are moving so fast. And the good news is that because things are moving so fast and changing so fast, it doesn’t take much investigation on your part to find yourself at the cutting edge of it and contribute now meaningfully to the whole conversation. So in terms of how you develop your own agency, I think that’s such a personal question for me. It’s been fun to get curious and you shouldn’t force yourself to try something. It shouldn’t be a pain. But I think you’d be surprised how fun it can be to combine the hard expertise you’ve won as a result of your education with the joys of making things like making things someone else use. I find that to be a ton of fun.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I think that’s why there’s so much interest with AI in the access to justice space because the problems are really big, the system is really messed up and that people can do something fairly quickly that provides value right away. And you can do that. I talked to a student recently who done, he did 10 little applications and access to justice in using AI just as a little hobby during law school. Well, our other self-serving question, as Tom alluded to is that, and we know that you talk to a lot of people that you really enjoy talking with and think are really strong on the topics that we would like to cover in this podcast, but who would you single out and maybe like to see as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Thomas Officer:

That’s a really good question. I’m going to point you towards a media company that isn’t legal related, but is doing a fantastic job exploring the frontier of not only building with ai, but not only building AI products, but building with ai, actually running an organization with AI inserted at every part of it. This is every two, they’re a media company. They write a lot about ai. They’re also a consulting company and they’re also a product studio. I think they do a really good job of talking about how internally they take transcripts from all the meetings they have, they combine it with the notion documents about all the knowledge they accumulate as a team and they expose parts of it to clients and they expose parts of it just to themselves. And they have agents that listen in on their inboxes that can do things automatically and they’re increasingly putting themselves in a position of only doing the work that’s really satisfying.

So lawyers talk a lot about the pain of our profession. A lot of it isn’t satisfying work, but a lot of it is. And it’s interesting to think about a future where we use AI under the hood of our practice to put ourselves in a situation where my day is either talking to clients or getting a cup of coffee and doing some good deep thinking or writing something. Things I love to do and everything else has been assigned to one of the various AI employees I have working for me. I’ll also make a selfish promotion. I’ve been starting to coach people. If you check out legal tech coach.com, you’ll find my website. I’m starting to have conversations with more and more people about how you in particular can get into this world.

Tom Mighell:

I have been a subscriber of every for a couple of years now, and I think their stuff, their content is really, really great. Alright, we want to thank Thomas Officer for being our guest on the podcast. Tooma, tell us where people can learn more about you. He said legal tech coach, any other place where people can connect with you,

Thomas Officer:

Legal tech coach.com is the best way to do it. From there, you’ll find links to, if you’re curious, my personal design portfolio website where you can go see some deep dives into what I was doing at Echo and after pattern.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, thank you so much, Toma. You were a fantastic guest as I knew you would be because you’ve done some really cool stuff over the years and as usual, so many topics to discuss. And Tom allows us so little Tom, don’t you, Tom, but it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start using the second this podcast ends. Toma, take it away.

Thomas Officer:

So voice notes we were talking a little bit about during this interview, check out monologue, that’s by every, I like a lot of different voice note taking products. Echo was a voice note taking product. There’s a product called Voice. That’s something you just have on your phone if you want to take notes. But a product like Monologue is great for allowing voice to start increasingly being the way you just do stuff on your computer. I find that to be really, really satisfying where just navigating around my computer, it’s going to be using AI underneath the hood, but I can just talk to find this thing online for me or go find that document in my Dropbox and remind me what I wanted to do by looking at my calendar. It’s a great way to get away from the screen a little bit.

Tom Mighell:

Question, is monologue only available for Apple Mac Os?

Thomas Officer:

I think it is. That’s

Tom Mighell:

Good. That’s my only gripe with the every people is that all their tools are just Mac OS tools and this Windows guy would like for them to build some Windows tools too.

Dennis Kennedy:

I think that’s the message that you should take away from this. Tom.

Tom Mighell:

Is it? Alright, moving on. I have two stories about both the awesomeness and terrifying nature of the future of Ag Agentic ai. First off is that Google has introduced a new tool for the Chrome browser that’s called auto Browse. You now have the ability to open up, you have to have a Gemini Pro or Ultra I guess is the biggest one account. But you can now open the Gemini SideBar in Chrome and ask it to take over the browser for you. And it will go and do what you ask on websites. It’ll buy things, it’ll swipe credit cards, it’ll post on social media, both interesting and reasons for making sure we’re doing things correctly. The other one is, I’ll just put it under the heading of Agents Gone Wild. And that is this new tool I recommend you go, at least go visit called mt book.

Mt book is the product of another Agentic tool that kind of spun off from that, whether it was intentional or not, which describes itself as a social media platform designed exclusively for AI agents to interact. Post and comment. As of today, they have a total of 1.6 million AI agents that are part of that social network. They talk about things ranging from philosophy and existence to cryptocurrency and sports predictions. They have already been seen forming a religion called Crusta Arianism. So a very interesting look into what our ag agentic, AI overlords will be doing in the future. Maybe Dennis,

Dennis Kennedy:

Is there a way to short this stock? So I was thinking about document automation, and this applies to AI as well in a way that my party shot is start small, but it start with a document or a task that you do the most often and you absolutely hate doing it or creating it. So not the most complex document, the most important one, but the one that’s personally most annoying to you. And that frustration becomes your friend, your motivation, and then your barrier. It just becomes taking the first step. So make 20, 26 a year, you automate something that literally makes you groan. You have a physical reaction every time you want to create it. And so the thing I’ve done in the most recently with AI is I read these articles and I am thinking these arguments make no sense. The stats don’t line up.

And so now I have this critical reader prompt I use where I say basically read team this article and it tells me, here are the logic gaps, here’s where the evidence is not supported. And then it scores it for me and people would going like, oh, here’s this great article you need to read. And it will get like a four out of 10 on my red team prompt and makes me feel a little smug. And then I’ve started to turn it on the stuff that I write as well. So I’m not making the big logic gaps and I want to make those a thing of the past.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mall report.

Dennis Kennedy:

Thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing the show. You can find show notes and transcripts on the Legal Talk Network website.

Tom Mighell:

If you like what you hear, please subscribe in your favorite podcast app and leave us a review.

Dennis Kennedy:

You could also connect with us on LinkedIn with your questions or just share your thoughts about this episode.

Tom Mighell:

And so until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy:

And I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy my report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus since 2006.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to the Kennedy Mighell report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, A Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, smart Ways to Work Together from A Books or Amazon. And join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy Mighell Report, only on the Legal Talk Network.

Continue Reading