Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Tom Martin

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Web 2.0. Innovation, collaboration. 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 414 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 talked with Erika Pogano about legal innovation, design thinking, and inclusive communication. 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 Mall Report, we are thrilled to continue our Fresh Voices on Legal Tech interview series with Tom Martin, CEO of Law Droid and Adjunct Law Professor at Suffolk University Law School. 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 Tom Martin to the Fresh Voices Series. Tom, welcome to the Kennedy Mall Report.

Tom Martin:

Hey, Dennis. Hey, Tom. Thank you so much for having me on. I’m really excited to be here and I realize that I have a lot of catching up to do on my episodes of my podcast because 400 and something, that’s a lot.

Tom Mighell:

When is it, Dennis? We’re hitting 20 years in a month.

Dennis Kennedy:

We may be before this one actually gets-

Tom Mighell:

Before this podcast actually is. Yeah. Yep. Been a while. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? Tell the audience about you, what’s happening at Law Droid, maybe what you’re doing at Sufolk Law School, your role there, and what the audience needs to know.

Tom Martin:

Yeah. So Tom Arden, CEO of Lawdroid. Law Druid’s been around for about 10 years. We focus on creating AI applications for legal aid, state courts, and some private industry. We’ve really dealt with this problem fairly deeply and had a lot of experience with a lot of different stakeholders. So we’ve gotten really into the weeds about how to provide reliable AI output and make sure that it works for everyone involved. In addition to that, I’m an adjunct professor at Suffolk Law School, teach generative AI and delivery of legal services. AI is a theme, as you could see. And I’ve just really enjoyed it. There’s a lot going on, as you know. Things change almost daily, and I just find it really an exciting field. I’m also a lawyer, by the way, as you might’ve gotten from being a professor at a law school. But for 25 years, I’ve practiced law out of California, even though I live in Canada, and that’s a whole other story.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, Tom, first of all, it’s awesome for us to have you as a guest on the podcast. I like to learn from our guests how they actually like to talk with lawyers about technology and how difficult that can be, and what are the ways you’ve found that are really best to do this. One of the things I like about the way that you talk about technology is that you are willing to push people a little further than they might be comfortable with, but you do it in a nice way. So maybe would you start us out by talking about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology and what you found works well for you?

Tom Martin:

Happy to, Dennis. Context and timing is everything. So 10 years ago when I first started talking about AI and how it was going to make a big impact, crickets, right? Or like, let’s move on to the next session. This is not interesting or affects my life. That clearly has changed now. And so people are much more open-minded and trying to figure out how they can bring it in and make it work for them. And so I’ve found that the best way to communicate with lawyers, but just people in general is not to focus on the tech aspect of it, unless it’s called for, but mostly to talk about the benefits about how it can work to their advantage and also talk about it in ways that make sense for lawyers. As a lawyer myself, I could talk about ways of using AI that are practical and that they could see how it would affect them.

Metaphors, analogies always make it easier to access.

Tom Mighell:

Let’s talk about kind of an adjacent topic to that, and that’s technology competence of lawyers. Dennis and I like to talk about this a lot. We have varying cynical views of technology competence. And so I love to talk to our guests because you are out in the trenches and you are all looking at this from a slightly different angle. So I think it’s kind of a two-part question, which is, what’s your current view of the state of technology competence? And then especially as it applies to AI, what should a technologically competent lawyer need to know today about technology in order to successfully serve their clients?

Tom Martin:

Wow. There’s a lot there because there’s a lot to learn and it is changing daily. I don’t think though that lawyers need to be as deep in the weeds as we are about it. Just as a side note, I watch and I get notified now automatically about the five top research articles that come out for machine learning and artificial intelligence on a daily basis, and I read through those, but I don’t think lawyers need to do that. What they should do, and I think they’re required to do, according to ethics rules now, is at least have an elementary understanding of what AI is and how it affects them as a lawyer and their clients. As we all know, clients are already using this stuff and some of them may not become clients because they already get the answers to the questions they need from going to ChatGPT directly.

We can’t control that. We don’t have control over that, even though we feel like we do. And so understanding what ChatGPT is, what Claude is, playing around with it, and I’m not talking about having played around with it two years ago, try it now. Things have changed, especially in the past month, these new models are amazing. So I think that at a minimum, playing with the models, at least taking one CLE that’s a basic introduction to AI because there’s many facets of how it impacts us as lawyers, attorney-client privilege, privacy, confidentiality. If a client was running some ideas past ChatGPT, but within the context of a conversation they shared with us as their attorney, is there privilege there? Is there not? There’s just interesting questions that we need to tackle as lawyers.

Tom Mighell:

So follow up on that, which is based on what they need to know, what do you think is the current state of what they do know? What are you seeing now? You mentioned that 10 years ago you’re getting crickets when you give presentations on things. I think now the demand is there, but is the knowledge there too? Or is it more like the technology adoption curve that you’ve got a lot of people who have got some … You’ve got some people who are on the upward spring of the interest level, but you still have a lot of laggards who are coming along behind like we typically see in the legal field.

Tom Martin:

Yeah. So looking at the Gartner hype cycle, I think last year we were kind of like in the abyss there for a minute- The trough. … the trough of disillusionment because a lot of people were disillusioned by what AI could do compared to what they thought it could do. But now we’re not quite on the plateau of productivity, but we’re on the upward swing because it’s becoming much more practical. I get to go to a lot of conferences and some even in different countries. And I think the main theme is that everyone is on the same page about how do we … Forget, it’s exciting, forget the experiments, forget all of that. We’re using it. What are the ways we can practically deploy this either in- house or at the law firm and people are really getting into the weeds of it, which is much more productive and less.

It lends itself less to the whole fear hype cycle of it.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah.

Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the fear hype cycle and what I call fear without data that I see a lot of these days that you see these very small studies being done, gigantic conclusions being drawn from people saying the sky is falling or this or that is going to happen. And if you look at them closely, and I actually created, because I see these things all the time, I created this critical reader AI prompt that looks at the issues in these articles and scores them. And it’s really interesting what people are starting to take as lay of the land that’s really thinly supported, if all. And I think you can kind of over rotate onto that and start to feel behind, afraid or whatever. And I think that tends to pull people in the legal profession back from the things that maybe need the most attention now.

And how do we, when we’re in an atmosphere of fear and you’re behind and stuff, how do you get people to say like, “Oh no, here’s some things you can do right now that will be helpful and help you understand.” What’s your approach there and what are some of the things you like to point lawyers especially to do to get started and see where there might be benefits?

Tom Martin:

I think bringing it back to the everyday is important. Sometimes when, I’ve noticed when attorneys think about AI, they think about it as something different, other alien. And I think that when they try to see it in a way that’s practically impacting them and how it could benefit them, it makes it more real. And sometimes just giving very concrete examples of that helps. For example, if it’s a bad day and it’s snowing out like it started to snow here in Vancouver earlier today, but you got to get it work. Normally, unless it’s really terrible, you’re not calling it a day, you have to find a way through it. You have to find a way to acclimate yourself to the challenges that life throws at you. So you don’t say like, “Hey car, you’re just not cutting it. I’m not going to use you. ” You just find a way to acclimate yourself by using snow tires or using different tools that you have available to you to tackle the challenge that you’re thrown with that day.

And I think AI is that kind of tool. It is a many, many multifaceted, many faced type of tool that can help us with those challenging days when it seems like we just can’t get it. We can’t get to work and it can help us do that.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah. And sometimes it really is the … When you find out it’s the right tool, and because I was thinking when you were describing the winter driving, and especially since this seems like we get more ice these days, there’s this great little scraper that’s … It’s brass and it’s like the weirdest thing to think you’re going to use it on a glass windshield, but it just takes the ice and sleet right off. And there are days when AI feels like, “Oh my God, I just found the right tool for this job.” And other days when you go like, “Oh my God, I’m using the cheapest plastic snow scraper possible.” And it’s like trying to do that matching. I was curious, what are some of the, because you’ve been around this sort of chatbot world for a long time too, but what are some of the other examples you like to tell people to think about that might work well for them?

Tom Martin:

Well, there’s so many to choose from. I mean, the flavor of the day is really actual autonomous agents now. I’m not recommending to you lawyers to run out and deploy OpenClaw to run your firm. I don’t think that’s a good idea. But what I’m saying that that’s kind of the bleeding edge right now, and it’s a very interesting thing because when ChatGPT dropped, it all became about chatbots and conversations that you have with chat, but now it’s really becoming more mainstream. I mean, agents have been out as a concept for over two years, two and a half years or so, but it’s really become more of a mainstream concept where people are getting their arms around it, their mind around the idea of, well, you can have an AI intelligence, the model paired with tools and then access to data that’s relevant. And if you put that triangle together of things, well, now if you give it a little agency to take action on those things, you could actually do some real contribution in getting some of the busy work done for you.

Make reservations at a restaurant or take some notes of a conversation and then maybe take the next step after that and actually draft up a to- do list or even like a memo or something like that. These are things that have been talked over for the past couple of years. I’ve tried operator with OpenAI and in the beginning it just didn’t work. And then there were other iterations, but now with the model improvement and MCP where you can connect into all different types of data pretty easily, it just makes it easier. And that’s the thing that causes mainstream adoption. Just like the iPhone made it easy to have a supercomputer in your pocket or the iPod made it easy to have like your collection of songs in your pocket. These agents now are making it easy, Claude Cowork or OpenCloud are making it easy for regular people to take advantage of the new agents that are available.

Tom Mighell:

When you talk about something like Claude Cowork and we come back to Dennis’s comment about fear, I downloaded, Cowork is finally now available for Windows. It was originally only available for Mac and I have a Windows computer, so I downloaded it. And the very first question it asked me was, “Please go into your settings and enable developer mode so that we may take control of your computer.” And just the average lawyer hearing that, I had a moment of pause. I went out to go look and I go, “Is there something else I should be doing to secure my computer to make sure that I’m not … ” And it came back with some very thoughtful advice for me to pay attention to. But I think that’s going to be for some as we get further down into agentic capabilities, I think that getting lawyers comfortable with things like that is going to be one of the more interesting challenges that we’re going to

Tom Martin:

Have. I totally agree with you. It feels new, but in some ways we’ve already been doing that with a lot of applications that we already work with when we-

Tom Mighell:

We just don’t know it.

Tom Martin:

Yeah. It’s not explicitly presented to you like that. So it’s not as scary, but you install like a new application and when you say yes to everything, it’s getting access to different-

Tom Mighell:

You’re doing the same thing. Yeah, it’s true. I think that then it is just an education issue or at least part ways a matter of explaining how all this works.

Tom Martin:

I would just say like education, yes, but there are some misgivings that are valid where we just need to know like, how is it accessing it, what we don’t want it to access and putting some boundaries around it is definitely still important.

Tom Mighell:

Well, and knowing that there are still some potential vulnerabilities out there that can allow for what prompt injection or, I don’t know if I’m using the right words, but they can allow for things to happen, knowing how to avoid that, being aware that it’s a possibility and I think it has the potential to panic people, but I think that understanding the limitations there or what you need to do to protect yourself is also important.

Tom Martin:

100%. Well,

Dennis Kennedy:

The good thing is lawyers like to read everything carefully and it makes solid decisions about … Oh, wait, nevermind. What was I saying?

Tom Mighell:

All right. So Tom, one of the things we love to talk about with our guests is collaboration. We wrote a book on collaboration. We love talking about it, and we always like to hear what people are thinking about how they collaborate with their coworkers, with others, with lawyers. Tell us what some of your favorite ways to collaborate. It can be people, process, or technology, any of those things, whatever you find makes for the best collaborative efforts.

Tom Martin:

Sure. I mean, one straightforward way, if we’re referring to a tool, for example, is using Basecamp. I’ve been a big fan of 37Signals as a company from the beginning. They do amazing work from a conceptual level, and I highly recommend reading their books about how they philosophize about work and using tools. It definitely applies to AI, but Basecamp, you set up a project, you have messaging within it, you can go back and forth, and it’s just a very neat, organized way of even communicating with clients, lawyers, like it’s not just for technology project management. But I think beyond the tools, the thing that’s more interesting with collaboration for me is the kismet of it. It’s the unexpected, unanticipated, accidental nature of collaboration. And a lot of times when that comes up is at conferences. You see people that you know of, that you may have not talked to, or you know people that you love to see every year and hang out, and that’s your opportunity to kind of rekindle those friendships.

But all of those things I think lead to just ideas that percolate that you might not have thought of. I know that’s how I first met Dennis is just taking the chance to say, “Hey, I love what you’re doing. Would you like to have coffee for a minute or two?” And he was generous enough to give me that time. So I think that like being generous, open-minded, and I think we have a wonderful community. And so for any attorney out there that’s thinking about this stuff, I wouldn’t hesitate to reach out to the people that you read about or hear about to talk about ideas because I think you’ll be surprised that how welcoming this community is and that it really helps you to think about things differently. And that’s a wonderful thing.

Tom Mighell:

We’ve got more to talk about with Tom Martin, but we first need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And we are back with Tom Martin from Law Droid and Suffolk Law. We’ve found that in our Fresh Voices series, our audience really loves to hear about our guests career paths. We love to hear about it as well. You’ve got a great career story. Can you talk about your career path and kind of what things you’ve done to get you where you are right now?

Tom Martin:

You know that diagram they show in some presentations where it’s like the path to success and what’s expected is like a straight arrow.

Tom Mighell:

And it’s all tangled.

Tom Martin:

It’s all over. And I’m not saying that I’m successful at this point, but I have a very varied career.

Very first job out of law school was actually as an intern at entertainment. I was working for John Peter’s production company as an intern on the Warner Brothers lot. Oh, wow. And that was in John Warner’s old bungalow, one of the original founders of Warner Brothers. And so that was an exciting time. ER was being shot on the lot and getting exposed to that. After that stint trying to become a movie producer, I segued into litigation and then I worked for a plaintiff side firm suing companies that create toxic chemicals and I would have to defend client depositions up against at least a dozen white shoe defense counsel. And that was quite an experience. My boss just threw me to the wolves and that’s one way you learn. And so I did everything from that, toxic tort litigation to employment, to probate, to family law.

So all over the map, the whole time though, because I started programming from the time I was around 11, I just loved interweaving tech into this world that we live in. So ultimately founded my own firm in 2006 and from the get- go was using document automation and creating my own webpages. We actually were one of the first law firms to partner with LegalZoom where they conducted the marketing campaign for prenuptial agreements and we were on the fulfillment service side and cobbled together like a national network for that. And that was quite a learning experience and a lot of fun at the same time. We were using document automation and all kinds of crazy stuff. But that led me ultimately to found LawJoy because I wanted to focus on this 100%. So 10 years ago, I had that opportunity. Really, I got to give credit to Joshua Browder for his entrepreneurial stuff that he was doing with chatbots in London to get people out of parking tickets.

And I felt that was a sea change. Here’s on the back of my neck stood up and I was like, I got to focus on this and I think it was a good bet. Things are finally starting to come to fruition and it’s just a matter of keeping up with the crowd right now.

Dennis Kennedy:

Right. Let’s dig a little deeper into AI. And I used to ask my students when I taught my AI in the law class, we start out by saying, “What did you try in AI?” And so I’m always interested in what people are actually doing. So you’re sort of out there a little bit edgier than most people, but what actually gets you excited these days about AI? And adjacent to that, because these aren’t necessarily the same things, but what’s actually working in AI these days where you see really good outcomes. So what gets you excited and what’s working?

Tom Martin:

So I would take a few steps back from the specific tools. In fact, I’m actually writing about this right now. I got a book that’s due at the end of April. It’s AI with purpose, a strategic blueprint for legal transformation. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about these things and it’s weird timing because it’s literally like trying to build the plane while you’re flying it because it’s changing every day. How do you suggest a strategy to people when it’s like that? But there’s these two concepts, a system of record and a system of action. It’s something Jack Nowton has talked about with his kind of change of focus with Clio. And I think what’s interesting right now is that you can kind of skip ahead to a system of action and not necessarily have to start with a system of record, although it helps to have that data to start with.

And I think that’s what AI opens up. It opens up the ability to start with a system of action, which necessarily by building things to take action for you, it could be agents, it could be like drafting or what have you, where you’re involving AI, or it could be taking notes of this very conversation we’re having and then drafting something afterwards from it. But in any of those situations, those are systems of action where the AI is taking action for you and necessarily it’s gathering data when it’s doing that, the transcript of this conversation or something else. And then clearly that data needs to be stored somewhere. So you kind of backend yourself into a system of record from the system of action. And so the thread that I’m seeing is that lawyers could really take advantage of that. They don’t have to worry so much about, “Oh, well, I wasn’t doing this 10 years ago.” You can start now, and it’s just enough with what you are going through on a daily basis, conversations with clients, experts, your own analysis, talking to colleagues, that you can build out a very sizable and powerful knowledge base that can differentiate you from other law firms.

Dennis Kennedy:

Cool. I see that, I’ll nudge Tom to get his thoughts on this as well, but I see there’s this really creative side of AI, which is where I like to live. And then there’s a single source of truth side, which probably Tom is creative, but almost by his work and his nature is going to be a little bit more on the single sources truth side than I am. But I see those two things happening and it’s at the intersection where things, to me, start to get really, really interesting.

Tom Mighell:

My problem is I am impatient. And so impatience is not always good for creativity. Creativity takes time and yeah, that’s my only challenge is that’s my big struggle with AI is I love to use it and I love to figure out new ways, but I also can see myself disappearing down a rabbit hole of constantly tinkering and perfecting and tweaking and I want to just get to done and I can see how that can become an issue. So I want to ask about kind of AI products like Law Droid in terms of choosing legal technology. We had a guest on the podcast, you may know Mark Lawrence. He was a guest on one of our earlier Fresh Voices podcasts and he asked the question, “Do you find that it’s getting harder to make good legal technology decisions?” And we think, Dennis and I both think the short answer there is yes, but how would you answer the question for yourself?

And maybe more specifically, how would you advise others to answer it, especially with the choices that legal aid groups or courts or self-represented litigants are facing with products like Law Droid and you’re not the only one out there. How would you advise people to think about that?

Tom Martin:

So I have to admit at the top of this, that I’m a little biased because I have my own company and all that. So the things I might say might reflect that. But I do think that one thing is when any vendor tells you that don’t worry about it, we’ve solved this, there’s no hallucinations whatsoever and it’s all perfect, don’t believe them. It’s a challenge for everyone. It’s a problem that’s still being solved. It’s something that’s tractable, that you can come up with ways to minimize things as much as possible. There’s great techniques available, so don’t be scared of that. You could still make good use of this technology, in particular retrieval augmented generation that gets you to the answers that you want that are reliable. But if they represent it like that, you have to be a little cautious. You have to ask them more questions about, is that possible?

How do you do that? What are some of the ways that you’re achieving that? What are some of the scores that you’ve achieved for F1 or recall? These are just different technical scores of output that you get. The other thing is that, yes, there’s a lot of newcomers to this that are kind of setting up startups and legal tech because it’s trendy or they think that there’s a lot of money there. And this is where the bias comes in. I do think that having somebody who’s been in the field for a long time who’s been mission driven to help lawyers and help people that are less advantaged to get access to reliable legal information coming from a different place. I’m not to say that somebody couldn’t have started a year ago, two years ago and not have that same motivation, but you want to definitely think about that.

What is their intent? And it could also inform, will they be around for long or are they just going to sell to Thomson Reuters and be gone next year or something like that? So there’s a lot of different considerations. I don’t envy people having to make decisions right now, especially with kind of like the incumbent companies getting squeezed from both sides. They’re getting squeezed from like the top with Anthropic and OpenAI kind of coming after their lunch with the SaaS that they have. And then from the bottom, you got associates like Jamy So and a whole bunch of other vibe coders out there that are … I just talked to Amanda Brown who’s doing her own vibe coding. And like from the bottom, then you also have the incumbents getting this pince removed from everybody involved. So lots of options for lawyers and that’s, I guess that’s a good thing.

Tom Mighell:

We have, in my field, information governance, the main thing that we have that’s going on right now is that the companies we work for, they want an easy button for their employees to be able to classify documents. Records management is not their day job and they want an easy button and they view AI as being, let’s just point a tool at it and have it say, “This is a contract and this is an invoice and we’re going to keep these period of time.” And there are some companies now that are brand new, completely brand new companies coming out saying, “We’ve solved information governance for your corporate environment.” And I think we have a ways to go. We’re still, I think it’s very exciting. I think that’s the future for where I’m going, but I think the future is still a little bit off.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah. I always like the people who’ve solved these information issues that I have been around since the Sumarians and that suddenly, despite all the history that we know, they’ve solved it in the last six months.

Tom Mighell:

In the last six months. Well, it’s as fast as AI was developed. I mean, if AI can move that fast, why can’t everybody else? All right, we’ve got more questions for Tom Martin, but we need to take another quick break for a message from our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy:

And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy.

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mihle. And we are joined by our special guests, Tom Martin, from Law Droid and Suffolk Law School. We’ve got time for just a few more questions.

Dennis Kennedy:

So Tom, I like to ask this for my students, but how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths in legal tech and other non-traditional careers in law, especially in areas like legal AI and entrepreneurship?

Tom Martin:

Yeah, it is a big question. I hear it from my students as well. There’s a little trepidation right now about job prospects and certainly alternative paths are a possibility. I think the students right now are actually in a uniquely advantaged position. Although that seems counterintuitive, I think they are because if they take courses like yours or mine or any of the burgeoning number of AI law classes, they’re in a better position because of that. I think it was in the Canadian Post that came out a couple days ago where it was talking about employers actually highly favoring hiring students that have AI education. And just because of their youth, their exposure to AI technology and being kind of AI natives, I think that’s a huge asset to companies that have no idea what to do about this. They’re trying to find their way. And one easy way to import strategy is just to import people that are comfortable using the technology.

And so I think that it’s a unique time that they have the advantage to actually use the education and experience they have with AI to their advantage.

Tom Mighell:

That’s awesome. We end with our selfish question, which is where we tap our guests to provide us with more guests. Who are the fresh voices that you feel like our audience would be interested in hearing from? Who are the voices you’re listening to these days that are important to you who we might want to get on the show?

Tom Martin:

Well, I can’t go this episode without mentioning the two new coworkers I have. Satish Nori is our chief legal futurist that I get to work with and he’s fantastic. He’s been doing a lot of thought leadership within legal tech. And I also get to work with David Gray, who’s been working in Legal Aid for close to 10 years now. Bay Area Legal Services and also Foster Power. He’s just a bit of a force of nature. He runs the business and strategy aspect of LawDog. I think they’re great. There’s many others though that are out there. Mia, I can’t remember her last name right now. She’s finished out of … Finland works on legal design and she is extremely interesting. She has a different take on AI that’s much more human-centered. In some way, she reminds me of my friend Kat Moon in having human-centered design.

Anti, who’s also out of Finland who has written a book called Prompted. For some reason, my mind is in Finland or because I’ll be going up to Estonia soon for future law, and that’s where I’ve met a lot of them.

Tom Mighell:

Very nice. We need to have our finished podcast coming up. I think that’d be great. All right. Well, we want to thank Tom Martin, CEO of Law Droid and adjunct at Suffolk University Law School for being our guest on the podcast. Tom, tell us where people can either learn more about you or get in touch with you if they want

Tom Martin:

To. Yeah, I’d love for that. You could find me on LinkedIn/ThomasGartin or just put Tom Martin in there. You’ll probably find me. Also law [email protected]. Could learn more about the company and about David and Satish and I and what we’re doing, but it’s really a mission to spread access to justice for those that need it.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah. I want to second your LinkedIn presence because you write a lot of forward thinking and thought provoking stuff. And I would encourage people to connect with you and see what you’re doing. So Tom, again, thank you so much. You’re fantastic guests. Great information and advice. And as usual, as I like to say, 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. Tom Martin, take it away.

Tom Martin:

Well, first off, for the two of you, Dennis and Tom, thank you so much for having me on. It’s always a pleasure to get to talk with you both, and I really appreciate the time to just hang out. My parting shot. So it’s not tech, surprise, surprise. It actually is an encouragement to all of you to just take some time out for yourself, be good to yourself. Enjoy just being a human being. I like to do that by taking my dog, Chapel, out for a walk here in the creek behind us. In the forest with the trees, just take some sunlight in and just enjoy yourself and be in the moment.

Tom Mighell:

Walking the dog is my favorite form of getting away and not thinking about anything, which is actually when I usually think about everything, but I love it. My parting shot is tech related and it is a tool that if those of you who have a Gmail account, you have access to this now. I believe, I’m not sure if you need to have a Gemini account for it or not. And it is a tool that Gmail offers that’s now called CC. And what it does is every day, I get an email the very morning that’s called Your Day Ahead. And what it’s doing, yep, get ready. They’re reading your emails. It’s broken down into three categories, top of mind, which gives you some reminders. You need to remember to pay this bill or you need to, mine says here, decide whether to accept this connection invitation from so- and-so because I have a LinkedIn invitation, but it’s top of mind.

The next one is FYI, which kind of looks maybe at your newsletters or some other things to say, “Here’s some interesting things you might want to pay attention to. ” And then based on any invites you got or other things, dinner reservations you made or things like that, it will say on your calendar for the day and it will show you what you’ve got. I will tell you, it has been incredibly useful for me because even though I try to be an inbox zero kind of guy, I let the emails pile up and there have been things over the past couple of weeks where it said, “Oh, don’t forget, you need to pay this by this date or you need to respond by this date.” And it’s been super helpful. I think you can go in and go into Google. It was a Google Labs experiment when I turned it on.

I’m not sure if it’s freely available right now, but it’s called Google CC. And so far it’s pretty amazing.

Dennis Kennedy:

Tom, it’s really encouraging that even if it’s an AI, the idea that somebody actually might be reading my email somehow makes me feel better about the world these days.

Tom Mighell:

We always knew that Google was reading our email anyway, right? I mean, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I’ve been thinking about dictation and I use voice memos. I’ve used the NATA.ai tool for transcription, starting to experiment with whisper flow. And I’ve noticed there’s two aspects of dictation that are interesting. So one is just the pure intake and doesn’t make it easier. And the other is then to take those, what you’ve gathered, those notes and put them into AI with a prompt that does something like expand these notes logically, fill in the gaps and turn this into something coherent. And it takes almost no cycles on you, no work. And you’re saying like, “I grab this stuff and I just say, let’s have the AI kind of put this stuff together and then I can go back and look at it later.” So it’s a two-step process, quick dictation, then the AI expansion, and then I think it gives me faster and better results.

So my early results are more than intriguing, but if you like to capture rough ideas but struggle with actually kind of fleshing them out, this might be something to try.

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 to our show in iTunes or your favorite podcast app and leave us a review.

Dennis Kennedy:

You could also connect with us on LinkedIn with your questions or 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 Mighell 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, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, Smart Ways to Work Together from ABA Books or Amazon. And join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy Mighell Report only on the Legal Tog Network.

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