#555: How to Use AI and Universal Design to Empower Diverse Thinkers with Susan Tanner

Episode Notes

Transcript

Stephanie Everett :

Hi, I’m Stephanie.

Zack Glaser:

And I’m Zack, and this is episode 555 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today I have a conversation with Susan Tanner about using AI and universal design to empower diverse thinkers in your law firm.

Stephanie Everett :

Today’s show is brought to you by our friends at NetDocuments, so stay tuned and you’ll hear Zack’s conversation with them in just a second.

Zack Glaser:

So Stephanie, again, we have Lawyers Lab where we help attorneys run their law firms. We have some new products though because we’ve noticed that sometimes we’ve kind of got to get our butts started. So we’ve got a program called Launch that we are, pardon, launching very soon. What is that? What exactly is that?

Stephanie Everett :

Yeah, so this is something we’ve been thinking about for a while and the time was right, so we’re doing it. A lot of times people are coming to us and they’re just starting their law firm or maybe you have the idea and you’re about to launch your law firm and you need a little help getting started and sometimes for those folks Lab is maybe you’re not ready for lab yet. Maybe it’s a little bit more of an investment that you need. It just need to get going. So we’ve created this four week sprint that we’re calling Launch that’s going to do just that. It’s going to help you with those key fundamental things that you need when you’re launching your firm. Some vision and some goal work for sure, helping you figure out your business model. Then moving right into some marketing, and then from there key systems and processes that you have to set up to get started.

Of course, we’re going to give you a checklist of the whole things, all the things you need to do. It’s going to be led by our amazing team of coaches. I think this is going to be an excellent way for folks who are thinking about launching not sure where to, or maybe you’ve even launched recently. I guess I would say this doesn’t have to be brand new. You could have launched in the last year, but maybe you’re struggling a little bit and you’re like, I don’t know if I did it the right way, I would really encourage you to come join us for a month and let’s get you figured out where you need to go and get those basics going so that you can really then just start hammering it out and doing what you want to do.

Zack Glaser:

One of the search terms as our SEO and website person, one of the search terms that I key on all the time, and people ask this all the time, it’s huge search term is how do I run a law firm? How do I start a law firm? I mean, we’ve got a bunch of information on how to do that, but that seems to be what launch is. How do I get this started?

Stephanie Everett :

Absolutely, and we’re going to do it fast. Just like with our other program that we’re launching that we’re calling Reset. We’re going to show you in the program how to leverage AI tools to do the work faster and better and to open how you’re thinking about it. Again, this isn’t a class on how to use ai. Instead it’s going to be fast paced, sprint on how to start your firm, but with the benefit of showing you how to leverage these AI tools, which I’m really excited about because I think people are going to walk away from this not with just ideas, but work product. You’re going to have your marketing strategy, you’re going to be doing, going to doing the marketing, you’re going to be doing the things that you need to do to get your firm moving in the right direction.

Zack Glaser:

Great. So we’ll have information on how to get connected with Launch and what Launch is a little bit more specifically in the show notes, and we’ll have that on our social media platforms coming out here very soon. But now here is our conversation with our sponsored guest and then we’ll head into my conversation with Susan. But before we get to that, and before you start thinking about all the different logo designs that you’re going to have for your new law firm that you’re launching, head on over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. Hey y’all. Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist, and today I’ve got Patrtic Thomas with me again from NetDocuments and we are talking, you guessed it, legal technology. Patrtic, thanks for being with me today.

Patric Thomas:

Thank you for having me. Zack.

Zack Glaser:

Patrtic, you’re over at the giant behemoth that is net documents. You guys understand a thing or two about technology tools, law firm, technology tools and how law firms are using ’em, right?

Patric Thomas:

Absolutely.

Zack Glaser:

Leave it to a lawyer to ask you a leading question right there, but what I want to know is about how can people look at tools or choose right tools with an eye towards scalability?

Patric Thomas:

One of the big things that comes into play when you start working at what you have, you’re going to see a net Docs package. You’re going to see what net docs can do for you, but almost at any size you’re at from small, medium or even strategic. You’re understanding how that practice group is going to grow in the next five or 10 years and feeling that net docs is going to be able to supply and support you and it’s not going to necessarily collapse in a fashion like certain LPMs might once you get too many users or too much data going through. It lets you have that kind of choice to grow at your pace instead of the pace of the book.

Zack Glaser:

I think if I have a ton of documents, if I’m a big law firm, I know that I’m going to get a lot of value out of net documents, but kind of talking about that scalability, what if I’m smaller? What if I don’t know that I have enough documents to really have all of the features of net Documents act upon those, act against them? How do I know that I’m going to get the value out of that, the return on my investment there?

Patric Thomas:

One of the big things that comes in whether you’re small, you’re large, is you’re still going to have these keystone documents that are going to be the exemplars for so much of your work. It may just be the document that you always find yourself going back to and grabbing language. It might be a particular form that you need for your type of practice, and these things are always touched at, while large firms will have thousands examples, a lot of times it’s still knocks down to 20, 30 documents that Practice group is hitting all the time. If you are a small firm and you’re hitting those 20, 30 documents, you may not have 50 examples of them, but you’re going to have the best examples for your firm and you’re going to be able to extract the best stuff out of that.

Zack Glaser:

So no matter what size I’m at, I’m still going to be able to use net documents to get more information, more knowledge out of what I do have.

Patric Thomas:

What a lot of small firms don’t think about is very large firms are normally just tons of small firms. If you think every practice, their management, their structure, their cash flows a lot different. But if you really think about it, if they have a litigation group and they have an insurance group and they have all this, each of those could be small firms in their own way and Net Ducks allows each of those groups to be given the bespoke treatment you’d want for a small.

Zack Glaser:

Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Well, so let’s talk about each of those little small firms and how they stay ahead of the curve. I think that’s another thing that we get when I go and I’m looking at legal technology, a lot of times we look at it, we bring in legal technology and then it becomes stale and we don’t continue to grow with it. How do we future proof our law firm with legal technology or how do we future proof our law firm against legal technology? I don’t know.

Patric Thomas:

One of the big pushes that we’re doing right now is we’re trying to create this concept of an intelligent DMS that as you’re bringing documents in net Docs is going to grow with your data and actually new products and new things are going to keep getting new discovery off of it. For example, right now we have ND Max, which are able to create automations off of the documents. You have to create data from that. We’re also creating background apps, which will let you automatically metadata all your things so you don’t have to waste time organizing your work. And then the final structure in our current roadmap this year is that we’re going to have semantic search where you’re going to be able to ask deed questions about all the documents you’ve created. As you build more data in it, it is going to keep getting more and more advanced because it is going to futureproof based on how your work excels across that time.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. So I hate to say it’s growing with you, but it’s growing with you.

Patric Thomas:

Yeah. Net talks is only failures if you don’t have documents.

Zack Glaser:

That makes sense. That makes sense. So, okay, last thing before we go, what is your favorite automation that you can do inside of NetDocuments?

Patric Thomas:

So it kind of comes back from, I worked in law firms and there a particular type of discovery document that is particularly annoying in California. It has to be very exacting in the questions that you ask and then the responses that you come into play ND Max can actually grab the document you’ve received from the other side and automatically convert it to the document you need for responses, placing their data in place and letting you just put down every part you need without having to go copy paste, grab a PDF, manipulate that, and it just generates it all for you.

Zack Glaser:

Oh man. Gotcha. That kind of sounds like the holy grail of document automation, right?

Patric Thomas:

Yeah, and the fact that it is an app that we have as our studio apps where every person can use that is great, but we also have teach people with our tools of ND Max to be able to create that for any of your type of documents. If you have your type of document for a firm that you’re getting always a result from and you’re always needing a response out of, we can show you very quickly through ND Max to create those automations. A great example of this is you need to give an update to a client on what you’ve done recently. You can actually create an ND Max thing that will scan all the documents in that client matter, create a result of what’s been done in the last, say last 90 days, and now you have a quick aspect of what you can show the client of the results of the case.

Zack Glaser:

And that’s probably better communication than when you would’ve had with your client even if you had somebody that was set aside specifically to do that task.

Patric Thomas:

And the return on investment if you set aside someone to do that task is so many billable hours versus you have a document you’re reviewing in 30 minutes.

Zack Glaser:

Right. Fantastic. Well, if people want to see more of all of that and get a demo of that, they can go to www.net documents.com/demo. Patrtic, thanks for being with me and thanks for sharing your knowledge.

Patric Thomas:

Thank you for your time, Zack. Have a great day.

Susan Tanner:

Hi, I’m Susan Tanner and I’m an associate professor at University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. And I have a background in machine learning, corpus and computational linguistics. And so I use that background to think a lot about AI and the practice of law and also AI and how we can make teaching more accessible to our students through things like Universal design.

Zack Glaser:

Susan, thanks for being with me. I really appreciate it. You and I met at the Women in AI Summit in Nashville where I mean we were surrounded by some brilliant, brilliant people. That’s where I actually learned that you and some other professors and law librarians and whatnot are putting together kind of an AI toolkit related to incorporating artificial intelligence into learning about the law because we can’t just stick our heads in the sand with chat GPT,

Susan Tanner:

We cannot. So already there have been lots of ethics opinions have been coming out that says it’s going to be part of a lawyer’s ethical duty to incorporate generative AI wherever it’s helpful and we can think about this. That’s one of those ways that we can serve our clients potentially better. If we know how to use it faster, we can be more efficient. And so we might have an ethical duty to be able to do that. Well, at a law school, we know that the law is slow to change and sometimes law schools are even slower. And so at a law school, we need to make sure we’re also not sticking our heads in the sand. And that can happen from a couple of different ways. We could either ignore the possibility that we need to train our students to be able to use it or potentially more problematic, ignore the reality that our students are already using it and we need to understand how they’re already using it. And so I’ve been thinking an awful lot about that as well. Luckily, I think at a university where we haven’t been sticking our heads in the sand, but I don’t know that that’s true throughout the country.

Zack Glaser:

Oh, I’m sure it’s not true throughout the country. And that’s one of the things is that it’s hit or miss I think, across the country. But we actually are going to go into that a little bit, that idea a little bit deeper in a later episode where I wanted to dig into artificial intelligence in the law with you specifically as you approach it in one sense from a universal Design for learning kind of perspective. So assume that I didn’t know what Universal Design for Learning was at the beginning of the day today, which is a real far stretch. What are we talking about there?

Susan Tanner:

I like to tell this story about the typical case of universal design and we can imagine an airplane that’s designed with for a pilot and that pilot in order to be able to be a pilot in this particular airplane would have to fit into the seat because we can imagine cockpits are a particular size, the seat is a particular size, it’s a particular distance away from the controls. And so if that is how we design an airplane, then that really significantly limits the amount of pilots that would qualify to be able to fly that plane.

You might still have great people who are in that general category, but you’d really be from the start eliminating a bunch of folks. And so what unit Universal Design does is not sort of assume that the pilot needs to change shape and size and height in order to match the cockpit, but to think, is there a way that we can design the cockpit account to sort of accommodate folks of all sorts of different sizes? And so therefore we can get pilots who are six foot four potentially. And so that’s the sort of typical sense how this shows up in education is instead of making every student conform to the same expectations and requirements, we can think what’s at the core. So what’s at the core of being a pilot isn’t necessarily being, for example five 10, what’s at the core is this particular set of skill sets.

And so Universal Design thinks, well, what is at the core of what I’m trying to get my students to learn and how can I reimagine the way I deliver products, the way I assess students so that I can make sure that a bunch of externalities aren’t interfering with my students’ abilities to learn and perform. I have dyslexia, which means that there are certain things that are hard for me to read and especially certain fonts that are harder for me to read. And so for at least 10 years when I was in law school, I had to actually cut up my books, scan them in OCR them so that I could change the font into something that’s more readable for me. And so that was my first, that was really one of my first experiences at Universal Design for myself, which was if we had a text that I could have easily changed the font on, it would’ve saved me an awful lot of time. And so instead of saying, here’s the one right text for everyone to be able to read perfectly here, let me give this to you in a format where you can easily make the changes yourself, or where there are multiple different ways that people can access the information so that people with different styles or different abilities can access that information in the same way.

Zack Glaser:

So we’re saying at a base level, that Century School book is not for everybody despite what the Supreme Court says,

Susan Tanner:

Right, exactly. It’s not, and I’ll tell you what we call C fonts are the bane of my existence, and I dunno if this is going too off topic, but I actually didn’t even really know what it was like to read the way that I did. I got diagnosed pretty early, but I was asked to give a talk very much later on in life about what it’s like to read when you’re dyslexic. And I was really excited to do this presentation. I didn’t realize that I didn’t know what it was like to read as a dyslexic. I didn’t know anything else. And I looked it up. I just sort of Googled it in and the first thing I saw were all of these images of swirly texts. When you look at a page, it might look very swirly. And that was the first time, literally in my life that I realized that it’s not swirly for everyone. And so those little serifs that are on letters really make everything swirl and combine in a way that is very sort of distracting for me. And so yeah, that’s one of those easy places. And again, I think for most assessment, we don’t think that one of the things that we’re testing students on is the ability to read rift fonts, so we can easily eliminate that.

Zack Glaser:

So that one actually hits very specifically closed home for me. My father had dyslexia and went through law school and he was like, Zack, I just would have to read very, very slowly. It actually kind of became a superpower in that sense. But at the same time, it took a ton of time and had we had a different font at that time and he had been able to change to, and we’re not talking about a font that solves everything. We’re talking about a font that is just easier to read, that would’ve helped him get through law school. And there’s no reason that we would think, oh, that person should have a barrier front of them to keep from doing that. And so I, I think that’s a great example of how to use universal design and that it can, I think it’s a really good example because it could, I want to flip this to our clients thinking about universal design towards our clients, and actually we’re going to get into the AI thing here in a second. But we thinking about universal design towards our clients. Any one of our clients could be dyslexic. Any one of our clients could have. This is not something that somebody walks in with and you see it on them. And frankly, it’s not something that my father ever told anybody. He never said, walked into the bank and said, Hey, do you mind giving this to me in this font? I’m dyslexic. But if you sent him an email or gave it to him on an iPad and he could change the font, that’s a different story.

Susan Tanner:

It’s not even something my dad’s old enough to where I tease, not tease him, but I tell him all the time that he probably has dyslexia. We used to sort of joke, he has all of the markers, he can’t spell a single word, but he was old enough to have never been diagnosed. And so I think that’s right, that not everyone will tell you what they’re working, what their abilities and disabilities are, but also that they might not even know.

Zack Glaser:

That’s a really good point. Well, okay, so one of the places that you’ve spoken about using universal design, especially as it relates to artificial intelligence, and this is a place that’s kind of dear to my heart. I really like talking about this is in neurodiversity and we use neurodiversity specifically. And you and I have kind of talked about how that doesn’t even hit the nail on the head with this, but when I think of neurodiversity, I think of it as just kind of, I’m simplifying, and this is not a technical way, but it’s the diverse ways that we think all think very differently. I think very differently than Stephanie. And that’s why we both are on the podcast in different ways. We think very differently from each other. But my way of thinking for me, if I use it appropriately, is a superpower.

Susan Tanner:

How boring would the world be if everyone thought exactly the same? We certainly wouldn’t need different political parties, we wouldn’t need different specialties. Everyone would have ultimate knowledge and the exact same way of thinking all of the time, which is just never the case.

Zack Glaser:

Right. Well, okay, so let’s talk about using this idea of universal design to approach different ways of thinking, different ways that our clients are going to be different ways that our students are going to be, and now we have artificial intelligence.

Susan Tanner:

So I want to start with that premise that as you were saying, everyone thinks differently. And so this is one of the things that universal design attempts to capture. Instead of saying, here are our materials for people who are on the spectrum or people who have this issue or what have you to make everything adjustable. I’ll say this is one of the things that generative AI can do a really great job with because it will naturally adjust for you if you use it. So some of this will be in individual’s hands, someone’s given, as you said, the documents that you’re given for example might be in a font and it might be up to you to change that font to something that works for you.

But we can also think about using the materials to help communicate with other people. So one of the first things I have my students do, and I’m not sure this is specifically about universal design, but it’s similar, is transform something that they’ve been doing for something written for a legal audience, a memo into something written for a client without a lot of legal knowledge. And so this is the first time that I have them used generated AI with me, for example, because it does a great job of taking the content that you’ve given and translate it into a new context. And so you’ll just say, could you please take all of this and rewrite it into a letter that someone with a high school education can understand? And it’s great, it’s very adaptable in those ways.

And what’s the first way I also like to encourage my students to use it to help their own learning. So another aspect, and you might not have to say this is universe design, but it is related to diverse thinkers. I might explain something and think, wow, I just did such a great job explaining that. It must be crystal clear to every single person. And some people in the room might think that was crystal clear. I 100% understand what you’re saying, but some people might still not understand what I’m saying. And so they can take information in one context and translate it for themselves. They can, for example, interact with generative ai. I put all of my handouts in a way that are obviously where students can copy any of the text and put it into any place that they want to. And so what they can do is say, my professor wrote this way too dense discussion of legal analogy. Could you please help me and give me some more examples so that I can learn a little bit better from this?

Zack Glaser:

And that’s never happened to any of us. We’ve never looked at what a professor wrote and thought, man, this is way too dense. That’s an amazing way to think about this on both of those levels. One is I like to think about generative AI sometimes as how were we able to use it to expand what we’re doing, especially with clients, to be able to do something that we didn’t think was really feasible previously. It’s not super feasible for me to bring every one of my documents or every one of my contracts and kind of translate it into high school level. It is now, right? So now I can use that to enhance people’s understanding and maybe even draw back kind of the curtain. And so people, I increase people’s trust in the legal field as well.

Susan Tanner:

I tell my students all the time that law is primarily a relationship building activity. And so I do think that being able to converse with people more on their level, whatever that is, is a way of building relationships.

Zack Glaser:

And then I really like this. I know here’s my information. I’m presenting it in this way, but I can give it to you in a way where you can kind of adjust the presentation. Thinking about that, somebody being able to query against your notes, query against your, we send out, we will do coaching calls with our sters, and we’ll send them the recording of the video of the call, and it’s done in a way where they can query against the recording.

Susan Tanner:

Oh, that’s fantastic.

Zack Glaser:

And so we use generative AI or AI to, they can say, well, what’s the summary of this? What are my takeaways? What was the main point? What should I have asked? What should I ask next time? They can go to their previous. So we’re presenting it in a way where people are able to use the artificial intelligence in their way. Then I think thirdly, I like to present things at a very base sense, written, spoken, and then in some sort of video that if we’re doing documentation or something like that, well, you can do that now with artificial intelligence, you can. It’s just the feasibility of a lot of this stuff as well,

Susan Tanner:

Especially translating from one to the other. I do that all the time, so we can automatically transcribe meetings now, which is great. So you’ll have a video and you can automatically transcribe that. You can also have, if it’s not built in with generative ai, you can have generative ai clean that up, which is fantastic. I will say I’m the least creative person I know, and I’m the least artistic person I know, but I have for my students produced songs, produced videos automatically using generative AI in ways that I would’ve never been able to. I just don’t have the skillset to be able to do that, and I can actually make things a little bit better for my students. They get a little bit of Professor Tanner and a little bit of, plus there’s this other much more creative person that they occasionally get to interact with.

Zack Glaser:

I like the professor Tanner Plus because I think that’s what a lot of this stuff is, is it’s kind of just adding to what we’re doing. Because a lot of attorneys out there that are listening to this think of, okay, well, I’ve got generative AI for my marketing. I probably shouldn’t use it for research. I probably shouldn’t use it to write a brief. But I mean, honestly, the reason that people get in trouble with that is because they’re not checking their sources in the first place, and those people were not doing a great job in the first place. I mean, it’s just exacerbating the issue, but thinking about it to make my client’s lives better, easier, or even I can see trying to figure out how a judge might think differently than I do or want something presented differently than I do, and it kind of gives you this superpower, potential superpower to approach something in a different way that you think.

Susan Tanner:

Absolutely. That’s one of the things I tell my students to do all the time. Write something and then ask generative AI to give you three different rewrites of it, either with some guiding or not, and at the very least, you can pick which one of those you think is most compelling. That’s one of those ways that, yes, again, you can be way better than you would’ve been because you might not have thought of this way of phrasing it. You might not have thought of putting it in this particular order, or you might not have thought of something. It’s still your words, but it’s just tweaking ’em a little bit. And I also, I do this all the time. I’ll put in an outline and say, what have I forgotten? So it’s sort of like you have this extra person to talk through ideas with.

Zack Glaser:

Absolutely. Okay, so let’s also, because in the neurodiversity sort of area here, different ways people think, I think it’s beneficial, we’ve talked about this before, to have different thinkers in your office. We had an entire podcast on that with Dr. Temple Grandin podcast 4 0 5. But let’s think about this universal design or even using AI to empower our neurodiverse thinkers in our offices.

Susan Tanner:

Well, I think one of the ways, especially this could be really helpful is by helping with communication. Because one of the things that happens often when people don’t think the same as each other is the communication breaks down. And so I use gen AI more often than anything for some sort of translation, for taking something and changing it either in form or in tone or in style. That’s how I use it the most often. And this is one of those ways that we can use it to communicate with folks who have a different communication style than we do. And so I think that’s one of the main ways. I also will say that, for example, some of my students, either current or former, who for example might not have picked up on emotional and social cues as easily as other students, this is sort of built into the way that generative AI produces responses.

I have a whole discussion with some of my students about how to write a polite email and they don’t quite get it, but then I tell them, go ahead and put that same email into generative ai. Tell it who you’re addressing it to, and it’ll make things a little bit better for you. It’ll understand a little bit more about the relationship between author and audience. So for some neurodiverse, sorry, employees for example, in a situation, it’s really the interpersonal skills that are holding them back. So they come with great ideas, they come as fantastic workers, but people just find something off about communicating with them and that can potentially hold them back. I think this is one of those ways that we can empower people to communicate better, because I don’t think that’s one person’s fault. I don’t think that because one person has a particular communication style, the other person is necessarily at fault, but this is just a way to translate between the two of them.

Zack Glaser:

That’s a fascinating use case in a sense as it relates to universal design, kind of the flip of it, I have the guts of what I need to communicate to you. It’s the important part. It’s the law or whatever it is. It’s the important part. I don’t have the fluff. I’m not going to package this well, but if I can put it into a product that can help me package, that can put this into the size and shape that you need, it presented to you with, well, now I can do it. Now I can do this thing. I can actually communicate with clients instead of having to go through you every time, boss.

Susan Tanner:

Exactly. Right. I mean, I think this is one of the things that I realize every once in a while, I feel very confident in some of my abilities, but I’ve realized because I bumped up to it, there are certain things I can’t do. I used to work in the modeling and talent field, and as part of this, I had to, at one point, I tried to write a script for something that we were doing, and I cannot write human language in a way that makes sense. It was literally beyond my control. I’m an academic at heart, and it just did not work out well. But I have generative AI write dialogue for me as I’m building together a brief packet or something for my students. I have it do that for me, and it is so much better. And again, this is something that I think of myself as, I just don’t have that ability to be able to do it, and it can do that for me.

Zack Glaser:

So you’re telling me that your background in rhetoric and computational linguistics doesn’t help you with human linguistic? It

Susan Tanner:

Does not. My spouse jokes with me all the time that my brain is more of a computer than it is an actual human brain, and I take that with a grain of salt. I actually, I think that’s probably an accurate assessment,

Zack Glaser:

But that’s good, especially when we’re talking about artificial intelligence and prompting and communicating with artificial intelligence. And I hadn’t thought about this, the different ways that we think are going to be different ways that we prompt and we’re going to have different talents in prompting. We’re going to have different talents in interacting with this artificial intelligence as well. Thinking of artificial intelligence interacting with your students specifically here, what’s something that has kind of surprised you in bringing that into the relationship and the communication between you and your students?

Susan Tanner:

I guess I have a few things that have surprised me. You’ll hear this a lot, but the first thing that surprised me is the hesitancy that some of my students had to engage with it. And I think especially some of my students, students in my class often will be proud of their writing ability and sort of the hesitancy to have an intermediary. In other words, instead of getting credit for all of their brilliant thoughts and how good of a writer they are, and they’re worried about using it and offloading some of that intellectual labor to someone else. So I think that was the first and biggest surprise to me. Oh

Zack Glaser:

God, I hope,

Susan Tanner:

Yeah,

Zack Glaser:

That speaks to lawyers, right? I’m sure there are lawyers listening to this right now that are like, yeah, yeah, I feel absolutely. I don’t want to do that. Yeah, man.

Susan Tanner:

I mean, I think that’s right. And I actually, one of a colleague and a good friend of mine here, I think takes that attitude because he’s a fantastic writer, right? Sure. And I don’t think he wants to see that control, and I think for him, that’s the right choice. I think he’s developed this skillset that I don’t think generative AI would be able to do as good of a job. And I use generative AI every single day, but there’s a lot of things I don’t have it right for me because it doesn’t have my voice as much as I try to prompt it to be able to have my voice, there’s a lot of things that I don’t have it right for me. And so I think that’s appropriate. I want to encourage people to find ways that it would be useful for them. And first thing that, I always go back to the example of the email because I’ve never loved writing an email, and no one ever wants to write an email, and I almost never write if it’s an important email. At some point, generative AI is helping me draft it. That’s one of the things that I’ve been sort of talking with my students about is about where and when generative AI might fit into the situation. So that was one big, is not wanting to offload the intellectual labor.

I’ll also say this was the first class where I really kind of let students use generative AI at every stage after a certain point. So I didn’t, we didn’t use it at the beginning of the class, but at a certain point we can use it. And this was the first class ever that I said, okay, you can even use it on these final assessments in certain ways. And I am surprised at the extent to which they have gotten so much better in such a short time with very little explicit instruction on how to prompt just encouragement to do it and to keep doing it and to change what you’re doing if you’re not getting good responses. And my students are showing me work. I have them document what’s produced by AI and what’s produced by themselves. And so I’m able to see the difference and they document that, and they’re getting much better responses than my former students used to get from January. Now, I know part of that might be the models are getting better, but I’ve been working with the models this entire time, and there’s something else besides just the change in the models that’s making these responses much better.

Zack Glaser:

That right there, that nugget of how much students in law schools are learning how to wield this really, really powerful tool is why we have a podcast coming up on how some of y’all are wielding it in the classroom specifically, because there are innumerable reasons why you can’t stick your head in the sand with this. But I think for our purposes today, it’s less about that the kids are using it really well these days or even that our clients are going to demand it, and it’s more that we can create a better experience for everyone, everyone involved if we’re using artificial intelligence in a correct way.

Susan Tanner:

Exactly. And I think one thing, and I think this is also, again, to get back to a little bit of the neurodiversity, I have a lot of students who face anxiety. One of the things I used to have to talk with my students an awful lot about, I have things explicitly in my syllabus that says, if you are feeling so anxious that you, for example, feel like you want to copy someone else’s work to turn it in because you’re afraid you won’t be able to do something, come talk to me first. And I think there’s a lot of anxiety about producing a product, whether it’s going to be good enough and anxiety. And I do think that one thing, I’m not going to say that my law students right now are not anxious, but I do think that every law student kind of understands that they can do things more quickly than they used to be able to.

And it’s also helping at least a little bit with that anxiety, right? Again, it wouldn’t be appropriate for them to have generative AI write an entire brief for them, nor would that be an especially high scoring brief, but knowing that they’re never going to be alone in that process, that they’re going to have this tool that they’ve been working with throughout the course of the semester to help them along, and that there’s never going to be a point when they would absolutely not be able to move forward. So I’ll tell you, I was actually just thinking this morning that I haven’t had writer’s block since I’ve had generative ai, and I used to get writer’s block all the time, just not be able to move forward because now I just prompt back and forth, right?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Susan Tanner:

I’m not sure what I want to talk about here. I’m not sure if there’s any good ideas. I treat it, it’s a partner, a collaborative partner in my writing process. And so I literally, I have been the most productive scholar I’ve ever been, not because I’m using generative AI to generate a lot of my content just because I never suffer from writer’s block anymore.

Zack Glaser:

I love that because I feel you on that. I’ve never been more productive in my life, and I use generative AI as a thought partner, as we say here. So I want to take that and move into flipping this perspective a little bit. Instead of thinking about how can we use artificial intelligence to potentially make things easier for our clients? Okay, well, we think differently. What are some ways that we can use AI to enhance the way that we do things? We’re, I mean, I think we’re all in a spectrum of neurodiversity. We all have different ways of thinking, and we all have our good places, our bad places, and how can we help out our bad spots? One of those things for me is being able to get past that anxiety of the blank page or just getting started. I’ve talked with my counselor so many times about procrastination tips, and it’s okay, Zack, just use the five minute rule. Just do the thing for five minutes, yada, yada. But we can do more than that now,

Susan Tanner:

Right? Well, and I think it’s the same thing that I know. I mean that there’s a joy and a comfort in knowing that if I sit down for five minutes and I do have five minutes, I start with five minutes. For example, if I sit down for five minutes, I have something at the end. You can imagine the five minute rule can still be stressful. If you know that at the end of five minutes, you’re not going to have anything usable, right?

I think all the time about how we all have expert blind spots. We all have areas where we know a lot about, and again, I’m not expecting generative AI to train neon areas that I don’t know about, but I am using it to help me identify those spots. So I think that’s another way that we can use it all the time to think. I know I don’t know everything in the world. I’m not expected to know everything in the world, but sometimes I don’t know that I should be researching something until someone else tells me that I’m missing something. And I still use colleagues for that. But my first step is to use runner to AI to tell me what is it that I don’t know.

Zack Glaser:

I love that aspect of what am I missing here? I always asking whatever product it is, ask me whatever questions you have. Am I missing something? Am I coming at this from the wrong perspective? One of the things that I’ve really appreciated about it though, is also breaking down projects. So I have anxiety with large projects that it’s a huge mountain, and it’s like, well, Zack, how you eat an elephant? One bite at a time? I don’t know what the bites are. How do I know what the damn bites are? I can see the huge thing. So I’ve actually gone into generative AI and had it make you explain the process and had it make all the tasks for me. But I’ve also noticed, again, that kind of blank paper thing in explaining the stuff to the tool, I had to go through all the stuff that I was going to have to go through anyway. Exactly.

So I’ve had it actually take a task, take a project, and ultimately I had it export CSVs of particular tasks for our specific project management platform, upload it into the project management platform. And I swear to everyone right now, it saved me 60 hours of work in one day. The thing was just, it was insane. It was about breaking it down. I just never would’ve broken that down. I never would’ve been able to maintain the focus for that long because of the way that my brain works. I would never been able to maintain the focus for that long to break it down into all of those things.

Susan Tanner:

Well, and there’s research coming around because everyone’s very concerned that we’re going to lose our critical thinking skills because we’re going to be offloading more of our thinking onto, for example, generative ai.

But some of the preliminary research shows that if we think of generative AI as a collaborator, actually we can strengthen our critical thinking because of that exact reason. You’re not just saying, do this work for me. You are asking it to help you do your work better. And so I think that’s a really big promise. I’ll have an article coming out with a co-author Ryan Roderick about what’s called co-regulation, and that’s exactly what you’re talking about. So we have self-regulation, which is how we regulate, and there’s this idea that we can work with other people to co-regulate, especially when it comes to our writing. And so I think of one of the great promises of generative AI to help us. And again, thinking about how hopefully more and more diverse perspectives are better. I think if we think about generative ai, this is going to scare some people as another perspective that we can always incorporate or multiple new perspectives that we can always incorporate. I think that’s only going to make our thinking better. Again, as long as we’re using it to improve our thinking and not to substitute for it.

Zack Glaser:

And I think that’s the fear. I think that’s the fear. So hopefully some of this conversation has gotten past that fear for some of our listeners where they’ve seen that artificial intelligence, bringing that into our offices is not just about creating marketing content. It’s not just about trying to figure out what the right tool to do legal research is. It’s about enhancing our abilities. Our client’s abilities are the people that work with us abilities. So Susan, I really appreciate this conversation. I appreciate you being with me.

Susan Tanner:

This was fantastic. Thank you so much for having me.

Zack Glaser:

Absolutely. Absolutely. We’ll have to have you again. Thank you.

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