#553: AI Tools and Processes Every Lawyer Should Use with Catherine Sanders Reach

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser:

Oh, hi there. I’m Zack.

Jennifer Whigham:

Oh, and I’m Jennifer. And this is episode 553 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. And today, this guy, Zack Glaser, is talking with Catherine Sanders Reach about streamlining your legal operations.

Zack Glaser:

This is one of those where we would get, if this was a TV show, would be previously,

Jennifer Whigham:

It would be previously on. Because we had her on a hundred episodes ago or something like that.

Zack Glaser:

Something like that. Yeah. Episode 4 44, which should be easy enough to remember. Thankfully we were smart enough to put it on a memorable episode, but it was a pretty popular one. Catherine’s got a lot of good information. She’s part of the North Carolina bar and she helps people over there run their law practices.

Jennifer Whigham:

Cool.

Zack Glaser:

She’s somebody that when I was still writing on my own for tech for lawyers, I would actually check her blog before I’d write my own blog post. So she has a lot of good

Jennifer Whigham:

And plagiarized. Is that okay?

Zack Glaser:

Cool. No, I would repost her blog

Jennifer Whigham:

On back in blog days.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, back in blog days. But today we’re talking about project management and getting things done in your office, so she’s very good at that. For lawyers, we weren’t taught how to do any of that stuff, and I’m still learning a ton about project management right now.

Jennifer Whigham:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m not a lawyer, but I was also not taught it in any of my musical theater schooling. Weirdly, not a class I

Zack Glaser:

I do see the direct line from musical theater school to you to here, right here

Jennifer Whigham:

To this podcast intro. Maybe to this podcast. The rest of my life, I’m not sure, but this might be where my degree is getting the most use in the podcast intros.

Zack Glaser:

Absolutely.

Jennifer Whigham:

Project management. So management, you and I were talking about this. I like to document my processes. I like to build the processes, I Like to analyze the data. I like to do all the framework and structure around it. When it comes to doing the actual processes, that’s where I’m less interested in. And I think that is not talked about enough.

Zack Glaser:

A, I don’t think it’s uncommon because for me, that’s actually what got me into legal technology is that I like building the machine as opposed to running the machine. And it is, I don’t want to say it’s stigmatized, but we don’t think of that a lot of times as work.

Jennifer Whigham:

I Know. Which is weird

Zack Glaser:

And we don’t think of it as productivity, but it is a talent it takes, and I don’t want to say it’s a talent over something else, but it takes a kind of certain mindset and it’s taken me a while to recognize that other people don’t want to do that.

Jennifer Whigham:

I know, but it’s the fun.

Zack Glaser:

They’re people that want to just run the machine, which is great. And that’s how their brain works. That’s how they like to say, okay, well what are the processes? Let’s do it. And that’s awesome. So this thing, and I’ve talked to our, we have, well that we have internal business coaches.

Jennifer Whigham:

I do know,

Zack Glaser:

I hope the people on the podcast know that because we’ve had them on a couple of times, are three different ones that we have. I talked to mine about feeling like that’s a luxury. Sometimes I feel gluttonous being able to design the processes and write ’em down and put ’em in spreadsheets, do a video, and honestly, I’ll do a video and throw it into chat GPT or something and say, give me a process for this. It feels decadent.

Jennifer Whigham:

Yeah. Like it’s extra you’re doing. If you have extra time, you could be doing these luxurious tasks, but otherwise just keep your head down, do the internal work instead of the processes. But I mean, the way we teach about building your workflows first and building your processes first, it is the exact opposite mind frame. It’s not a luxury, it’s the found. I mean, it’s like saying the people who built your house, that doesn’t count you doing your dishes every day is the thing that really counts and nobody’s going to, that’s ridiculous.

Zack Glaser:

Right? No, that’s exactly right. But I think especially in a law firm, especially for lawyers, that mindset of got to get something done, got to bill these hours, I’ve got to be able to, what can I show for my day? And you’re running your law firm. Part of running that law firm is documenting these processes. And if it’s not something you like to do, fine, honestly, maybe somebody in your office loves to do that, but people think differently. It’s not a luxury. For some people, it doesn’t feel gluttonous and amazing, and just because it does to me doesn’t mean that work doesn’t have value.

Jennifer Whigham:

And if it comes easy to you. Another thing that often people will discredit

Is when something is really easy for them and they do it without thinking, they don’t consider it work, and they don’t actually realize how hard they’re working because this task they’re just naturally talented at, they do it really fast when somebody who’s not naturally talented would struggle and considerate work. So if you think about the things that you do without thinking those are also work just because they take less time or they go fast for you or you do ’em, and forget, doesn’t mean they don’t count. Work does not have to be arduous for it to be

Zack Glaser:

Work. Right, right. Yeah, that’s a good point.

Jennifer Whigham:

Well, here’s Zack’s conversation with Catherine. Hey, before you go, let go of that steering wheel to see if your car has somehow gained the ability to autonomously steer. No, don’t do that. Who wrote this? Please keep your hands on your steering wheel and head on over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. If you don’t mind.

Zack Glaser:

See inherent in this whole thing is that somebody is going to take their, they’re just going to let Jesus take the wheel.

Jennifer Whigham:

Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Drive your car, keep your hands on. And here’s Zack.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Hi, I am Catherine Sanders Reach. I’m the director of the Center for Practice Management at the North Carolina Bar Association.

Zack Glaser:

Hey Catherine, thanks for being with me today. So we’ve had you on the podcast multiple times. You’ve been on other podcasts like New Solo and things like that. Many times you’re a sought after speaker in these things we talked about previously on episode 4 44, legal operations. I really wanted to kind of continue that conversation a little bit. So for our listeners, if you want to dig into the basics of legal ops, the people, processes and technology go to 4 44. But today, since I’ve got Catherine here, I want to pick your brain about how do we incorporate artificial intelligence into that concept into our legal operations.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

And I think 4 44, episode 4 44, was it in 2020 ish?

Zack Glaser:

So it was right when AI was kind of really coming out and we started playing with it. So it was more like, here’s what I think I’m going to do you, and when we were talking to people about how to do their legal tech stack, we’re really just still in like, alright, start from your processes. Just start from your process, start from your processes. We weren’t getting this, Hey Zack, I want to use artificial intelligence in my office. How do I do it? And then having to reframe that question so much.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

I guess one of the things with the Gen AI is we’ve got these foundational models, the big models, the As chat, GPT, as Claude as. And while I do find those tools useful, the tools that I find most useful are the ones that are purpose-built to do a thing. And so that’s going back to where my process is breaking down, where are my processes inefficient? And for instance,

We have long had the ability to turn a Word document into a template that’s fillable, expand that to practically any practice management application that has the ability to create a mail merge with the information that you’ve input into the system and fill out your engagement agreement or your non-engagement agreement or your closing or whatever. And we have not seen widespread adoption of these basic and fundamental tools. Well now we’ve got tools that are using generative artificial intelligence to identify variables. So identify content that you’ve already got to potentially fill out clauses and things like that. So the argument for not using those tools I think was the time commitment to get it set up

Zack Glaser:

Potentially.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

And so if Gene AI can help you get those things set up faster because it’s helping you identify things or it’s turning that document into a client interview that is easier for your clients to fill out and feels more personal. Because I mean, how many times have you seen an intake sheet that somebody sends as a Word document? And that’s just not the way to do business anymore. For one thing, the information you gather is going to have to be re-input into some system unless you’re printing it out and then retyping it somewhere else at some point. So thinking about just the flow of information coming into the office and back out of the office and how can you use AI tools to kind of leverage those things so that you’re not retyping and recreating and all of that. There are certain tools that come to mind right off the top of my head and I’ve had people say, oh, they’re so expensive. This is where we start getting mathy and I’m doing a program at texture on return, on investment on technology. So I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.

Zack Glaser:

Oh, I like that. I’m going to go to that.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

So if you think about, okay, how much time can I really save improving this process using generative artificial intelligence, is it going to save me time? If so, how much do I bill by the hour? Even if you don’t bill by the hour, you have probably valued an hour of your time at something

Zack Glaser:

Or you should. Yeah, you should have an idea,

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Right? So I just got copilot, the Microsoft 365, about 30 bucks a month.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, it’s way more reasonable than I expected, honestly,

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Compared to the business standard version of 365, which costs $12 and 50 cents, 30 bucks additional sounds really extreme. So I started challenging myself, okay, let’s make this thing pay for itself. So how do I do that? Okay, how much time did I save today by using this tool and how much does that equate to my hourly billable? And what I first realized is at 360 a year, that’s a dollar a day, more or less. So all of a sudden that becomes, oh, it’s really not that expensive if you think of it that way,

Zack Glaser:

Right?

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Then you think about, did I save at least a dollar a day using this tool, which if it can help me write an email that is more elegant than what I might’ve written otherwise or struggled to write eloquently because I’m trying to convey information that is not always easy to get across without context. And so you want to make sure that that email is perfect.

Zack Glaser:

That feels like a normal lawyer email, right?

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Correct. So then you think, okay, if it can summarize my emails from yesterday and tell me any things that I need to respond to. The other day I was going to go give a CLE at one of the county bar associations and I let it tell me where I was supposed to be when I was supposed to be there, who had talked to what documents I had sent over. It gave me an encapsulation of stuff. Would it have taken me more than six to seven minutes to gather that stuff for my inbox and my file explorer and all that stuff? No, it wouldn’t have taken me that much time, but it would’ve taken me more than 20 seconds.

Zack Glaser:

What I want to do is back up just a little bit on that because I think we’re jumping into the things that you’ve found that artificial intelligence has been beneficial for. But what I think people might miss in this is that you are a processes person. You have your processes written down and when you suggest, Hey, go look at your intake, go find these documents, you need to have those documents documented or the fact that you’re even making this, I like to use Vizio because it’s in the Microsoft 365 environment, but you can use various things, mirror boards or whatever, and I make flowcharts of how things go through, how my processes are. And when I was practicing, I would always make a document green. So whenever a document was being made, that box or whatever it was was green because green meant money because green means that I can speed up this process, I can do something faster here. And so when you are using artificial intelligence to do that process, we’re still talking about that process. It’s still that process. It’s just enhancing that process. It’s not doing anything really new.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Not until we have really good AgTech tools. So I think that we’re going to get rid of human beings in any real sense. And so far the agey requires so much babysitting that I would just rather let someone who knows what they’re doing do it

Zack Glaser:

Well. Alright, let’s for people that don’t know, we’ve got L lms, the large language models, the generative ai, and then we’ve got ai. What’s AI for people that dunno?

Catherine Sanders Reach:

AI is something that actually read through and carries out actual steps. So you say do this process and it actually goes through and does that thing. And from what I understand, it’s spend so much time asking you if what it’s doing is okay, or on the flip side I’ve read about where it didn’t ask if it was okay and charged your credit card. So I think we’re pretty early days on this stuff, It’s funny because there was a tool back in 2020, it’s disappeared since then. X ai, it was an Angen tool. You could choose either Amy or Andrew. And so if you emailed me and said, Hey, do you have time to be a guest on the podcast? And I’d say, let’s let Amy, my assistant help figure that out. You’d cc Amy at xai or you could buy your own domain and give it your domain email and Amy, the ag agentic bot would communicate with you directly to establish availability, knowing what was on my calendar and book the time with us. That was a very specific use case that worked amazingly well and that was a long time ago. And so now we’ve kind of fast forwarded it into watching these Chad GBD reason through something, but I’m still kind of,

It’s helpful, but it’s not perfect and it doesn’t, I mean it gets you a rough draft. I also find the more you use it, the more it writes like itself and not you. The tools that I like the most are the ones that are specifically good at doing something. So you talk about documenting processes. There is a gen AI tool called guide. It’s G-U-I-D-D-E and you can record your screen, just do what you do because what I find is you ask about law firms, have they documented their processes? No. Okay, so you go do what you do,

Zack Glaser:

Right? The answer is always no. Right

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Guide will record it, it will turn it into a actual little video. It will also turn it into a step-by-step manual. It’ll say go here, do this, do this. It adds annotations to the screen with mouse clicks and all that kind of stuff, You can go back and edit it in terms of just making it super, super easy not only to record a process, but also to share it. And then for people who like to watch videos, you can watch the video for people who like to have that step-by-step, screenshot instruction, screenshot instruction, it does all of that.

Zack Glaser:

Now we’re getting into what I like to think about when someone says, Hey Zack, how can I use AI in my office? Is to enhance the thing you’re already doing. We all kind of have this at least idea that some people want to watch a video, some people want to read it, some people want to listen or whatever it is. And now as I’m creating this process, I can set it up to whichever way that people in my office deal with it for all of them. Not just like, Hey, what’s the consensus here? Does everybody want a video or does everybody want it written out? No, it’s give all of it to you, but we’re talking about grabbing a tool that is purpose and enhancing what we do.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

A lot of people I’ve been talking to are using Loom, which creates the video and then there’s also a tool called Scribe, which creates the step-by-step screenshots. Guy does both. You don’t have to figure out which one people prefer. They just can use this one tool to do all of it, which that’s when you start

Measuring which thing does the most effectively and saves me the most amount of time. The barriers to documenting your processes have all of a sudden becomes significantly reduced just by having these tools on the market that make it easier to do that. And that’s where you have to figure out what is it that I’m not getting done? What is it that I can definitely see improvement? There’s a lot of transcription tools now on the market where you would have the AI bot sit in on your team’s call or your Zoom call, and I always feel it a bit disconcerting to have

Zack Glaser:

Just a little Zack’s robot in the corner.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

There’s a tool that I like called Tactic. It’s T-A-C-T-I-Q and you don’t have to invite it to your video conference. You can upload the file to tactic and it creates a transcript and does all the summaries, action items, all those kinds of things. And I have an attorney who has low visibility and so she records all of her client conversations and they know that. And then she wanted to create transcripts and so she’s been using that tool and she’s really excited about it.

Zack Glaser:

What I think people might struggle with is this idea of being able to dream around those processes. What am I missing? What else could I be doing? How could people potentially be or how would you suggest people keep track of that? What’s my day-to-day stuff that I’m not capturing, I’m not able to do because I don’t have the time, I don’t have the capacity, I don’t have the workforce.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

I usually suggest doing a needs assessment across the office and asking everybody how do you do these essential things? So if you know that your conflicts check involves sending out a blast email to everybody and asking if anybody knows if there’s a conflict, that process could probably be improved. And you could use an AI search tool to search across your internal repository, and that may be something that’s built into your law practice management system to give it better capabilities of getting into the information that you’ve already input into the system to learn more about potential conflicts. Because conflict, I think there’s seven different ethics rules regarding conflicts. So it’s a very sophisticated complex process to check for conflicts. So you’ve got seven attorneys in the office, six paralegals, and you sent out an email and 90% respond and you figure it’s okay for the other ones it didn’t, but that could be a problem.

Zack Glaser:

That could be the one, yeah.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Right. Is there a way to leverage AI to attack or address the missing pieces by looking through the existing data? Which kind of gets us to the conversation about knowledge management where I see that Gen AI has a real potential to improve our knowledge management in a law office. Do I think that we’ve got the tools that are available and at a cost that is something that could be implemented in silos and small firms? Not quite yet. I think we’re going to get there. Those are the kinds of things. Where do our processes break down? What drives ask people what drives you crazy? I guarantee you they have an answer. We’re not asking you for any other reason than to look at how can we improve this. I know that I talk to, I have been talking to a lot of partners who are telling me all sorts of things about their lazy associates. This generation, obviously I’m deferential and sympathetic. On the other hand, I’m thinking, and we talk about it. I’m like, well, how are you assigning tasks to people? I email them or I leave ’em a voicemail message or I put a post-it note on or drop by their desk and I’m thinking, and they’ve got two or three attorneys all giving them tasks to do. There’s no follow through. They don’t even remember what they’ve asked until it’s too late.

And I feel like tools like Microsoft Copilot combined with teams, with planner inserted. So it’s not just one thing. And I don’t think gen AI is going to just fix, it’s not going to fix any of this stuff.

Zack Glaser:

That’s one of the big things that we’ve seen become exacerbated or whatever as we’ve gotten more mobile, I know that. So in my office, I could step out of my office and I could look around and I could see people sitting in front of the computer typing, doing something or on the phone or whatever, and I think, okay, everybody’s doing something great, great. They could be on Facebook, they could be fake typing into the computer and I don’t know exactly what they’re doing, but I felt comfortable I wasn’t actually managing people. And I think a lot of this comes back to your process management is actually people management. If you’ve got processes, then you can see who’s overloaded, who’s overloaded. I don’t know, maybe you didn’t give any assignments to Jamy attorney for 30 days or something. Yeah, maybe they are lazy. Sure. But find out actually manage them.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Yeah. It’s never been about seeing that someone’s working. You have to have evidence of them working and that’s really the only thing that matters.

Zack Glaser:

That’s exactly right. And I want to be very clear here that at no point do I think that keystroke managers anything, it’s not about were they but and Seat, it’s about did they get the thing that you paid them to get done, done? That’s it. Are they getting their

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Numbers? Some people are going to be able to leverage the gen AI tools to get things done faster. So I will tell you, and I don’t know if any of my management will ever hear this podcast, so I’ll wrap myself out. I have to come up with titles and descriptions for programs all the time. I Don’t struggle to write those anymore. I put in write a title and description for a CLE program that includes the following bullet points of what we’re going to talk about and it spit out something. And I don’t sit there and focus on wordsmithing, something that in the grand scheme of things is not a make or break.

Zack Glaser:

Actually, I think that’s a really good example because I write or edit or deal with a lot of articles like you do blog posts, things like that. And I used to go through and write 10 potential titles for every one of the blog posts and it would take me, I mean it’d take me 10 minutes at least. Now I actually can go into the copilot in the system, go over to the side, the copilot and go give me 10 titles for this. I’ll generally say 20 because it’s not as good, and then I’ll pick my favorite 10, and then somebody else picks their favorite one that takes me a minute instead of potentially 10. It’s important it has to get done, but it’s not massively important. But I like that as an example because I want to reiterate that that process was already being done and if somebody had said, Hey Zack, how should I use artificial intelligence to do something in my office? I dunno that you do that process. I don’t know that you do something like that, but it’s something that saves me at least the price of copilot every month

Catherine Sanders Reach:

When I was a puppy and my first boss, his name is David Wheelan and he’s a genius, he’s now at University of Chicago, but David said I was stressing over a project and it was taking me way too long, and he said, no win is good enough. And I have held that every day. There are things where perfection is the only standard, but there are so many things where it is not.

Zack Glaser:

That’s a very, very good point on using artificial intelligence in our offices because if you’re writing a brief and you’re going to submit it to court, you need to know whether or not the sites are correct and relying on just kind of stupidly relying on artificial intelligence to write that for you is dumb. I’m writing an email to, I don’t know, my staff or whatever and just want to reiterate something. I can have artificial intelligence likely write a good deal of that. And

Catherine Sanders Reach:

I’m thinking I wouldn’t necessarily trust the gen AI to write a contract at this point knowing that I saw a big malpractice suit against not one, but two firms, and the point of contention in the contract language was literally the pluralization of a word. So for that, I’m not thinking that I wanted to trust gen ai, no. On the other hand, to help me review tone on an email to summarize my day, to identify, let’s see, what else do I use it for? Oh my gosh, because I do write blog posts. I don’t have to subscribe to Adobe Stock anymore because get Windows and I just, because it’s built into the co-pilot, I just use Microsoft Designer to create custom images to go with my blog posts and social media posts because people will pay more attention for marketing purposes. This stuff is golden.

Zack Glaser:

Sometimes it’s more about quantity or just getting the dang thing out there, getting it out into the world. Yeah, I want an image that’s going to strike people, but it doesn’t have to be Basquiat. It doesn’t to be absolutely amazing and really nobody’s coming to it for that image.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

And also looking at things that you haven’t done for law practice management, the law practice management aspect, not the practice of law, but managing your practice. I got it to write a wisp, a written information security policy. Perfect.

Zack Glaser:

Thank you for defining that for our audience, by the way.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Of course. So we used to call them incident response plans. An incident response plan is part of your written information security policy. I had a young lawyer come to one of my programs and then she emailed me later and she said, I’m so excited about using some of these tools. I’m using OneNote to take all my notes on my iPad, but my boss says that I need to send the notes from OneNote from my iPad through VPN into the server. And I said, well, you have 365. And she said, yeah. And so we talked about it and I wrote her boss a little memo about why what she was doing was okay, but I also said, if you have a mobile device policy and bring your own policy, then this can be incorporated because it’s her responsibility to make sure that she’s got a protection on her iPad, that the apps are up to date, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so the memo got a lot longer than I anticipated when I was really thinking out the firm’s responsibilities, the individual’s responsibilities, where it came with their policy and advice and all of that. But

Those are the kinds of things where you can get a lot of help. The other day, I got it to generate a spreadsheet for me, I just wanted a spreadsheet to help track spend on different technology tools. So what is it? How much does it cost per month or per year? How many people are using it? All that kind of stuff.

Zack Glaser:

Okay.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Went into chat, GPT told it all the things I wanted it to do and it spit me out an Excel spreadsheet.

Zack Glaser:

I love instances like that where it’s like, I wouldn’t have done that without artificial intelligence. I just wouldn’t have done that thing. It would’ve taken too much time.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

The very act of getting it started, you just don’t ever have time to do it. So come up with a list of all the policies and things that should have and start asking the AI to do it for you. This isn’t client work, but this is stuff to help manage your firm. And if you can get a good start on it versus me Googling looking for somebody else’s example, this is something we used to do all the time. We would Google for an example in North Carolina, we call ’em gobys for a lot of the law practice management and law office policies and procedures. There may not be a go by so you can get it generated if you, again, as a starting point, it’s probably not going to be perfect right out of the bat, but it’s going to be a lot more. It’s something versus nothing, which I call the blank page syndrome. It’s so intimidating to just get started sometimes that it just makes it easier to get a first draft so that you can work on it.

Zack Glaser:

I really love the meta aspect of this right now of you use artificial intelligence to help you document your damn procedures and then go into those procedures and figure out where you can utilize some of these tools to do specific things.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

We have so many attorneys who don’t actually enter their own time into the system, so they have a time and billing system. They don’t enter it. They keep a spreadsheet or they hand write it or keep a notebook and then hand over their notebook. But some support person puts all this into the system and then they have to send it back for review, and then the pre-bill goes out and then somebody finally takes the time to look at it goes, no, that’s not right. And in a perfect world, we would have people enter their own time and we would have standardized ways of describing what we do so that we know that the client’s not going to write it off. This is after trial and error, knowing that certain clients are always going to write off or ask for a writedown on some activity because of the way we described it, or it’s too vague or it’s too specific or whatever. So you can develop a shared list of how we describe certain actions that can be incorporated into the system so that it’s just a dropdown. None of that’s going to happen if the methodology starts with I’m handing someone my time sheets, however it is, I keep track of them. You’re never going to be able to use that stuff very effectively anyway. The other part of this is that there are now gen AI tools that sit in the background and track your time for you.

So the part of tracking time becomes much easier. Again, not looking for perfection. It’s still going to have to be reviewed, but let’s get the humans out of the mix.

Zack Glaser:

That right there, the not looking for perfection because I think a lot of people, they go, well, the tool’s not going to do it, right. Well, you’re not doing it right. The tool’s not going to capture all my time. You’re not capturing shit. You’re coming in on a Friday and going, what did I do this week? And you’re going to your email and you’re like, who did I email mail? Absolutely. So at least this gives you a starting point or gives somebody else’s starting point and then they can send you something to edit. And we took at least one person out of this process.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

I remember having a conversation with an attorney who, this was a while back, but he asked me if I knew where to get a pedal, and I was like at the pedal, this was for transcribing his dictated notes, and it was the pedal that the assistant would use to stop and start the recording as she was physically transcribing the notes. And I said, there’s a lot of tools on the market now where you can dictate into your device and it transcribes that automatically for you. There’s even third 40 services that you can send to have it perfect if you want it perfect. Is this really a good use of your assistance time? And he sat there for a second and he said, yeah,

Zack Glaser:

Oh man. But theoretically, at least he’s making an active decision there instead of like, well, I didn’t realize that I could just talk into my iPhone and then have that turned into. That’s what’s amazing to me right now. My father started out practicing and we did dictate a bunch of things, and then I come into the practice and I’m like, what are you doing? Oh man. And we get away from that, and now it’s like you could probably dictate a lot of stuff now. It’s so neat that we’re coming around to that again.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Well, and the thing is, it’s built into word. You can dictate directly into Word right in the system, and you see it talking. I broke my right wrist in 2021. I had to mouse and type with one hand, and obviously not very good at that, especially because it’s my non-dominant hand. And that’s when I found out, oh, word dictation is amazingly good because I looked at how much it costs to purchase Dragon. Oh my gosh. I Was like, this is cost prohibitive, especially for the amount of time I actually am going to need it. There’s a lot of stuff already in your technology stack that you’re not using.

Zack Glaser:

That topic is a whole separate podcast. You and I could go off on that and keeping yourself up to date, making sure that you are using the things. But I think that still comes from the idea of know what it is you do and then grab these tools as you see fit that are purpose built to help enhance what you already do. Yeah, yeah,

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Absolutely.

Zack Glaser:

I could obviously wax philosophical on this with you for a while, but we do need to wrap up. If you have one thing, one tool that you could tell people, and I hate giving people this because it is answering the question of how should I use AI in my firm? If there’s one tool that you’re playing with right now, what are you playing with and how’s it doing?

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Well, as I mentioned, I did just get Microsoft copilot. Two things that it does that are just huge time savers for me, and this is not going to be every practice, but I do a lot of PowerPoint presentations. It takes hours to build an attractive presentation. And if you’re doing A CLE, which is a great way to get exposure for your practice and share your expertise and all that kind of stuff, you’re already going to have to write a paper, write your paper, write your outline, offload it into PowerPoint, and let it generate an attractive PowerPoint presentation for you. It saves me power powers of time.

Zack Glaser:

Now, it might not be time prohibitive for somebody to participate in the CLEs to give CLEs I love that. That opens up a potential marketing area for our listeners.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

And then the other thing that I spend way too much time doing is I put out a newsletter every week,

And it’s not a sophisticated newsletter, but I go through and I find five or six articles that I think are really worth people reading. And this could be for your clients too. And then I would get the link and then I would write a little description of the articles, and then I would edit it, and then I would review it, and then I would run it through spellcheck and the grammar edit, all this kind of stuff. And it would take me two, three hours to write a really short newsletter just because, again, perfect being the enemy of the good and all. I wanted it to be really good if you’re going to send it to a thousand people. So Last week I went through, found the articles that I was interested in, got the title, got the link, thought I’ll ask Chay, GPD or ask copilot what I can do. I said, can you write a short two, three summary of each of the articles that are linked to in this document?

Zack Glaser:

That’s awesome.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

10 seconds. And I was like, I feel guilty. But then again, I have to think I already did the curation. I already made the determination that these are the right pieces of content to be sending out. Do I really need to spend a bunch of time writing annotations for them?

Zack Glaser:

The value you’re providing isn’t the annotation isn’t the three sentences. Hey, honestly, I think you should look at all of these articles. So go look at all the articles. It doesn’t matter with the annotation. Yeah. That’s amazing. I like that. I like both of those a lot.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

It’s a huge time saver.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. We’ll end on that. Thank you once again for sharing your expertise with our audience here. I hope this is coming out after tech show. I hope everybody listening was able to get to your talk at tech on calculating ROI for technology spend in your law firm. I know I’m going to be there. I guess this is going to be weird. I’m saying this in future tense, but when it comes out, it’s going to be passed tense. So I will have been there or what have you, but thank you for sharing with our audience.

Catherine Sanders Reach:

Thanks, Zack. Thanks for having me. Lawyerist.

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