Innovating Without Overwhelm: Practical AI Tips for Lawyers, with Graydon Trusler

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser:

Hi, I’m Zack.

Chad Fox:

And I’m Chad. And this is episode five 90 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Zack is going to be talking with Graydon Trusler about productive laziness and how they use AI in their law firm.

Zack Glaser:

I usually like to talk to people about unproductive laziness, but today it’s productive laziness, but unproductive laziness, which is what I call the moment after I eat Thanksgiving dinner.

Chad Fox:

It’s a good, nice

Zack Glaser:

Transition. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. This was a good segue. Today or Thanksgiving lunch or whatever you do. I eat Thanksgiving meal as long as I can all day. And then how long does eating Thanksgiving, Turkey, and food and whatnot last for

Chad Fox:

You? Seven to 10 days.

Zack Glaser:

That feels right.

Chad Fox:

Seven to 10 days. That

Zack Glaser:

Feels right. However long it physically lasts.

Chad Fox:

There comes a day where you, depending on how much you cook or how many leftovers you come home with, from wherever you enjoy the meal, there is a day where you’re kind of pushing it a little bit. It’s day 11, should I still be eating this Turkey?

Zack Glaser:

We used to freeze Turkey soups, though. It’d be deep into winter before we really actually got done with all of our Thanksgiving related leftovers, I guess. Do you intentionally cook leftovers?

Chad Fox:

Intentionally cook leftovers? Do you

Zack Glaser:

Intentionally make way too much in order to have the leftovers?

Chad Fox:

Yes. I think you should do that.

Zack Glaser:

That’s,

Chad Fox:

Yeah, it’s like double the size bird that you actually need. Double the mac and cheese, double the stuffing.

Zack Glaser:

Ooh, okay. Obviously we’re talking Turkey, so you got a Turkey, and then people can debate and we might, how to cook said Turkey, but what’s your sides?

Chad Fox:

Oh, sides. Yeah, sides. Sides is got to have the staples, right? So you

Zack Glaser:

Need, what are your staples? I mean, people have different staples. Yeah,

Chad Fox:

We must have mashed potatoes, dressing, stuffing, and

Zack Glaser:

My

Chad Fox:

Wife’s homemade mac and

Zack Glaser:

Cheese. You just talked about dressing and stuffing. They were the same thing. You were just like interchangeable dressing, stuffing. Totally interchangeable.

Chad Fox:

Stuffing.

Zack Glaser:

Okay, so you cook it in the bird.

Chad Fox:

It should be in the bird.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. And then your wife’s mac and cheese.

Chad Fox:

My wife makes homemade mac and cheese. That is the best mac and cheese you’ll ever have, and we only get it on Thanksgiving.

Zack Glaser:

Is it difficult or is she just like, you know what? I’m going to make it special. It just has to be special.

Chad Fox:

It’s time consuming. She uses five different types of cheese that she shreds herself and it’s like a whole thing and there’s breadcrumbs on top and yeah, I mean you have

Zack Glaser:

Me at cheese, but it sounds pretty good. I’m going to need a picture of that.

Chad Fox:

She uses cheeses I’ve never heard of or something like that, however you say it. Gu cheese. I am like, what is that? Bluey Bluey

Zack Glaser:

Cheese? Yeah. Yeah. Insert guta joke right now, which my wife will get really irritated with throughout Thanksgiving is me and all of my guta jokes. Okay, so you’ve got

Chad Fox:

Turkey. I think there is guta in the mac and cheese is one of the five. I hope

Zack Glaser:

So, right? I mean that’s a good melty cheese, right?

Chad Fox:

Have you ever had guta grilled cheese sandwiches?

Zack Glaser:

Oh yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Chad Fox:

That’s the way to

Zack Glaser:

Do it. There used to be a super fancy, and it may still be there, a super fancy grilled cheese food truck in Nashville called, I think it was called the grilled cheesery, and they had goda grilled cheese sandwiches for if you had $40 on you, they would give you a goa grilled cheese sandwich.

Chad Fox:

$40.

Zack Glaser:

Wow. It just felt expensive.

Chad Fox:

That sounds like that lobster sandwich you were telling me about at Ccle Con.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, except I’m not allergic to cheese. Yeah, the lobster, the lobster roll was not as cheap as I expected it to be, but I’m just not really a refined person, so I think I just didn’t know. So what’s your other stuff? Mac and cheese mashed potatoes.

Chad Fox:

So if I’m making the Turkey, we’re doing a 24 hour brine, so I have a five gallon bucket in the garage that I use just for brining, the Turkey. And so I put the Turkey in the five gallon bucket in water mixed with kosher salt and cinnamon sticks and apples and rosemary and I can’t remember all of it. I have it saved somewhere and then that goes in the fridge in that bucket and chills for 24 hours.

Zack Glaser:

What does that do? What’s the purpose of that?

Chad Fox:

I assume there’s a purpose, right? Yeah, I mean the flavor’s a Turkey, but also it is the most moist because off sometimes you have Turkey, Turkey and you’re like, can you pass the gravy? The turkey’s a little dry, so brining fixes that. So the Turkey will be nice and moist and flavorful and yeah, it’s the way to go. Some people swear by fried turkeys. I’ve never done that, but

Zack Glaser:

I feel like I’d blow myself up if I did a fried Turkey

Chad Fox:

Burn the house down,

Zack Glaser:

I would burn the house down, blow myself up, and then we’d have a terrible Turkey, which that would be the real problem. How do you have room for a five gallon bucket in your refrigerator? Chad?

Chad Fox:

You have to raise the shelves up and it’s a little uncomfortable for a day, but you make it work.

Zack Glaser:

And this is coming from two people that live in the south. I guess you could totally do that in South Dakota on your back deck when we were there, we totally could have.

Chad Fox:

Yeah, it’s got to be refrigerated in Florida for sure.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same in Memphis. Okay. So is that how you’ve always done it?

Chad Fox:

I mean, yeah, as far as long as I can remember. I think the first time I ever made the Turkey, I was like, all right, I want to make sure that I do this. And as I was doing the research, I came across the brining method and I was like, all right, this is how I’m going to do it.

Zack Glaser:

Then you stuff it full of stuffing and cook it like a normal human being fully intact in the, okay, so you don’t cut the spine out and butterfly it or anything like that?

Chad Fox:

Is that a thing? I don’t know. I’ve never done that.

Zack Glaser:

If you listen to the radio long enough today on Thanksgiving, you will hear Alton Brown talking about spatchcocking a Turkey. So if you just look that up, it is apparently the way that you keep it, that you cook it the most evenly. I’ve never done it. I don’t cook the Turkey, nobody lets me, lets me around the Turkey cooking. So I’ve never had the opportunity to brine, spatchcock or fry a Turkey.

Chad Fox:

Well, I will say we are going to grandma’s this year and grandma’s not going to be B brining, so I might need some gravy for the Turkey this year. But do you do Grandma makes good sides and desserts, so that’ll be all right.

Zack Glaser:

Okay, so what’s your go-to dessert?

Chad Fox:

Ooh, pumpkin pie is a staple. I know I’ve heard debates on some people hate pumpkin pie. Some people say you have to have it, but that’s like, as long as I have pumpkin pie, it feels like thanksgiving. Anything else above that is a bonus. Yours, what’s yours?

Zack Glaser:

So my mother does a, she always called it fudge pie, and it’s a pie that her family has passed down for a while. We’ve always called it fudge pie. It is actually chocolate chest pie. And I finally figured that out, but it’s a recipe that mom, if you’re listening to this, I’m going to tell your secret here, I’m not going to tell the secret recipe, but my mother’s mother gave it to her and my mom started cooking it. Then my mother’s mother, my grandmother, my wonderful, wonderful grandmother lost the recipe and my mom won’t give it back to her.

Chad Fox:

Oh man, that’s messed up, right,

Zack Glaser:

Right. I have the recipe, which, oh man, now it makes me, now I’m

Chad Fox:

Evil. Grandma’s going to come looking for you now,

Zack Glaser:

Man. Okay, so maybe my thanksgiving, maybe the thing I do for Thanksgiving is get that back to my grandmother.

Chad Fox:

Yeah, Merry Christmas

Zack Glaser:

Grandma. Yeah, so mom, if you’re listening to this, I’m giving the recipe back to mama and I’m from Tennessee, so we call her grandmother mama.

Chad Fox:

My family has made chocolate pies in the past, but it’s basically jello pudding in a graham cracker crust and chilled and then whipped cream on top.

Zack Glaser:

I get that. That’s good. 10 would eat, but this is just sugar, it’s just gooey sugar with cocoa powder and it’s just, it’s really good. It’s my jam.

Chad Fox:

So what day and what time is dinner at your house this year? I will be there,

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Yeah, so it’ll be on Thanksgiving, so yeah, it’ll be Thursday.

Chad Fox:

Do you guys eat late or early or? We usually eat at

Zack Glaser:

Three. Yeah, something like that. Two, three, something like that.

Chad Fox:

I’ve heard the times all over the map. Some people eat actually for dinner at six o’clock, but I’m of the belief that you should eat early so that you can hungry again and you can have another round at dinnertime.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, it’s like voting right early and often. Do it as many times as you can.

Chad Fox:

I need to get my first nap in before football starts.

Zack Glaser:

Right. Alright, well, we have bored people to death with our Thanksgiving theories. If you’re still listening, if you’re still listening, I have a conversation with Graydon Trusler that is talking about practical uses of artificial intelligence in your law office. And honestly, I know that that’s a thing where people go, oh, everybody’s trying to talk about practical uses of artificial intelligence, but it really is, he’s got some really good concepts and he’s got a website out there that is trying to help people really incorporate artificial intelligence into their offices. And he uses a system he calls productive laziness, which is how we got into this conversation in the first place, Chad. So bring it all around. So yeah, here is my conversation with Graydon. Happy Turkey Day, everyone.

Chad Fox:

Happy Turkey Day.

Graydon Trusler:

Hi, I am Graydon and I am a practical AI specialist with Lakes Expert ai As my company, and I kind of got into this because I’ve been working with my wife’s law firm. I was actually in the internet marketing space for years and back in the early two thousands, and my wife was starting her law firm. I thought, gee, I can apply a lot of these principles to the law firm and it might be beneficial, and I’m still here. So we continue to work together, but it’s really, my work with AI has just kind of been an extension of that. Always been, I don’t want to say a nerd, it just fascinates me.

Zack Glaser:

You can say I’ve always been a nerd on this podcast,

Graydon Trusler:

Frankly, I don’t consider nerd a bad word.

Zack Glaser:

No, no, no. You’re in good

Graydon Trusler:

Company. I wear the badge honorably. I also kind of think that it’s like, how can you not be in this world? This is the most fascinating technology that we have seen in our lifetime, and it’s going to change everything. And you can take the dystopian or utopian view. I choose to take the Star Trek view rather than the Terminator view. So I think we have a lot of really awesome things coming, but more practically that’s great, but really most people want to know, okay, how do I make it either save me time, save me money, do things faster, do things better? How does it make my life better? And so that’s what I see. That’s what I do here at the firm, but I’ve always been concerned that I see a lot of attorneys that are just not willing to touch it, whether it’s Privacy Concerns or I don’t know what to ask, that kind of stuff. And so I started Lux Sport ai, not really as a business, just more of a place to start putting some of these ideas out there to say, Hey, go. Here’s something that might help you overcome some of those hurdles and do this. Honestly, it’s not a win, it’s an if.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah,

Graydon Trusler:

I’m sorry. It’s if it’s a win, when is AI going to start doing it? And I think things move so much faster now. It’s going to be, it’s not like the adoption time over internet. This Is accelerators. You’re either going to get on board or you’re going to get left behind and by left behind in some cases, maybe go out of business. That may be a little extreme, but it’s not. I don’t know that it’s,

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, I don’t think that is extreme. But let me unpack a little bit here. The problem is that artificial intelligence is something that you kind of have to say everything at the same time. There’s just so much going on in this space, and if we start just saying, Hey, we’re going to have a discussion about AI, people’s, honestly, their eyes can G glass over, and I guess in this scenario, their ears can G glass over. And so we want to say, what is our entree? What is our entry point here? And what we’re talking about is kind of practical uses of artificial intelligence in a law firm from somebody that has been doing this and has been doing the automation, but is now kind of putting it on top of putting AI on top of that. And you’ve been doing it for a little while. You also have a background in management information systems and business analysis. You’ve been working at your and your wife’s firm in Texas for a significant amount of, how long have you been doing this in the law space?

Graydon Trusler:

20, at least 20 years, maybe 25. I don’t remember exactly. So I kind of waited in and then the next thing I know I’m there all the time.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So your wife is the attorney and you are running the operations and all that. I hate to say behind the scenes of a firm, but that stuff that clients don’t necessarily see.

Graydon Trusler:

I agree. Which frankly I like, I’m fine not really interacting with, I don’t have a problem with it. I just, all things being equal. I’d rather, I’d rather not, but that’s getting where it’s becoming less. I don’t want to say less an issue, but it’s more related to AI too, because AI can interact with clients. I mean, we can go into that too, but

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. I mean, AI can kind of enter into the law firm in a lot of different places and it can get pretty complex pretty quickly. It can get pretty scary pretty quickly as well. And great. In the way that we have connected is you were part of our lab program and have been part of our business strategists program. We’ve talked about your application of artificial intelligence internally in the firm. Before we get into the external thing, which you touched upon the expert expert ai.com, which is helping other attorneys do this, let’s talk about it inside the firm that you and your wife run. How did you get started really trusting AI to do things in your firm or trusting AI to help you in your

Graydon Trusler:

Firm? I’ve always been an early adopter and not being a lawyer, I don’t look at things like, what are the problems with this necessarily? And this is going to stop me. I look at it more of like, okay, this is an issue. How do I solve this and move past it? So I basically knew it was something we were going to do, we needed to do, it was going to happen. So it’s not what roadblocks do I see, but how do I address all those so I can do this because it’s going to happen. And so the first thing was the privacy issue for us that was really addressing that and made sure we didn’t want to have client data exposed, that kind of stuff, because unless it’s working with real data, it’s less useful, at least to me. And that’s why I’ve seen the real power is when I do give it all the details about something, even personally I, and I can go on that just the more it learns about me and us and our practice and what it does, it’s like it will tailor everything with that in mind. So it’s really, really helpful.

Zack Glaser:

And so you can’t just say, okay, well, I’m going to use these off the shelf public facing platforms because they, I mean, we know they’re not secure enough to put client information in, but you wanted to put at least business information.

Graydon Trusler:

Exactly. And I did do a fair amount of research, and it’s easier now, but when I started, I was doing everything through their API, which is a little more technical, but basically it secure ensured that my data was not being used to train other models,

Zack Glaser:

Which was the big, and so we weren’t going to have somebody trying to write a divorce decree and then all of a sudden your client’s information comes up as in they’re example.

Graydon Trusler:

Exactly. Exactly. So we’ve done that forever. And then as the Claudes and chat GBTs have matured, there are options to prevent that on all of ’em.

You could do that with at the business level or the consumer level as well. It’s just one’s automatic, one’s consumer, and I actually have some information on how to check that because they’re okay to use as long as you make sure you’ve got all those settings, but you’ve got to do that and which is pretty critical. That lowers the barrier to entry. In other words, I don’t necessarily need to go sign the contract with LexisNexis just to test this out, but I want to be able to use a tool that’s secure and is not going to cause a problem

Zack Glaser:

Because not all of our artificial intelligence, not all of the things that we want AI to do that we dream about AI doing is legal research or

Graydon Trusler:

Even

Zack Glaser:

Legal document creation. And so we don’t need necessarily something that’s trained on legal data, we need an LLM that’s not going to spy on me and tell everybody my information.

Graydon Trusler:

In fact, one of the very first things I did was I put the little chat bot and I gave it the Texas Family Code. I said, based, all your answers based off this, don’t base it off of the stuff you find on the internet. Base it off the copy of the Texas Family Code. And it was great. Yeah, I mean, we did all kinds of stuff with that, and that really opened eyes about what we could do, and all that just got easier and easier now to do.

Zack Glaser:

That’s an interesting example because one of the things I was going to ask you in this is what’s a workflow that you were able to do in family law with artificial intelligence? But that’s beyond workflows, a chat bot answering questions based on the Texas Family Code. That’s something that you really wouldn’t even think about. It’s too complex to automate with without ai. Absolutely. So then I guess, how do you think of things that you want to do inside your law practice? I think a lot of times we get into this Minos paradox idea of, I don’t know what, I don’t know. If I knew what I wanted to do, then I don’t already done it. How do you think about approaching some of these things?

Graydon Trusler:

Well, first of all, I think we talked about my productive laziness approach where it’s like, how can I get a AI to do this for me?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, let’s take a step. Yeah, I love this productive laziness. So yeah, tell me about that real

Graydon Trusler:

Quick. I just made that up because in the back of my mind, everything I do, I’m just wired to think, gee, can I get AI to do this for me? And before was ai. I was like, can I figure out how to get my computer to do this for me so I don’t have to do this a thousand times?

Zack Glaser:

My dad, it was, can I figure out how to get my kids to do this for me?

Graydon Trusler:

Well, yeah. I mean, why does he have kids?

Zack Glaser:

Right? Well, and then he had a kid that became a lawyer and worked in his practice, so he did a really good job of that

Graydon Trusler:

Good plan, good thinking, but that’s the majority of where my ideas come from. And so I think from a simple kind of approach, if you’re doing that, I would say look at what’s a real pain in the ass? What do you hate doing? What takes a lot of time and focus on? And just look for those kind of things. And you could even go so far as to say at one point I said, okay, I’m not going to answer a question twice. If I get a question more than once, I’m going to go add that to a chat bot or something where the information’s there and somebody else can go look for it.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, I like that because it’s instead of saying, and we like to do this at Lawyerist, instead of saying, how can I use ai? It’s saying, I have a problem. How can I get AI to solve that as opposed to what problems would I need to have in order to have AI to solve it?

Graydon Trusler:

Exactly. Yeah. It’s like, well, and you can ask, this is an AI question too. You could sit down and say, Hey, I’m a family law attorney. This is where I practice. These are the kind of cases I have, and even today I have, these are the three things I really need to get done today. How can you help me? Give me five ways you can help me solve this problem today?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, I’m sorry. I love that. It’s like, Hey, ai, how could I use

Graydon Trusler:

You?

Zack Glaser:

I’m having trouble figuring out how to use artificial intelligence. Hey, artificial intelligence, how can I use you? That’s amazing.

Graydon Trusler:

Well, I jokingly say it’s kind of asking Einstein to teach you physics. You’ve got an expert on AI right there that you’re working with. So ask it to help you use it,

Zack Glaser:

Ask it to help you use it as your AI expert.

Graydon Trusler:

And the other thing I say a lot of times is, if you don’t know whether AI will do something, ask it and it’ll tell you. And then you say, if you don’t know how to get it to do that, ask it how to do it. If I say this, I want to accomplish this, what prompt would I need to give you in order for you to do this for me? And then here’s the prompt.

Zack Glaser:

Oh, man, that’s so meta on. It really is. But it’s also, I talked to Sam Hardin, one of our strategists here at Affinity and Lawyers, so talk to him on the podcast previously, and he was talking about vibe coding and essentially going in and asking AI how to make a thing, how to build a product. And this is really that same concept that’s behind vibe coding. It’s like, Hey, tell me how to get you to do this. Tell me how to get the computers to do this thing. I like that. I like that. And so instead of saying, what can I use it for? You say, well, okay, here are pain points that I have. I’m doing this multiple times, or this is a pain in the butt, or I know that this is repetitive. Okay, now I can say, how do I get you to help me solve this problem?

Graydon Trusler:

I’ll give you kind of a little technical example, but Claude is, I use Claude most of the time just, and oddly enough, just we just seem to think, it’s almost like you build a relationship with it. It’s like he gets me talking about the way, when I say, help me with these things, what I’ve actually gone a step farther is saying, Hey, Claude, this is what I need to do today. By the way, I have a DHD, and I typically go off doing other stuff through the day, so help me stay on track and if I mention something, just make a note of it. So we’ll forget. We will forget about it. And so every other word out of my mouth these days is I got an idea. And so I had my three projects I was supposed to do that day and I said, Hey, Claude, I got this thing that sounds really great. And he goes, and it literally said, that’s great, but you don’t need to do any of them, any of these other ideas until you finish the things that you’ve got done until one of ’em is producing income. And I shut it off for saying, and I felt scolded. I thought, wow. But I thought that is exactly what I needed to hear. That’s

Zack Glaser:

What I asked it to do. Yeah, that’s fantastic because a lot of times mine, and I don’t know if it just knows that I need this or not, mine is always like, oh yeah, Zack, you’re brilliant. That’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. That is an amazing question for you to have asked me. And so getting it to push back against me sometimes is a little difficult. But I like that of kind of saying, well, here are my, I don’t even want to say deficiencies, but here are the

Graydon Trusler:

Challenges that,

Zack Glaser:

Here are my challenges. Here are the ways my brain works, is how I think of it. I like that, and I like that chat can kind of help you in that. Okay. So let’s pivot a little bit here because you’ve done a lot of these things in your and your wife’s law firm and is it Austin, Texas? Austin, correct. In Austin. And you’ve like many people looked up and said, I could probably help other people do these types of things. And so you’ve started branching out a little bit. Talk to me about what you’re doing. I don’t know if it’s on the side or,

Graydon Trusler:

Well, we’ve made an intentional effort to extract me from the firm day to day because a lot of the stuff that they wanted me to do, I hated doing anyway, and I sucked at it. So we’re like, let’s get him out of that. Let him do the stuff he’s good at, which is, and so I’m doing it for the firm, but at the same time, everything I do, I’m like, well, gosh, this could be applied to a lot of other firms. My way to wade into that is basically just kind of putting out content about, Hey, here’s how to do things better with AI and use it. I try to focus on keeping it very direct, very action oriented. Here’s how to do this without spending a bunch of time. And so that’s what L expert AI is really just helping educate people and helping them lead them through this process a little bit.

Zack Glaser:

I like this phrase that you said, or kind of like a pseudo title that you had said of practical AI specialist and obviously kind of hanging on that word practical, because you can get into extremely technical stuff when you talk about artificial intelligence and if you follow certain people or certain hashtags or what have you on LinkedIn or Twitter, I guess it’s X now shows how much I’ve used it. But if you follow along with some of these very advanced ideas, you can get really in the weeds. And now you’re thinking, do I need to set up my own internal server and model and all that? And it’s like all I wanted to do, all I wanted to do was have an automatic response to the email that comes to me that says, what is my case doing? So talk to about some practical,

Graydon Trusler:

And that’s kind of what I was really trying to do with Lex expert. I kind of overcome some of that, just technical minutia and say, Hey, here’s what you really need to know the problem that you’re facing or what you may be concerned about as a lawyer. Here’s the real scoop on a reasonable way to address this issue. A lot of these risks, it’s like using the internet at all. There’s no way to eliminate every risk. That’s, that’s not possible.

Zack Glaser:

I mean, that’s just walking around in life, right?

Graydon Trusler:

Yeah. And so take reasonable steps to do that and get up and then just start trying to knock, throw the things off. I’m trying to think of a couple of things. We did, one of the things, and this borders on technical, but I’ll keep it pretty high level. I started making custom chatbots for each case in the firm. So I’ve got a chatbot with a rag database, which is nothing but a knowledge base. It’s like a collection of files that it references. And so I’ll put all the files from that or the relevant files for that case in there. And then what we do is, and this was just kind of an experiment. One the prompt, we don’t just say, Hey, you’re a helpful assistant. We say you are an AI case assistant or AI paralegal, you’re part of the Trusler legal team. These are the attorneys that you’re going to be helping. These are the paralegals that be helping. This is the opposing party. This is our client, this is who the judge is. These are the facts of the case. This is what we’re trying to, I mean a full blown case overview.

And your job is to help us advance our client’s case and make sure we’re not doing something stupid and help just basically do the funk, play the function of an AI paralegal. And it totally changed the kind of responses we got from it to the point that I’ve created a monster and now Chrissy wants one for every case. So I mean from drafting witness questions to opening and closing statements to analyzing documents or reviewing discovery, I mean, we do all kinds of things with it.

Zack Glaser:

Yes. So this is one of those interesting places that I think people in my mind don’t discuss enough yet. This feels like someplace where you’re not saving time using artificial intelligence, you’re doing something fundamentally different Than What you would have done. And hopefully, and I assume it has to be, otherwise you wouldn’t do it better,

Graydon Trusler:

No question. And ultimately it’s better and a lot faster. I mean just in terms of, hey, produce a timeline for this case, boom, it’s done and it’s good and often better than we would’ve done because it goes into so much detail that we wouldn’t have done. And so draft witness question, a quick example, CRI actually had it on her laptop in court and the judge was getting frustrated about the line of questioning that they were going through and had a lot of questions. And so she said, Hey, all I want to hear is this questions about this topic. She Told me, Hey, judge is pissed off. Give me the questions, just narrowed this boom and just read it immediately. And she had the whole set of questions done.

Zack Glaser:

So your office was able to use this essentially live in court accessing a chat bot that was connected directly to the specific case that they were in court for and was, yeah. Yes. That saved time of course. But it’s something that just you wouldn’t have really been able to do at any level like that. Yes, she could have sat down and I’m sure she would’ve come up with wonderful questions, but it would’ve taken a minute and maybe we would’ve frustrated the judge a little bit more. Maybe it would’ve taken a little bit longer to kind of get back onto that correct path. That’s phenomenal. That’s

Graydon Trusler:

Amazing. And she’ll take the paralegal to court with her, our real paralegal, our AI paralegal. But Rebecca, that you

Zack Glaser:

Have to specify now,

Graydon Trusler:

Yes, you’re going to clarify. I call it that it irritates them, but I kind of equate them a little bit. But Rebecca, while the opposing party is answering questions, she can sit there and pepper it with questions and find out whether they’re is checking against their deposition and what they actually have said before and whether there’s being a contradiction or that kind of stuff.

Zack Glaser:

So is she as that paralegal kind of developing different skills that you wouldn’t have necessarily associated with a live human paralegal six years ago?

Graydon Trusler:

Yeah, I think so. Just because we have different tools and we’re able to do things that we would’ve never been able to do before. Before she had transcript that she was trying to search on her own. I mean, she’d have it on a laptop. She’s having to search for it and find that it’s just so much faster and efficient now. And in that situation, the speed, if you’re not fast enough, it’s not useful. So if you can’t do it fast enough, it just doesn’t work. Make any sense to do it at all. But for me, Christie was the fastest adopter because once I started giving her these chat bots, the light bulb went off and now she all went.

Zack Glaser:

And just to clarify, Christie’s your wife, wife,

Graydon Trusler:

Wife, the attorney, correct? Yes.

Rebecca has been, apparently has been with us for a long time. And when I saw the ice melting a little bit or warming up to ai, she started coming to me saying, Hey, do you think AI could help with this? That was magic words to me. That just means she’s starting to think that way and absolutely. And another little thing I did, we had a hearing that we’re preparing for and opposing counsel supplemented production at 1130 at night before the hearing, she was just really, because given her a deficiency letter and Rebecca was like, shit, I can’t go through all this. Said, well, lemme see it. So I gave it to Claude and said, here’s the deficiency letter, here’s the production that they just produced. Go through it and verified that they produced everything they asked for and give me a report what’s not there. And in about five minutes I had that and I said, well, since you have the original deficiency letter, just update it, make a new one with what’s missing. And in about 15 minutes I had a complete deficiency letter. And of course we had to go through and check it as best we could at 1130 at nine of course. But it wouldn’t have been possible at all before.

Zack Glaser:

Right? Yeah, I love those. I love moments where it wouldn’t have been possible. And so the tough part with this in discussions like this a lot of times is to put some sort of return on investment, the ROI on these things. Can you as best we can, because again, we’ve been talking about like, oh, well I just wouldn’t have done this. Can you find a point someplace where you can say, this was my return on investment of this specific thing. What is something that you’ve been able to quantify

Graydon Trusler:

That is as specific as we’ve gotten is really with this discovery piece? Because that’s such a time consuming process and I’m doing things in 15, 20, 30 minutes that would’ve taken three or four hours for a paralegal to do. And that’s just dramatic. And so the more things we can do like that, it’s just going to shave off time. And then you’ve got the whole issue of the billable hour, which is that’s a different animal where people are concerned about, well now I can only bill for 30 minutes. Well, that’s a flat fee issue. So we’re working on that next.

Zack Glaser:

I’m sorry, you got to figure out how to do this. So I guess that’s kind of segues a little bit into a last kind of line of questioning here of what does the future look like then? What does the future of bringing artificial intelligence into a law firm in a practical way as opposed to just being a hundred years in the future, what does the near term future look like then?

Graydon Trusler:

I think our near term futures, first of all, we are going to try to move to flat fees as quickly as possible because that’s going to really eliminate the issue of trying to reconcile how much the loss of billable hours doesn’t mean we’re going to start taking advantage of people, but there’s ways we can still make money and save the client money and produce a better result faster and that, so that’s from a financial standpoint, that’s the answer there. But I think our next step is to, I just made this up, kind of augment our parallels with these tools and really ingrain ’em and I don’t want to say make ’em think like me, but make ’em think in terms of everything you’re doing, how can I do this better or faster? And that could be as simple as every one of your just start your drafts, it produces better drafts than you’ll ever get from anything ever. And just start with that. And so

Zack Glaser:

There have been many drafts and I write a lot for what I do. There have been many drafts where I’m like, oh, that sounds like me and it sounds better than me, does a great

Graydon Trusler:

Job. It’s like, yeah, that’s what I meant to say. It just did it faster and more clearly.

Zack Glaser:

And with more M dashes.

Graydon Trusler:

Exactly. Which by the way, I do have a specific in my system problem. Don’t use any m dashes.

Zack Glaser:

Oh man. I used to love an M dash. I

Graydon Trusler:

Used to love for. Yeah, they’re brewing for us.

Zack Glaser:

They

Graydon Trusler:

Shut

Zack Glaser:

And it kills me. Kills me.

Graydon Trusler:

Hey, I’ll lemme tell you one other quick thing that you might appreciate because a lot of times I’m always thinking I’ll see something that’s cool I think, Ooh, I could apply it over here and do that. And so I was using chat GPT Atlas, the new AI browser, and I’d logged into Form Builder and I’d given it an information sheet from a client. It was a friend of ours and I was having it fill out the form builder to generate estate plan documents for her. It actually worked and it was really cool. That wasn’t cool. So that was one cool part. That’s a whole other thing. But when I was doing that, I noticed that it was the way that it was kind recognized, it was taking screenshots. That’s how they recognize where they are. Let me take a screenshot, see where I am and then go do it. And then I thought, well wait a minute. I can take screenshots and it knows how to go through this. I wonder if it can make an SOP for me.

Zack Glaser:

Yep. That’s where my brain went.

Graydon Trusler:

And so long story short, and I’ll send you, I’m going to document how to do this and I’ll send it to you directly, but basically I’m repeat

Zack Glaser:

In the show notes.

Graydon Trusler:

I got it to go through and basically create a walkthrough step by step with screenshots in a document and it’s like done it fully create SOPs for me.

Zack Glaser:

And I think the thing I want to make sure that our listeners really make sure they get in this is that this was the browser doing the action in the first place and then creating ans OP off its own action instead of, there are tools out there where you can go and do the thing and you spend the 30 minutes doing the thing and put an SOP out there. But this is the browser, taking the age agentic kind of moves and then doing an SOP off that. So it’s like double AI

Graydon Trusler:

There. Exactly. Yes. More meta. Yes.

Zack Glaser:

That is absolutely amazing.

Graydon Trusler:

I actually did one of them and then I was like, I can’t screw around with that. I got to do other stuff. I’m going back that to really nail that because this is big. That’s one of those things like I hate doing ’em and so I don’t do ’em. And so this is like now it’s just I’m going to have my good friend Claude, do them for me.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Well I will say, and we’ll probably get into this in another podcast or if you just like people listen to me talk in general, artificial intelligence is changing the way that we do SOPs and changing the way in which you can document your stuff. It has fundamentally changed the way I advise people to do their documentation. It’s amazing. And that right there is also part of that fundamentally changing the way that we document stuff.

Graydon Trusler:

It’s just like it all boils down to, gee, can I get AI to do this for me? That’s all I’m thinking that all the time.

Zack Glaser:

I like that. I like that. And I think that’s probably a good place to end here because we’re talking about ai, so we could go on forever, but I like the, can I get AI to do this for me? That will kind of end on that productive laziness idea and yeah, can I get AI to do this for me?

Graydon Trusler:

I like that. And this is not a promotional thing, but I really do have a lot of content on the site that Claude and I worked on very hard,

Zack Glaser:

Right?

Graydon Trusler:

You have to. But it’s really good stuff. But it’s about how do you use AI better? And there’s one of them that is really, it’s not technical at all, it’s just mindset. Mindset shift. It’s like talk to pretend it’s a person that’s 90% of it there. Pretend you’re working with a remote VA and you’ve only got access to email or text and you’re going to go a long way with that.

Zack Glaser:

I like that. Well, people can find all of that information and it is a lot of information in a blog and people can subscribe to it pretty [email protected]. And I’m going to spell that one L-E-X-P-E-R-T-A i.com. Graydon, I really appreciate you being with me and sharing your knowledge on this, your practical AI specialist knowledge on all this.

Graydon Trusler:

Yeah, it’s funny. It’s the same whenever we run into each other at the lab, whether it’s the same conversations we have there.

Zack Glaser:

It really is. People got to peek in on us talking about what we’re doing right

Graydon Trusler:

Now. Exactly. Yeah. So if you want to know what it’s like talking to me, this is it. Pretty much.

Zack Glaser:

This is it. Well again, great. And I appreciate it and we’ll put all the links that we talked about in the show notes for everybody as well. So thank you.

Graydon Trusler:

Great. Thank you.

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