Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Christian Puzder

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

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 421 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 discussed my legal technology literacy and leadership class at the University of Michigan Law School and what I learned from it this past semester. 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 LegalTech interview series with Christian Puzder, CEO at CaseFriend. 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 to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so thrilled and so excited to welcome Christian Puster, CEO at CaseFriend. Christian, welcome.

Christian Puzder:

Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Dennis. Great to be with you guys.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? What’s CaseFriend? What do you do there? What should our audience know about you going into this discussion?

Christian Puzder:

Yeah, absolutely. First off, I’m a lawyer by training and by trade. Most of my career has been in the law and technology. So I really personally kind of merged the two together and I love the law and I love technology, so it’s a really great personal passion play for me. CaseFriend is an AI native case management system that takes for work comp defense attorneys and lien resolution firms. It uses technology as a tool to create efficiencies and generate greater margins for law firm operators. I like to tell law firm owners that our job is to allow you to scale your business without scaling your staff or creating greater burdens for your staff. Typically, day-to-day, what we do with CaseFriend, what I do is it’s heavily customer feedback driven. So the product is always changing. We have an agile development model. We’re listening to our customers, our users, how they’re doing their work so that we can adapt the technology to make them most efficient.

Dennis Kennedy:

Christian, first of all, it’s so awesome for us to have you as a guest on the podcast. We’ve known each other for quite a while. I always like to start by saying it’s not easy to talk with lawyers about technology. I’ve seen you present, especially when you were at Thomson Reuters, and you just have a great way of focusing on exactly what is in front of lawyers and how technology can help them. And I think you convey it so well. So would you talk about your approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology and what you found works well for you?

Christian Puzder:

Thanks, Dennis. Actually, that means a lot. I appreciate that. If I can tell a story, I have an older brother who’s a physicist. And when he was in undergrad majoring in physics, he was at level seven Latin and taking advanced honors English courses. And I was a lit major. I said, “Well, why are you taking these lit classes if you want to go into physics?” And he said, “If I can’t explain what I’m doing to a layperson, I can’t get funding for my work.” And that really made a lot of sense to me. And I kind of understood how people who have a very specific background in a technology, if you can’t explain that to a potential customer, a potential user who doesn’t have that background, you’re going to lose them. So being a lawyer, understanding how lawyers speak was critical. And I take a very brief-like approach to explaining technology to attorneys.

With that, constructing an answer kind of like a brief, kind of like in an IRAC method, what’s the issue we’re dealing with here? What’s the rule? How do we get to the end of it? For technology and lawyers, it’s more about workflow. A lot of attorneys, a lot of paralegals will get in trouble when they say, “I want X.” And they don’t explain how they get there. They don’t explain the task they’re doing. So when I talk to attorneys about what we’re delivering or trying to be responsive to their needs, I try to take them a step back and say, “Well, what are you doing?” Kind of like a deposition, let’s start off with the basic question and then tell the story. And that drives how we build the product. It drives how you use the product. And then it also drives how we pitch the product.

Dennis, you brought up Thomson Reuters. If I can, I worked with Mike Dane, who’s a leader still over at Thomson Reuters in Westlaw, and he did a great job of teaching to all of us how to tell a story. And everyone, whether you’re a physicist or a lawyer, we like to hear a story. So taking a complex piece of technology that behind the scenes is really cool and we can really kind of gee out on the technology. Most people aren’t going to. They’re going to want to hear the story of how that technology can really benefit them. So being able to speak the way the audience wants to hear you, speak to them in the language that they understand and tell a really good compelling story helps communicate the story of technology.

Tom Mighell:

So I want to take that, just take something you said there about that lawyers are just, I want X, or paralegals saying, I want X. CaseFriend is a tool that’s powered by AI, so AI is going to make up a lot of the things we talk about today. So I want to kind of dive into AI and say that in the past you have argued that the real problem with AI isn’t hallucinations, it’s accountability and that AI should assist and that the lawyer should decide, which is fair enough. It’s fair enough in a white paper or a presentation, but with the, I want X crowd, with the, here’s what I want, what does assist and approve look like on the day of a filing deadline for a solo who’s buried in work and is just tempted to trust the output and say, I want X.

I mean, what does that look like for, I would say most of our audience tends to be solo small firm type lawyers who may not have that kind of time. What’s the advice there?

Christian Puzder:

Yeah, and AI is really, really great for the small law firms. It can replace so many cost-heavy resources and it’s a great tool for attorneys. To get into that answer, I want to identify the problem and that is lawyers will get into trouble when they look for that solution and they don’t look for the workflow. And with AI, it’s very easy to get caught up in what I call the theatrics of automation. Something that looks magical, it does a great demo. The salesperson says it can do everything that you want it to do without thinking. That’s a trap for lawyers. AI should be treated like an overachieving summer associate. So you hire someone who’s not a lawyer, they’re interested in the law, they’ve got some background in the law and they come to work for you for the summer. If you have a research project, you want to lay out in detail what that research project is, what your expectations are, what you want the result to look like, and then that summer associate goes out and does the work.

And then they come back and you review it and you tell the summer associate what they did well, what they did poorly, what they need to change. If you treat AI in that same way, you’re going to get great results and the accountability is built into that workflow. It’s built into that process. I would never give a task to a sumer associate and then take it and then just file it with the court. What lawyer would ever do that? Why would we then do that with technology? So for me, that’s the problem that AI presents to lawyers and the solution to that is accountability. So a small firm that’s using AI because they want to get things done quickly, they want to get things done affordably, they have got margins they have to look at, go and treat that AI system just like a overachieving summer associate and make sure to review all the work that comes out of that AI system before you deliver it to a client, to a judge, to opposing counsel and make sure it fits your requirements.

Dennis Kennedy:

That’s such a great point. I was realizing when working with AI, and I talked to my students about this as well, that you can actually learn how to delegate and there are actual principles and techniques you use. And if you just kind of adapt those to AI, it puts you ahead of the game. But let me shift a little bit on you and say from your vantage point, which I think is a really interesting one, what are the areas in the legal profession now that you think need the most attention? And how can we actually get people to pay that attention to them when all they’re hearing is AI, AI, AI?

Christian Puzder:

That’s a great question. And if I can touch on your earlier point about becoming a good delegator and finding a good delegate, that’s not just in the law. Even in software, our team is very small and with AI, we can build and develop at a rapid pace. Personally, I’ve learned to use AI to input an issue and then tell it exactly how the system is structured and what we want to build. And then the AI system can deliver to me documentation for my developers and I can deliver that to my developers and they’ll build it. This is the parallel with the law. If I don’t review the product scope that AI outputs and I give it to my developer, they’re going to build something that doesn’t deliver what I originally intended. But when I review that and I can go back into the AI system and update the results, update my questions to better focus on my result, we’re going to get a much better product.

And it’s the same for lawyers. As you just said, if you can delegate it and be clear about what you’re asking AI to do, the output is going to be much, much more valuable to you and much more reliable. But with that, to get to your direct question about the areas to look at, I think first is governance. That’s absolutely critical because we’re a licensed profession and we need to make sure that what we do fits within the licensure requirements and the good standing requirements and all of the professional responsibility rules. We can’t delegate our license to another person or a machine. And that’s a really fantastic risk that attorneys have with tools that seem so easy to use. You can just go onto the internet, open up a free AI tool, upload a document that’s going to have social security numbers, medical records, addresses, all this personally identifiable information and the system, you’ve now shared it with the world.

And what does that actually mean in effect to your license, to your practice, to your reputation? There’s a database called the Sherlotin database that’s been tracking AI sanctions for… They started in June of 23, so 37 months now. And they’ve tracked in the US 1,162 sanctionable cases where attorneys have misused AI. That’s about 31 a month, which is literally a decision a day. Considering leap years and all that, that’s about a decision a day where atorneys have been sanctioned for misusing AI and that’s because governance hasn’t been applied. Now the cool thing about governance and AI is it’s similar to governance of discrimination policies. So when I was an atorney, I worked in discrimination defense and I would teach our employer companies how to implement anti-harassment policies, but you couldn’t actually stop a person from doing that bad act. But with technology, if you implement good governance, not just policies, you can actually have the technology prevent an attorney from misusing AI.

So I think governance really needs the most atention, not only from attorneys, but the providers that are building AI solutions for those attorneys. It’s a huge value play for us to build in that governance so the attorneys, the HR team, the managers of the firms don’t have to think about that aspect of enforcing governance. I think two other areas, training is highly associated with governance. You can’t just drop AI on a desk and expect people to know how to delegate to it, to know how to use the answers and to how to make the best use of that particular product. The third area, and this is where I think AI really becomes powerful, because AI is about processing. It’s why Nvidia does such a great job with AI. They’ve got these incredible processors. It’s not about storing data, it’s about processing data. And that means you get a huge edge, especially if you’re a law firm in a document-heavy practice.

So for work comp defense, which is the area we focus in, our customers will get a file referral, let’s say 5,000 pages in a single PDF and they’re a mess. Some of the pages are forms, some of them are 20,000 by 20,000 pixels. And the client says, “Here’s 5,000 pages, you figure it out. ” AI can be used to take that single PDF and very quickly break it down into something that the paralegal, the attorney can quickly analyze and review in a time billable way. So if I have a 5,000 page PDF, I really can’t bill for the time on separating the pages in Acrobat. So if I have the AI system use its processing power to break down that large document set, I can then present a smaller document set that the attorney can start analyzing and then actually bill and recover for. So I think the governance coupled with training and focusing on that document processing, the large document processing is really an area of great focus for legal profession and AI.

Tom Mighell:

Sounds like as you’re describing it, that these are all part of CaseRen’s value proposition. Let me kind of expand on that a little bit, is that your footprint really is in streamlining high volume document heavy practice area of workers’ compensation, lots of medical

Announcer:

Records,

Tom Mighell:

Lots of investigations, lots of things. What are the unique workflow challenges that exist in workers’ compensation areas that a standard practice management tool is not going to be able to cover or is going to miss?

Christian Puzder:

Subject matter focus. So in work comp, it’s workers’ compensation. Every applicant has been injured in a job. That means every single case has medical records, every single case has employment records. So understanding that means when the documents come into the system and our automated systems process those documents, we can then present them so that the user experience focused on those documents. Case management prior to the rise of AI, it was table stakes to store documents and retrieve them on demand. And it was kind of up to the user how you’re going to put them into the taxonomy. With these automated tools, the documents can go into the system. Our system can’t use its knowledge to pre-organize everything, put into what we call a validation step, and the human confirms everything’s okay. So when the attorney gets the documents in the case, they can click the button that says medical.

They can quickly access the employment records because that’s what the attorney wants to do right away. So with a subject matter focus where we know every single case going to have AME reports, QME reports, medical records, deposition transcripts that all relate to at a high level a work injury that we can create an experience that’s focused on analyzing that information as a work injury as compared to a document management system where you just upload the documents, storm in the cloud, and then it’s up to you to figure out where everything is.

Tom Mighell:

All right, we’ve got a lot more to cover with Christian Posder from CaseFriend. But first we need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy:

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

Tom Mighell:

I’m Tom Mighell. And we’re joined by our special guest, Christian Pusder at CaseFriend.

Dennis Kennedy:

We found in the Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guests’ career paths in part because Tom always gets really interested in a new career path and wants to work with people. But would you talk about your own career path, which I think is fascinating and how it actually overlapped a bit with mine. Maybe you could tell the story of your tech show conversation with Craig Ball, which I think was influential for you and what kinds of things you’ve done to get into your current role and focus.

Christian Puzder:

Yeah, that’s great. I love that question, Dennis, because we’ve known each other, I’m 51 now, for about 40 years. I was probably about 10 or 11 the first time I ran into you at the Stoller Partnership in St. Louis. And that’s where my career path began. I grew up going to my dad’s office. My father and you practiced together for years at the Stoller Partnership in St. Louis. And it was tradition on Saturdays that the kids of the attorneys would meet at the law firm and hang out and get into trouble and eat all the donuts and all the things that kids did. At that time, I got to observe at a very young age what the practice of law was. And it was my dad going to the library, taking one of the books off the shelves with the red and black Westlaw binding, reading, copying something, cutting it out, taping it to a yellow legal pad, writing around it with a Black Barrel Warrior pencil.

Those were the mechanical steps that he and all the other attorneys went through. And I got to observe that. And as I grew up, I just developed this fondus for technology. I remember asking my dad early on in high school for a computer because I wanted to play games, but I tried to trick him and said, “Oh, I want a computer to help me do homework.” So he bought me a typewriter with a little screen on it that would help me do my homework and type out all my papers. It really wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it was a tool that actually got the job done that I was asking for. And because of that, I had to go out and buy my own computer, build my own computer. And I really got into the technological aspect of it and saw what computers could do.

When I worked for CKE Restaurants, I worked on building out their year 2000 POS system and did a lot of testing. So in my job before law school, I got exposed to testing, to the user experience. What does it mean to take orders and make sure that computer systems can send orders to the kitchen? And then after law school, I went to practice at the Stoller Partnership, our old firm where you worked and my father worked. And at that time, it was 2002. I was the only attorney at the firm with a computer. And I got about 30 cases for rent and possession for a commercial landlord. I though, “This is really stupid. I’ve got a laptop. Why do I have all this paper?” And at the time, the only thing I knew how to build was access. So I built an access database to manage my cases so I could just open up the database, generate a report, have my secretary put information in as it came in.

At the end of the month, I developed a report, sent it off to the client. They’re like, “This is great. We don’t have to spend an hour to lunch with three attorneys. You just gave me a report giving all that we needed.” I realized, wow, I can actually benefit the client, retain the business because a happy client is what keeps business for lawyers. And so instead of going to the expensive fancy lunch, I just clicked a button, generated a report, and my client’s like, “Here’s some more work for you. ” At that time, I then got exposed to Westlaw. They were seeking subject matter experts to build Westlaw Next. And I left the practice of law. The only thing I missed from the practice of law actually is taking depositions. That was a lot of fun. But I went to Westlaw and worked with an incredible team on building Westlaw next.

And I was exposed to product development, agile product development, and most importantly, user research. The guys at Westlaw, Mike Dane, his team that are still running it, they invest in user research. I don’t think I’m spilling any beans here. That team loves talking to the customers, and I think it’s something that that team does in a way that no other company does. So I got to see how important the user voice was in developing software. And in the interim, I sent my database to a friend who literally said, “I’m in a broom closet and I want to start a law firm.” And I said, “Well, I left my law firm. Here’s my database. Here’s how you use it. ” And he called me and he said, “Man, I turned this thing into something great. I’ve got all these clients now. I moved out of the broom closet.” And we said, “We think we can sell this thing.” So we took it from an access database, built it into a web-based, cloud-based application, which was called CaseFriend.

And so that journey from watching how lawyers did work manually, experiencing testing, which is the most important part of software development, watching the user research, building Westlaw next, talking to attorneys, really understanding how technology affected their business delivered me to this place where now I can build this unique software, try to deliver some value to attorneys, and also do things I love. I get absolutely giddy when we can find new things to do with AI and new technologies that fill workflows and bring joy to customers through technology.

Tom Mighell:

So one of our recent guests, Mark Lawtson, he asked the question of us and we’ve been talking, sort of been talking to all of our guests about it when the initial question is, do you find it’s getting harder to make good legal technology decisions just in general? You have mentioned in the past that the goal for AI is to just be there, that it just disappears into the tools that lawyers are already using instead of being another subscription, another login, another side tool that they have to use. But right now, every vendor on earth is putting the word AI onto everything that they sell. When I go to a conference, if a booth doesn’t say AI, then they get harassed because they don’t have AI on it. How does a non-technical lawyer, a small solo and small firm lawyer make good decisions in that context?

Christian Puzder:

I know we’re going to talk about quick takes later. My hot take is technology doesn’t work, but it can work for you. And I think non-technical people need to understand that because it’s easy to get caught up in the theatrics of automation, to be caught up in the anecdotes of we’ve got AI in our name, look at how fast AI can do things. So right off the bat, understand that technology works for you. It’s a tool. And so what you need to look at are hard metrics of how that tool can actually deliver for your practice. And there are a few questions that I would advise people to ask, especially small law firms looking for tools that will support governance, because as we talked about earlier, governance is really the most important thing. The first is where does my data go? Vendors should be very transparent about where and how they’re storing their data.

Separate and apart from SOC two or any kind of requirements, where are those documents? Are they in a data center in Canada? Are they in a data center in the Philippines? Is that data domestic? Secondly with AI, which I think is most critical, is your data being used to train another model? Is someone taking your client’s information? Because it is your client’s information filled with confidential, privileged, personally identifiable information. Is that vendor sending it off to another model where it’s exposed to the world? And then third, what sources are used for the answer to rely on? I’m not here to pitch Westlaw. One of the great things about Westlaw is their heritage of their reference attorneys, the Keysight system. So we know their AI model is built on all of their proprietary information. At CaseFriend, our system, we call Casey, only looks at your case information.

It doesn’t look at all the information in the world. It doesn’t care what Madonna’s birthday is. It just looks at your case information. And so understanding what your AI system is actually using to answer the question is important. Fourth, who reviews or approves the output before it’s used? Whether you’ve got an AI vendor that’s doing it for you or is the AI vendor delivering something that is ready to be approved? And then later on, which kind of gets to the auditing feature of it, especially for carriers, because carriers are going to start, I think they’re going to start asking very similar questions to what I’m listing out here. The fifth is, is there an auditable trail? Can I later prove as a lawyer, can I later prove what happened with evidence that I can show a judge, that I can show another attorney? So if I can summarize those, there’s my lawyer blood speaking again.

Where does the data go? Are we training someone else’s model? What sources are being relied on? Who aproves? And do you have an auditable trail that you can prove later? Those are great questions that are going to really help small law firms figure out which vendors to use.

Dennis Kennedy:

No, Christian, that answer is great. I love how you get to the heart of these issues. So I want to ask you about one of the things I’ve been thinking about in AI these days. So everywhere I’m reading about these legal AI companies creating the legal OS, they’re creating the AI native law firms, blah, blah, blah, blah. So what I always like to ask our guests is what the heck is actually working in AI these days? And where is there action and outcomes and not just talk? And so what do you see out there that actually seems like it’s working where you can just show somebody and they will go like, “Oh wow, I get that. I actually see something.”

Christian Puzder:

A few years ago, I was very skeptical about AI. I thought it’s just scaled up plagiarism. It’s plagiarism at an instantly fast speed with all of the data in the world. And that’s what I call Gen AI. That’s where you’re asking AI to try to create something. It’s going to take all the information it has, figure out how to copy it and make something that appears magical and fresh and new. And that’s where I think people say, “Ah, I don’t like that. That’s where I get in trouble.” To separate that from what works, I think pulling out pebbles of legal information from a lake of legal data is where AI really succeeds. So back when we practiced, if you had a case and you knew it was bad, you could bury the opposition in millions of pages of documents and that solo attorney’s never going to get through all of them.

They’re going to have to hire a team of a hundred people to read documents and they’re going to lose a whole bunch of money on that case. AI eliminates that and it kind of balances the seesaw because you can put your documents in and that amazing processing power can find the Small conflict in injury reports. You have three doctors that evaluate someone’s knee, two of them give conflicting reports. The AI system can very quickly find that and that’s a pebble of information buried in thousands of pages. I think the other area where AI does really well is general legal research. You have a very defined structured corpus of information. It has a taxonomy. It has a very clear logical flow. And so being able to quickly find those legal research results, finding that one case from 1917, which actually applies today, AI systems can be used to bubble up that information quickly.

So getting rid of some of the human, mundane, repetitive mechanics and bubbling up information quickly I think is really where AI is working best for attorneys. I don’t think it’s working very well on the Gen AI level. That’s very, very risky.

Tom Mighell:

All right. We’ve still got more to cover with Christian Pusder, but we need to take another break for a quick word from our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy:

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

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mighell. And we’re joined by our special guest, Christian Pusder at CaseFriend. We’ve got time for just a few more questions.

Dennis Kennedy:

So what I like about your career path is that unlike a lot of people who got in technology because they didn’t like being in law, you kind of used your legal skills and your legal interests to move you into technology. And so I think that’s a fascinating way to think about what people might do in law and technology today. But my question is, how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find new career paths in legal tech and the other non-traditional careers in law, especially in legal innovation?

Christian Puzder:

In short, follow your passion. I love technology and I love the law. And there was a point where I realized that the path for me to actually be able to feed my family was through the law. And through my passion of technology and trying to bring technology into everything I did in the practice of law opened a lot of doors for me. And I firmly believe that if you have a passion about something, you need to pursue it. And then the success, the happiness is going to come from that. What makes a good candidate to transition from law student or lawyer to a technologist is what we talked about very early on is to act as a translator. Attorneys are going to find problems that can be solved with technology. And when you can explain that to a non-technical person, you’ve created technological value for yourself with your subject matter expertise.

And I think by doing that, by solving problems, exploring, testing new things in a very controlled area without putting your license at risk, but exploring those technologies to solve legal problems are going to open up doors. And it is cliche to say necessity is the mother of invention, but it’s absolutely true. Every single tool that we have from Case Friend, Westlaw, Harvey, everything that’s out there are people trying to solve problems for attorneys, bringing in your subject matter expertise, whether it’s family law, corporate law, litigation, and apping technology to solve the problems that your practice area faces going to open up these doors into legal technology for you.

Tom Mighell:

All right. We always finish with our self-interested question, which is who are the fresh voices in legal tech that you think we ought to be paying attention to? Who are the voices that you’re looking at right now and maybe those that we might want to include as future guests of the show?

Christian Puzder:

Right now, I think Dean Stephanie Lindquist from WashU is at the tip of the spear for AI for law students. I’ve got the pleasure of working with the Washington University Law School on their AI board and the efforts that she is making to expose 1Ls to AI to figure out how they can use AI to not only learn the law, but to be better lawyers and be prepared to practice in an AI environment. I would say she’s a very fresh voice. She’d make a fantastic guest on this show. Along with that is Oliver Roberts. He works with Dean Lindquist and with basically everyone in the legal AI space. And he’s incredibly intelligent and very articulate and succinct in explaining the issues that face attorneys with AI, how to solve those, and also exposing people to new fresh AI tools. And third is a partner of ours, a gentleman named Chris Floyd with a company called Adexus.

Adexus does online electronic filing and mailing. And one of the areas that he and I are working on is how can we make snail mail more efficient? Now what that looks like in the end, we’ll show you later, but working with him, especially with law firms, because you have a mail room, you’ve got incoming and outgoing mail, and it’s paper, it’s folding, it’s cost, it’s postage. He does a lot with technology to really improve that, especially for the solo and small firms because you either spend half a day going through mail, you hire someone to go through mail. Something that’s more cost-effective is let’s automate those repetitive, mundane, non-recoverable mechanical tasks.

Tom Mighell:

I will say that the term more efficient snail mail sounds slightly oxymoronic and I’m excited to see where you head with that.

Christian Puzder:

I’m excited about it too.

Tom Mighell:

Excellent ideas. Names that we haven’t heard before. So thank you very much. And we want to thank Christian Poster, CEO at CaseFriend for being our guest on the podcast. Christian, tell our audience more about where they can learn more about you and if they want to get in touch with you, how they do that.

Christian Puzder:

Casefriend.com is our main site. If you want to learn about some of the features of CaseFriend, you can go to support.casefriend.com. That’s got our publicly available knowledge base active on LinkedIn. That’s a great place to contact me. Also, anyone can email me at [email protected].

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, thank you so much, Christian. You were a fantastic guest. Great information and advice for our listeners. Believe it or not, I’m actually really interested in the snail mail things. So we might have to have a conversation about that at some point. As usual –

Christian Puzder:

Absolutely.

Dennis Kennedy:

So many topics to discuss in so little time, but now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can use the second this podcast ends. Christian, take it away.

Christian Puzder:

Yeah, thanks. And I thought about this from the perspective of your audience, solos, smalls, firms that really don’t have resources. I touched on it earlier, so I just want to reiterate it. Technology doesn’t work, but it can work for you. And that means create an AI approval rule before you create an AI use habit. This simple rule of no AI output leaves the firm, goes to a client, goes to court, or becomes part of legal advice until an attorney has reviewed it, verified the key points and approved it. If you get into an AI habit that avoids that, that habit will be flawed and you’ll run into issues down the road. But that rule really changes the entire posture of how you approach technology and AI because it makes sure that AI is a tool and not a risk. It can help you move faster, but it will never replace your professional judgment.

I did a presentation recently where I introduced the John Connor rule. John Connor from the Terminator. Terminator was that perfect AI system. John Connor was the human that checked every decision that perfect AI system made. And our role as attorneys is to check every decision AI makes.

Tom Mighell:

Great advice. Great advice. My parting shot is actually an observation this time and I guess more accurately a plea. I have mentioned on the podcast that we are getting ready to start building a house. And one of the things that I am going to be paying atention to is how much of a smart home we want to have, whether it’s a smart home or just maybe a clever home. We want to try to do something in that nature, but I am living in a rental right now where I’m just starting out, I guess, restarting because we had some of this in our house, starting out very small. And I just bought some new smart bulbs for the house and tried to plug them in. Didn’t work, didn’t connect, wouldn’t connect at all. I tried to troubleshoot it. I learned that most of the smart bulbs come on the 2.4 gigahertz range where many of the new Wi-Fi mesh systems are five gigahertz.

And it feels like there should be a little bit more coordination there in the smart home industry to get this. And maybe that’s just my ignorance and what I’m doing, but it feels like the friction to get into a smart home these days is higher than ever and it should actually be getting better. I know that there are tools that are centralizing this more and I look forward to learning more about this, but just the simple act of putting in a smart bulb has resulted in at least an hour or two of troubleshooting that I didn’t need to spend. So wish me luck.

Dennis Kennedy:

Tom, back in the 19th century, you had been one of those people who were saying that railroad rails should be of the same size and separation.

So my parting shot starts with a simple question. How old is your current computer monitor? If it’s been sitting on your desk for more than three or four years, my rule of thumb is it’s time for an upgrade. Monitor tech moves fast and upgrading to a modern display will give you immediate benefits that you can actually see. And I think this is the thing that the monitor is what is your interaction with the computer. And I think it can be really helpful, especially when I’ve been in law firms where it looks like the monitors have been around for 20 years or so. So look into that. They’re really reasonably priced these days. You can get a really good upgraded monitor for a couple hundred bucks, 300 or so. And when you upgrade, you got two great choices for the old hardware. You can plug it right back in as a second screen and have a dual monitor set up, or you can donate it to a local school, nonprofit or community center where a perfectly good working monitor can instantly help somebody else.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mighell Report.

Dennis Kennedy:

A big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing the show. You can find the 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 to 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 for more than 20 years.

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 Talk Network.

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