Building Better Lawyers in the Age of AI, with April Dawson

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser:

Hey y’all, I’m Zack.

Stephanie Everett:

And I’m Stephanie and this is The Lawyerist Podcast. Just one element of how the team here at Lawyers helps small law firms because we also have an amazing website with e-guides. We have a book and we even have a community where we work one-on-one with lawyers on how to grow their business.

Zack Glaser:

Today I talk with April Dawson about AI’s role in training new lawyers. That’s AI. Again, one of the aspects of how we push forward. I like to say here at The Lawyers Podcast, it’s everything but the law. We’re helping you with your law firm. It’s everything but the law is what we do here. Exactly.

Stephanie Everett:

Glacier may be coming in with a new tagline for lawyerist. You heard it right here. We just dropped it.

Zack Glaser:

We’re going to have to check on the copyright aspects of that, trademark aspects of it, but everything but the law, which is really kind of what Claude, this is what I wanted to get into with you here, Stephanie, today. Kind of what Claude is doing in their anthropic legal plugins, they are getting to everything, but I think they’re trying to include the law. I was going to

Stephanie Everett:

Say, it wouldn’t work for them because you’d have to just say everything.

Zack Glaser:

Everything.

Stephanie Everett:

Including the law as we saw as of this recording, they just have dropped Claude for legal, which really is just a series of plugins and predefined skills, which is one way you work within Claude and we can talk about that, but you can develop your own skills and say, “Hey, when you do this task, I want you to follow these exact instructions.” And we have been working with lawyers on building those skills that are specific to how they practice. Hey, here’s how I review a lease, or here’s how I draft a motion. An NDA. Exactly. And what Claude’s doing is designing that workflow for you. And so it’s coming in with the pre-written script or skill of here are the 20 things you should do when you review an NDA, for example.

Zack Glaser:

Claude is bringing in these pre-packaged skills, it’s bringing in something pretty vanilla. It’s the structure of it. But I kind of think of it as you can go to WordPress and this is really going to be dated really, really soon, but you can go to WordPress and you can grab a template of a website and just put it in there. But you’ve got to … If you make it yours, nobody knows it’s a template. If you tweak the right things, but most of the time an attorney just sitting there trying to make a website doesn’t know what to tweak. And I think that’s the same thing here on these dot skills is that you can download these packages and they give you this really vanilla thing, but if you tweak it, if you make it yours, it can really, really do something for you.

Stephanie Everett:

I agree. I think for years we’ve said, I know lawyers who’ve used wealth counsel, for example, or used other templated documents, but then they’ve gone into your point and they’ve made it theirs and they’ve tweaked it. Then there’s other firms that are like, “I have my template set and it is my secret sauce.That’s my IP. That’s my work product. That’s what I’ve created over all these years.” And

So yes, I agree with you. You could go in and you can tweak what Claude’s creating, which is the vanilla work product. And I think you probably should. It’s pretty easy to look behind the hood and see what it’s doing, but we also can teach lawyers how to do that, but they’ve also made it pretty easy to design your own. And so that’s where I would … If I’m going to encourage people, I’m like, look, you’ve spent all these years in practice building this big brain, building this repository of a great agreements. Why would you throw that all away for Claude’s vanilla piece?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Stephanie Everett:

Not that it’s not amazing. The tool itself and what it can do is amazing and you should use it. I’m just saying use it with your stuff, maybe use their stuff to get some ideas, to brainstorm, to see what it’s capable of.

Zack Glaser:

What do you think? I think Sam on our team, Sam Harden has really put it in perspective for me of like it feels like at least the drop before this, it feels like this is kind of anthropic saying, “Look at what you could do.

Stephanie Everett:

” Yes.

Zack Glaser:

“Here are examples of what you could do. ” And I think that if you look at it in that perspective, you can do so much, but Stephanie, I got to run a law office. How am I going to do that? How am I going to get all these things put together? There’s so much potential there, but I still have to run a law office. Yeah, I don’t know where to start even.

Stephanie Everett:

I totally agree, Zack. And this stuff for you and me and for Sam, it’s fun. We enjoy it and yet just like we say to lawyers all the time, you are good at your craft, outsource the things that you might need help with, which is why we’re super excited. We’ve been working at fever pitch pace. Is that the right phrase?

Zack Glaser:

Furiously. Yeah. Furiously.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. As fast as humanly possible to stay ahead of all these changes, to understand how the tools work and more importantly, to understand how lawyers can leverage the tools. And so because there are some really cool things you can do in Claude and cowork like, “Hey, here’s my notes from my first meeting. Here’s the client intake form. Can you now create the engagement letter? Can you create this document? Can you create the welcome letter?” With a few

Clicks of some buttons, yes, you can do all those things. Yeah, we know that this isn’t necessarily lawyer’s highest and best use to try to push all the buttons and configure all the things. So we have been working as fast as humanly possible to stay ahead of the curve to figure all this out and we’re excited. We’re launching some new get up and running with Claude packages as we speak that we’ve been testing with firms, we’re ready to go and help firms really understand the power that they can create with all these cool AI tools and Claude especially.

Zack Glaser:

Well, yes. So Sam Hardin, who we’ve had on the show a lot and hopefully people know who we’re talking about here, but Sam is really kind of pushing into that. You and Sam and some of our other experts have been doing that. Should we have Sam on the show again? I love it. Yes, we’re going to have him

Stephanie Everett:

Back on. We’re going to go record an episode

Zack Glaser:

Like today. Talking about the furious pace at which we have to do this stuff, I think we should just grab Sam again because I think there’s an element of we need to dig a little bit deeper than what you and I are talking about here and go a little further. This intro has gone pretty long already, but I think there’s more that we can talk about also.

Stephanie Everett:

Absolutely. And so look, this isn’t the first time we’ve talked about AI. If you’re feeling still a little new and behind on the conversation, no worries. It is moving fast. We have some episodes we’ve done. You can head over to lawyerist.com and find all of the podcasts that we’ve done and search on what we’ve done for AI. And yes, keep, maybe this is where I say subscribe now because in a few weeks and as quickly as we possibly can, we’re going to have Sam back on the show to really talk through all these changes and help unpack it for people because nobody wants to go spend the 10 hours that I know Sam Harden spent on GitHub and other resources when this announcement came out.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, except him. I mean, he really likes doing that. We like doing that here. That’s what we spend our weekends doing, but you shouldn’t have to. You should be able to spend your weekend on the boat or something like that. Exactly. He told

Stephanie Everett:

Me he had to force himself to go to sleep because he was just down rabbit holes reading about this. And I was like, “I’m glad you got some sleep.”

Zack Glaser:

God love him. And

Stephanie Everett:

I’m glad you’re on our team so that he can keep us up to speed, educate us and our larger community, all the

Zack Glaser:

Listeners

Stephanie Everett:

Out there.

Zack Glaser:

Right, absolutely. Well, speaking of keeping yourself educated, now here is my conversation with April about AI’s role in training new lawyers. Also, go to our YouTube channel, like and subscribe all of that stuff. That’s how you can stay connected with this. End of rant.

April Dawson:

Hello. I’m April Dawson. I’m the Associate Dean of Technology and Innovation and Professor of Law at North Carolina Central University School of Law. I’ve been a professor here for going on 20 years and I have taught several courses torts, constitutional law, administrative law, Supreme Court seminar. For the past, I would say five years I’ve been teaching all things AI and the law, technology and the law and I oversee our technology, law and policy center.

Zack Glaser:

April, thank you for being with me. I really appreciate your time here and your insight. As our listeners can tell, you have some insight into what we’re talking about here, which is artificial intelligence in the law kind of writ large, but one of the things I wanted to dig into with you specifically is kind of how we’re using artificial intelligence to train new lawyers and how we’re training new lawyers to use artificial intelligence. And I know you have some thoughts on that. So yeah, where do we start in that idea? Well,

April Dawson:

I think we start with the reality that things are changing and there is no going back and that as educators and particularly legal educators, this is a moment in time where we can kind of rethink how it is that we educate young people. When I say young people, I should say people who are new to the legal profession because we have individuals of all ages and experiences who decide to go to law school.

And we’ve been talking about whether we are doing the best job in terms of the pedagogy for a long time within the legal academy. And this is a moment in time where we can look at the AI disruption that’s taking place and really come to grips with how is it that we best educate. And so I think we have to start from that perspective and that kind of point of view and that mindset going forward. So the next thing is legal educators is we need to reconcile the fact that we cannot teach even if we wanted to, we cannot teach the law in the same way, especially if we’re thinking about legal writing. So gone are the days when a student can turn in an artifact and we can read that and assume based on that written document that they have an understanding of what it is that is expressed within the document.

AI is able to do that. And even when professors say you can’t use it, in some ways it’s really hard for students not to use it because it’s embedded in so many of the products. And so how do we help students master the information? How do we make sure that they’re able to analyze and digest and to think critically in a world where an actual physical document doesn’t demonstrate that in the way that it may have previously?

Zack Glaser:

Okay. So that’s fascinating. And the big thing that I like from that is the admission of that. I think one of the bigger things is admitting for us as the legal profession that a written document is no longer the way to measure whether or not somebody has comprehension. So what do we do then if turning in a brief on one side of an argument is no longer the best way to measure that, how do we measure that if we can?

April Dawson:

Yeah. So we have to measure it the same way a client will now measure it.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. I like that.

April Dawson:

Yeah. So you have to be able to articulate your understanding verbally. So having oral exams, our students still have to write and they still need to understand writing and so we want them to write, but that can’t be it. So you have them write, you help them understand how you leverage these tools to improve your writing to enhance the written product because they should be using it, but they need to learn how to use it responsibly. And then we also have to help them develop those verbal skills. And when you tell a student that yes, you’re writing, you’re turning in something, and then also you have to talk about it and be the expert in it, that forces them to engage with the material in a different way. It puts that additional pressure on them to make sure that they do in fact understand it and it gives us another means by which to assess them.

Zack Glaser:

I like that. And my brain goes towards how are our students kind of responding to that? Are we seeing … My first thought is, are we seeing different students excel at this? Are we seeing different types of people or students take to this more than others?

April Dawson:

Yeah. And that’s a good question. And I should go back just for a minute. So we do have closed book exams where the students are in their classroom and so kind of the traditional final exams that we see in the first year courses typically. Those are still fine in terms of assessment, but typically our upper level classes require the production of some type of artifact and our legal writing classes as well. Now, one of the things that is required for law schools is that the students earn six hours of experiential credit. So as part of the law school curriculum, students do have to engage, assume the role of a lawyer or actually work in a clinic. And so those verbal skills are something that all students have an opportunity to exercise and to grow and to develop, but they will have more of an opportunity to do that in classes where they might not otherwise have had to do

Zack Glaser:

That.

April Dawson:

And I do think that this provides an opportunity for those students who feel very comfortable having discussions about what they understand to be able to showcase those skills, but also for those students who might kind of shy away from it, who would prefer to be able to just go into the library and write, where they’re going to have to exercise those muscles more. Because when we think about what the profession is looking for now of new lawyers, it is not any longer. Can you produce a memo because the technology can do that exceedingly wealth. And again, the technology is not perfect. We know this, but the task that I did as a first year associate, law firms, legal organizations don’t need first year associates to do that in the same way,

Zack Glaser:

Which

April Dawson:

Means when you think about your value proposition to any legal organization, you can’t just say, “I’m a strong writer.” Well, we all should be much stronger writers.That’s table safe, right? So what else are you able to bring? So we talk about soft skills and sometimes it feels a little overplayed. However, at this moment in time, new law students or law students, new lawyers have to think about what is it that clients are now looking for from their attorneys? What are the skills that are elevated even more and what do legal organizations need from new lawyers? And being able to take these complex topics, break them down, articulate to explain, those are the skills that every student that graduates law school should have had an ample opportunity to experience and develop.

Zack Glaser:

That seems to me to be a … I like hearing this because I feel like that is a higher value skill in the first place. And a lot of times I can’t speak for everybody, but that’s what I went to law school to do. I didn’t go to law school to argue over Creek or Crack or IRAC or to write memos to somebody that was just telling me exactly what to write a memo about. So that’s exciting in my mind to do that. The place that I see that I question, and I’m really interested in seeing how this plays out, is that that is giving junior attorneys, new attorneys, less of an opportunity to go in and kind of a safe space and learn and just get a couple of years of experience of just reading these contracts or reading these memos or imparting this and having feedback from their senior attorney.

And so are we losing a mentorship opportunity? Are we losing a mentorship like space and time in doing that?

April Dawson:

Yes, I definitely think the mentorship opportunities are going to be diminished in a lot of ways. And what I tell my students is that you have to now take more ownership of your learning. You have to be more self-directed. Now, the good news is that you can really leverage these tools to do that. So if you want feedback, there are ample tools that can provide you with that. If you want to do a deep dive into a subject matter in terms of content being available, it is absolutely available in whatever way it is that you consume it best. So if you prefer mind maps, there are tools that can do that easily. If you prefer podcasts where … I mean, there’s so many ways in which our students and graduates and new lawyers and lawyers at all levels can leverage these tools to help them develop their mastery of the topic without having to sit at the knee of someone.

Now, you still want to be able to talk to the folks that are experts in the space, but you should be going to them with higher level questions

Because there’s more stuff that you can do on your own to develop and be that self-directed learner because there’s not going to be as much patience. So even if a student comes to ask me a question and it’s a question that really they could have very easily have found out the answer themselves, I do get a little frustrated if they ask something and the answer’s clearly in the syllabus, it’s like all of our time is valuable, but to the student or the lawyer who kind of understands what it means to leverage what you do have to develop those skills and then when you go to the professor and you’re asking a more higher level sophisticated question that says a lot about the individual, because you’re like, all right, this person, they did their work, this question is a very thoughtful question and your impression of that individual is different than the person that asks you a question about something that’s in the syllabus.

And I think that translates into how new lawyers will need to maybe rethink how it is that they show up in the professional spac. So in all of my classes, my students have to use the technology. We talk about how do you use this technology to help you develop your mastery of this subject because I want them to feel comfortable with the tools and even after my class, I want them to say, “Okay, I’m moving into this practice area, what can I do to use these tools?” And we talk about it being a force multiplier. So back in the day when I was a first year associate, it may have taken me three weeks to really consume the necessary information to get up to speed on a particular topic. Well, my students should be able to do that in a week because of the different ways in which they can engage in the materials.

Zack Glaser:

I like that. Again, a lot of this stuff that I’m hearing from you is kind of accepting the reality of these things and not only accept, I guess not accepting the reality, embracing the reality of these things. And on the places that I get to in my brain is this at least perceived potential gap from zero to expert for an attorney, because there are a lot of attorneys out there right now that are saying, “Oh my goodness, Harvey is killing it for me at my office because I put all this information in, it comes out and then I have this amazing BS detector from 20 years of doing this. ” So the question then is kind of like, how are we going to develop these BS detectors without that 20 years of experience? And from what you’re saying is self-directed learning, you kind of have to go out and get it yourself.

This is the first time you saying this is, I’m like, “Well, maybe people can actually get it faster than 20 years.”

April Dawson:

Oh, without a doubt, without a doubt. And again, it kind of goes back to how are you leveraging these tools? So for example,

One of the assignments that I gave my students in my AI governance class is they had to use one of these foundation models to do a daily briefing on AI governance. So email, they get this daily briefing, they’ve got to read what’s going on in the AI governance space. Now they may not necessarily be acting on everything in that daily briefing, but them kind of seeing what’s going on within the space as they are building their knowledge and their expertise, their mastery of the subject matter is growing because they are immersing themselves within this field. Well, if you don’t know, you can really easily craft a daily brief, then you’re leaving chips on the table.

And so the students that do that, the students who think about topics and how they might connect. So one of the things I encourage my students to do is you don’t first go to AI. As you’re thinking about something, let’s say you’ve read a story in your daily briefing about something that’s going on in Brazil and their AI governance program, think to yourself, well, how does that compare to what’s going on in Korea because we’re studying what’s going on internationally and just think about that. And then if you want to stress test your thoughts, well, you can leverage AI to do that as well. Back in the day, you might’ve gone to the partner and said, “I read something about what Brazil is doing with AI governance and we were just talking about what’s going on in this other country.” Now you still may want to do that, but you can leverage the tools to help you think about the comparisons and the differences But the important thing is to do the thinking yourself as well and leverage the tools to help you further interrogate the connections.

And if you do that and you leverage these tools, you can gain your mastery without having to necessarily get that insight from someone who has the 20 years. I don’t want to downplay the importance of being able to have those conversations with real life human beings.That is incredibly important, but these new lawyers may not have that same opportunity. So what can you do? And it goes back to that self-directed learning so that when you do go to the partner, your discussions are at a whole nother level.

Zack Glaser:

Sorry, my brain just went into a slightly different direction here and I’ve got to scratch this itch. You said these younger attorneys or newer attorneys don’t necessarily have to go to a seasoned attorney. Now they don’t need to. Now they don’t necessarily need to have a partner helping them with their stuff. And so it could even potentially give more opportunity for younger attorneys. And again, by younger, we mean newer attorneys to just go out on their own, spread their wings a little bit earlier. But sorry, my brain just had to go down that path. But bringing it back to what we’re talking about, not only knowing how to use AI to help you with legal, but also is there a benefit that you’re seeing of just simply mastering AI and bringing that into a firm. So we get into that, having a junior attorney come in and if they know how to use artificial intelligence to their advantage to make them better, will they be able to spread that through the rest of the firm too?

April Dawson:

Yes, yes, without a doubt. And I’m going to answer that, but I do want to go back to the point that you raised about starting your own firm.

Zack Glaser:

Oh, I love this. Yes.

April Dawson:

Yes. Yeah. So the technology without a doubt for so many reasons, so not just the mastery of the information, but also how you run your firm and can you set up the processes so that you set up the processes from the get- go so you’re able to leverage AI or leverage agents. And so it is easier today, I think, for someone to start their own firm than it was 30 years ago when I became a lawyer. And I have

Zack Glaser:

Worked

April Dawson:

In the government at the Department of Justice. I’ve worked at a large law firm, I’ve had my own law firm, I’ve had my own solo practice, I’ve done pretty much it all. And if I were to start a solo or small firm again today, oh yeah, the AI and technology absolutely a game changer. Now what I will say is while the technology can help leverage our understanding of the material, the mastery of the material, the processes that we employ within the practice so it’s streamlined and it’s efficient and help us communicate with our clients better and more consistently, there is nothing that is better than community with human beings because it is a Team sport, if you will, because oftentimes you’ve got an adversary on the other side, you’ve got course. And so even if you leverage the technology as much as you possibly can, always make sure that you are engaging with people because there’s so much richness and value that you will gain from those interactions.

So I did just want to say that.

Zack Glaser:

We do have to keep humans around us, whether we like it or not, we do need to keep humans around us. And I think that’s a really good point, but the humans around us, the community around us serves a slightly different function when we’re able to have AI mentor us on the law. We still might have somebody that says, “You know what, Zack? Maybe don’t sue that person.” Maybe it’s better if you tell this person to just not sue their neighbor because it’s going to create problems. And so having that kind of mentorship is not necessarily there inside of the AI platforms.

April Dawson:

Yeah. Yeah. Or you don’t have to be nasty to opposing counsel because they … Or yes, this is your understanding of this topic, but there are some unstated concepts that AI may not have fleshed out. And so you may think that, okay, well, this is after doing all of the hard work. This is my thinking now. Running that by someone who has 20 years of experience, that’s golden. And the point is though, whatever you can do on that front end, you want to do it so that you leverage the time that you have with this person with 20 years of experience.

Zack Glaser:

Well, so April, what about … We went back to the, is it easier for attorneys? But let’s say that they’re coming, but yes, it’s easier, but I still want to go in because I want that mentorship and things like that. What’s the benefit of maybe me bringing as a new attorney, bringing my mastery of AI into that firm?

April Dawson:

Yeah, that’s huge. And I think legal employers at all levels are, I think, expecting that new lawyers have had that exposure and understand the technology and know how to use it responsibly and they are looking for some … Sometimes they say reverse mentorship. So I’ll mentor you on the substance. Can you mentor me on the technology? And so I encourage all law students while there are students to dig into the technology as much as they can because there will be that expectation. But also we talk about the economy and the unemployment rate for college graduates is going up. And when that happens, law school applications also go up because folks can’t find a job. So they’re like, “I may as

Zack Glaser:

Well go to law

April Dawson:

School.”

Zack Glaser:

Might as well.

April Dawson:

Yeah. And so there are some law firms that are shrinking their summer associate class and their incoming classes. So as law school graduates, those numbers are going up. If legal organizations are reducing the number of attorneys that they’re bringing on board, the competition is really getting fierce. And so I tell my students that they really do need to think about the differentiation, like how are they going to distinguish themselves because a competition is getting fierce. So students, they need to learn and understand how to use the tools responsibly and how to get the most out of them so that they can benefit themselves individually as lawyers, but also the organizations that they’re moving into.

Zack Glaser:

That makes a lot of sense and is a very practical thought there that I think for attorneys and students would say, “Okay, well, that is one of the things that I should get out of law school at this point.” Okay. Well, let’s kind of flip that around then. You’ve been with a lot of students talking to them about AI, using artificial intelligence in your own work. What’s one thing that you wish every small firm owner understood about AI that they probably don’t at this point? You got to pick one.

April Dawson:

Okay, just one, because you just need

Zack Glaser:

One. Out of the many, many, many.

April Dawson:

So the one thing I wish they really understood is that technology AI will necessarily change how we deliver legal services, which means that we have to take a look at our processes from beginning to end. Because if you have an inefficient process and you just layer AI on top of it, well, maybe you have just a little more efficient, inefficient process, but the goal is really to how do you best leverage these tools? And just because we’ve been doing things the same way for decades doesn’t mean that those processes are set up to best leverage how AI does its work.

Zack Glaser:

What’s the saying from your mouth to God’s ears? Yeah, absolutely agree with you on that. I love that. Well, I wish we had more time to keep digging into this, but I really appreciate your time. How can people find you if they want to know more about this or pick your brain on some of these things?

April Dawson:

I would say the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn. So yeah, you can always find me there, shoot me a DM and happy to connect. As folks can see it, I can talk about this all day.

Zack Glaser:

Same, same. And I really appreciate you coming in here and helping out our listeners. I think this was a very … I learned a lot in this one, I appreciate you and we will put a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes. Once again, thank you very much for being with me.

April Dawson:

Thank you, Zack. This has been a blast.

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