Perfect Albums, Vol. 5; Analyze This; “Overrated, Underrated—Thanksgiving Edition”

Episode Notes

Transcript

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Male: It’s the Legal Toolkit with Jared Correa with guest Nicole Clark.  We play overrated, underrated, properly rated Thanksgiving editions and then Jared has some sweet advice on how to save a bit of cash if you’re out on the dating scene but first, your host, Jared Correa.

Jared Correa: It’s time for the legal Toolkit podcast.  We’re not your mother’s legal podcast.  That is, unless your mom is a lawyer, then we are.  Now let’s get off mothers, because I just got off viewers and yes, it’s still called the Legal Toolkit podcast, even though I have no idea what an all is.  Is it a species of owl?  And would a southern owl be called a yowl?  Okay, then.  I’m your host, Jared Correa.  You’re stuck with me because Jack Nars was unavailable.  Bob Crosby and he were working on some scripts together.  Yeah, I pulled that one from the recesses of time.  I’m the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, a business management consulting service for attorneys and bar associations.  Find us online at redcavelegal.com.  I’m the COO of Gideon software and intake platform for law firms.  Learn more and schedule a demo at gideonlegal.com.  Now, before we get to our interview today with Nicole Clark of Trellis.  Yes, it’s time for us to talk about another perfect album, maybe well past time and for the first time in this series, we’re going to fly our time traveling DeLorean back to the mid-1980s.

This episode we’re covering Paul Simon’s Graceland.  Graceland is a landmark album.  It’s still probably the most commercially successful album to feature world music, South-African music but also music in the Mexican tradition as well as Ideco and more.  Now, that term world music is sort of loaded in its own right because it kind of implies that there is a mainstream American and I suppose British music and everything else.  That’s certainly problematic.  Now, I was thinking about when to do this whole thing when I covered this album and I think we should do it now because I want to spend most of my time focusing on the music.  If you know anything about this album, you know it’s controversial, and there are several reasons for that.  The first is that Paul Simon went to South Africa to record some of it during apartheid.  At the time, there was a cultural boycott placed on South Africa for its perpetuation of apartheid which in case you don’t know about this was a policy of formal government approved racial segregation, not good.  Apartheid was undoubtedly awful but it seems clear at least to me that Paul Simon wasn’t going to Africa to record sessions for what would become Graceland in order to support apartheid or just for the sake of thumbing his nose that the boycott though I guess he did so indirectly, at least, by participating in the economy when he was there.

Of course, the other side of that coin is that Paul Simon worked with black South-African musicians and even paid them above New York rates for the sessions they played on, as well as offering them royalties for the songs on which they performed or originated.  Now, part of the reason for that was that a lot of those artists didn’t even know who he was and so he had to convince them to work with him.  Plus, his last album, Hearts and Bones bombed. So Warner Brothers was like, “whatever, man, do your thing.”  They didn’t seem too concerned about him getting in trouble over this stuff.  Now, this would have been nothing like if Bruce Springsteen in 1985 had decided to go up and record an album in South Africa.  That would have been a huge deal.  Paul Simon, at that point in his career, not so much and it’s really tough to pull these things apart.  So was Paul Simon indirectly supporting apartheid?  Yeah, in some ways.  Was his goal to highlight the music of black South-African artists?  Also yes and I think that the latter was almost certainly his primary motivation.  Was he going to profit off of it?  Sure, but I do think that that ability to profit widely from the massive success of what would become the Graceland album was more of an open question than it might appear to be in hindsight.  There was no guarantee at that point that Graceland was going to be successful at all.  Paul Simon was taking a massive risk here at probably the lowest ebb of his career.  This was sort of like a moonshot.  So even if Simon’s motives were not entirely pure, I do think that his focus was on the musical journey and that he became obsessed with that more than anything else and in the end, I do suspect that Graceland probably had more to do with pulling apartheid down than building it up by highlighting the contributions of black South-African musicians for the world to see.

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But even beyond the apartheid issues, there’s the question of cultural appropriation and musical credit in general.  Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to figure out cultural appropriation on this podcast, though and the question of why South-African musicians needed the white savior Paul Simon to bring their music into the mainstream is probably pretty simply answered in that Paul Simon was already part of the mainstream.  It’s kind of similar to the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? which generated a resurgence of interest in American music in the mainstream.  Was that cultural appropriation too? Probably a little bit.  Now, in a perfect world, does Paul Simon just release a mixtape of his favorite South-African singers and offer them all the proceeds directly?  Maybe but that sort of effort doesn’t have the same or anywhere near the same gravitas and commercial appeal that a Paul Simon album would, even at the nadir of his artistic career or maybe Graceland is just the most impressive musical collaboration album of all time.

I think there’s a case to be made.  Beyond that cultural appropriation.  Part of this, there’s the musical credit debate.  So both the Zydeco band, Good Rock and Doxley and The Twisters and the Mexican-American band Los Lobos.  You remember them, they covered La Bamba for the Ritchie Valens movie starring Lou Diamond Phillips.  Both said that Paul Simon stole their songs to use on Graceland without their permission and without crediting them.  The true story is probably somewhere in the middle.  I would guess that Paul Simon got the ideas for the songs from these bands but likely changed or improved what they had done to generate the final released versions.  Who gets credit?  Probably both sides but this is a story as old as music.  You hear the same things about AP Carter, though.  You hear a lot more of those things about AP Carter and every popular artist ever has been accused of stealing other people’s songs.  Graceland maybe should have been styled as a group effort from the outset.  As I alluded to above, it’s a compilation of many different artists with Paul Simon as a headliner, since he pulled everything together and wrote a lot of lyrics.  Kind of like Paul Simon and his all-star band and if you look at the commercial version of Graceland that exists now, all the artists, for the most part, are credited on their individual songs.

So if it started out that way, maybe all these issues are blunted a little bit but maybe not, I don’t know, because a lot of this is racially charged.  Boy, I spent a lot of time on that, more than I wanted to but in general, I guess I would say that when I listen to albums and try to select perfect albums, in this case, I’m mostly interested in the end product.  Let’s be honest, a lot of commercial musical artists are assholes and musicians are not known for their prowess and contracting or intellectual property law.  That’s why they’re always getting fucked by their managers.  So these kind of situations have arisen and they’ll continue to arise.  I mean, Gary Glitter is a pedophile.  Does that mean I can never listen to rock and roll part one again? I hope not.  Michael Jackson, also a pedophile.  Is thriller a bad album?  No, it’s still fucking awesome.  John Lennon was violent towards women.  Are the Beatles a shitty band?  No, but the shitty Beatles might be.  Phil Spector fucking killed someone and he developed the Wall of Sound.  Can I never listen to another Wall of Sound recording again?  No way.  People suck but it shouldn’t ruin your enjoyment of their music.  You don’t have to run a background check on every artist whose music you like.

So in that spirit, let’s do the music.  Graceland is sublime.  It is a straight up masterpiece.  Even now, it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard and in the middle of the 1980s, it was like a sonic blast.  It might be the most eclectic popular album ever and Paul Simon actually pulled it off.  When Paul Simon talks about the title track, he refers to the rhythm as sounding like that produced by the Tennessee two.  That was Johnny Cash’s backing band, which features this strident drum track and I think that is sort of a tidy metaphor for how this album was produced.  Paul Simon sees all these connections between the South-African music and the other forms of music he’s investigating and the music he’s known since he was a kid.  Johnny Cash, The Everly brothers, they do backing vocals on Graceland.  They were his childhood heroes, Elvis Presley and more.  Hell, I mean, the whole Graceland thing is sort of like a marriage of church and state to itself.  A road trip to Elvis’s mansion fashioned as a spiritual journey.  When an artist Paul Simon was producing handed him a bootleg tape of South-African street music to listen to, he immediately knew he had something.  A version of his favorite song on that tape, Gumboots by The Bayoyo Boys later made it on to Graceland with contributions from the original artist, the woman who provided Simon the tape Heidi Berg was not a Paul Simon fan after that.  After Graceland became this cultural touchstone, of course, some of that is issues around credit, but also probably a bit of professional jealousy, since, again, Paul Simon was able to be the one who blew up all these influences and reconstructed them into something that was beyond any of them individually, including himself.

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In any event, when he was with Simon and Garfunkel, Paul Simon bought the rights to Peruvian folk song called El Condor Pasa and turned it into the hip hop song El Condor Pasa (If I Could) that’s probably a song, you know.  This time he took the process a step further by building a whole album around the concept of traditional music from various places, most notably South Africa.  Graceland is striking because of its musical sensibilities.  Every song is quite different.  It features unique harmonies and rhythms.  It is consistently interesting.  Every song you listen to next, it’s sort of like, “whoa, that’s different.”  Listen every track in order and it’s jarring.  It sort of works because it’s not really a consistent whole and Paul Simon did struggle to find themes throughout the album, partly by stringing together phrases and words but I don’t think it entirely works, though that only makes the album better.  However, I will say that Paul Simon when it comes to lyrics, is a craftsman and despite the potential issues with sourcing the musical techniques that appear on Graceland, Simon’s lyrics almost his own entirely are like poetry.  Even some of the nonsense and non-traditional wording that he pulls together for harmonies are perfectly executed and placed effectively right where they need to be almost every time but I haven’t even really talked about any of the songs yet.  Graceland, the title track, is a highway song in that very American tradition.  It features this jaunty backing beat and has some of the most stunning lyrics I’ve ever heard.  The introduction to the song is so beautifully done with the music leading into this famous set of lines.  You’ve heard this before, the Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar.  I am following the river down the highway to the cradle of the civil war.  I’m going to Graceland.  That’s just brilliant.  Then you’ve got two vignettes about losing love.  That part is about his ex-wife, Carrie Fisher.  Yes, Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia.  He was married to her and the girl who calls herself the human trampoline, meaning we’re bouncing into Graceland.  Both are quirky, especially the latter, but both further the song’s message in unique and interesting ways.  I love these random Paul Simon digressions that occur from time to time in his songs.  The part about Carrie Fisher is interesting, too.  Graceland is kind of a divorce song, and I guess it could be argued that Graceland is a divorce album, but it’s not a downer like Tom Petty’s Wildflowers.  Instead, it’s pretty peppy and a happy album overall, and I think intentionally so, sort of like it’s the I’m now over the divorce album.  I think it could be argued that Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes is the best song on the album.  It’s basically in two parts.  The opening segment is Acapella harmonies, partly in Zulu, featuring the group Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Simon.

The second segment is more of a traditional pop song with the bouncy rhythms notable on much of Graceland.  Plus, there’s more Paul Simon lyrical wizardry, including one of my favorite lines on the entire album.  “She is physically forgotten, but she slipped into my pocket with my car keys.  She said, you’ve taken me for granted because I please you.”  That’s just beautiful imagery honestly.  You could read that in the book.  Interestingly, this song was only added to the album when the release date was pushed from July to August 1986.  Other outstanding tracks, of which there are many, include the Boy In The Bubble, which is the lead song on the album.  I had a lot of allergies as a child and I was once a boy in the bubble, so this song is particularly meaningful for me.  This one also features a great intro.  The song intros in Graceland are killer, by the way.  As it starts with an accordion solo.  That’s right, I said an accordion solo calling Weird Al before the percussion comes in.  What was the last pop song you listened to that featured an accordion?  There are some tremendous lines.  Tremendous?  No.  How about tremendous?  There are some tremendous lines on this track as well.  The way we look to a distant constellation that’s dying in the corner of the sky and I believe these are the days of lasers in the jungle lasers in the jungle somewhere staccato signals of constant information, a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires and baby.  Baby I always thought I said babies, but it doesn’t, it’s just a single baby.

I’m hoping for elusive affiliation of millionaires, billionaires and babies to occur one of these days and I love the part where he does this subtle transition.  When the song goes, it’s a turnaround jump shot, it’s everybody jumpstart.  It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.  I know what I know is another song with fantastically unique backing vocals that appear at odd times and sometimes out of tune.

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Also intentionally.  The whoop! whoop! whoops! thing in the song is cool and the Gaza Sisters thing in the Shangaan language, which is this is the first time I’m hearing it.  Paul Simon again brings a western sensibility to these lyrics, relaying some bullshit that people talk about at fancy parties.  I love how he unifies the sentiments of a love song with the silly things people think are important over drinks.  “She moves so easily.  All I could think of was sunlight.  Aren’t you the woman.  Who was recently given a Fulbright?  No, that was somebody else.”  I also like how the outro is pretty stark and connects to the high strung intro to gumboots, the next track, which was a song that Simon particularly enjoyed on that mixtape he initially received and reviewed and which kicked off this whole process.  You know what they say, breakdowns come and breakdowns go.

You Can Call Me Al is probably the least unique song on the album.  It was the lead single, by the way, and that’s maybe because it’s the most straight pop song, though there is a penny whistle solo because of course there is.  It’s probably mostly remembered for the MTV music video featuring Chevy Chase, who is comically taller than Paul Simon.  But there are some lyrics in this one too that are really great.  “Why am I so soft in the middle now?  Why am I so soft in the middle?  The rest of my life is so hard.”  Tell me about it.  Under African Skies is a tribute to the country rich alliance with the story of Joseph from the Bible.  All around the world are the myths of fingerprints is a great little track to end the album on and features an intro that sounds a little bit like Footloose to me.  Don’t tell Kenny Loggins we got enough problems with this album.  Crazy Love, Vol. II has a really bright and affecting chorus.  Some people think the Vol. II part is in reference to Van Morrison’s crazy love, while others think it is a reference to Simon’s second marriage to Carrie Fisher.  That Was Your Mother is mostly a Zydeco song and sort of out of place on this album, honestly.

It’s a little bit jarring, but that is if anything could be out of place on an album that this eclectic but it’s fun song.  Homeless features more great harmonies from Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the choral group.  Now, after Graceland was over, and a greatest hits album, negotiations and love songs in between, Paul Simon went back to the well and released Rhythm of the Saints in 1990.  This time that album was based on South American music.  Now, Rhythm of the Saints features a song called the Obvious Child that may be better than any single song on Graceland, but the album as a whole pales in comparison to the majority and the majesty of Graceland.  That’s because Graceland is a perfect album, and you only get so many of those in one lifetime.

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Jared Correia: The You know who texts even more than my mom?  Law firm clients.  That’s why I’m here with Joshua Lennon, the lawyer in residence at Cleo, to talk to me about more tech enabled forms of communications for law firms.  Joshua, can you fill us in?

Joshua Lennon: Absolutely.  We’re finding that clients are demanding more tech enabled forms of communication than ever before, text messaging, secure portals, mobile apps, and even online payments with their law firms.

Jared Correia: How can lawyers take advantage of this and adapt to the new world?

Joshua Lennon: We see that a third of lawyers already are. They’re using legal practice management software that comes with these tools already built in so they can communicate the way their clients want.

Jared Correia: So, Joshua, how can lawyers learn more about such things?

Joshua Lennon: We actually talk about this in our legal trends report, which they can download for free at clio.com/trends.  It’s spelled C-L-I-O.com/trends.

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Jared Correia: Okay, let’s get to the meat in the middle of this legal podcasting sandwich, everybody.  Today’s meat is hummus.  Now, you might be saying to yourself, hummus isn’t really meat.  That’s right, I’m running out of meats.  But I eat a lot of sandwiches with just hummus in them. Like, not even as a condiment.  Check out jalapeno hummus if you have not, it’s delicious.  All right, that’s enough about my grocery shopping habits.  It’s time to interview our guest.  We have today in a return appearance on the Legal Toolkit podcast.  I think it may be her third appearance, which is amazing.

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Nicole Clark: Wow.

Jared Correia: Nicole Clark, the co-founder and CEO of Trellis.  Nicole, what’s up?

Nicole Clark: Hey, it’s great to be here again.

Jared Correia: Yes, we’d love to have you on, obviously.  We’ve invited you several times.  Before we get started, what are your feelings on hummus?

Nicole Clark: Oh, I’m a big hummus fan for sure.  There’s a raw sprouted hummus at Whole Foods that is legit.

Jared Correia: What’s it called? I would get some of that.

Nicole Clark: Something like raw hummus or sprouted hummus, something like that.

Jared Correia: I’m going to look at that.  I eat a lot of hummus, probably like 10 or 12 metric pounds of hummus a year.  It’s delicious.  So I want to thank you because you came on the show on short notice.  You got a lot of stuff going on.  So let’s get into this a little bit.  You have a company called Trellis, which I think has been doing really interesting things for years.  So just to let people in on that, can you talk about what Trellis is and what it does?

Nicole Clark: Absolutely. So we are a state trial court research and analytics platform.  For those that practice in any state trial court work, they know the system is fragmented across thousands of individual county courts.  So we go in, we aggregate the data on a county by county level.  We make it searchable.  So think high level, sort of one searchable system for the United States trial court system, the way you would search court of Appeals on Lexus or Westlaw state trial courts is us.  And then the ability to search by your judge or your opposing counsel or your legal issue or your motion.  So really a research platform and then because we have all this data analytics on top of the data, how judges rule, law firms, their performance across different states, et cetera.

Jared Correia: I love the analytics stuff, and I do want to get into that.  All right, so before we get into that, let me ask you, getting the state court data sounds like a huge pain in the ass.

Nicole Clark: Yes.

Jared Correia: And that might be like the understatement of the year.  So that’s good in a sense, because that’s a barrier to entry.  Like not every want to do that.

Nicole Clark: For sure.

Jared Correia: Right, not just the barriers, an entire moat.

Nicole Clark: Yes. There’s alligators, the whole lot.

Jared Correia: How do you deal with that?  This is not like gathering federal data.  You got like 50 different really disparate states and commonwealths to deal with.  How do you tackle that?

Nicole Clark: Correct. But now at the county level, right?  Because it’s not just the state level, there’s 3000 different counties and then some of those counties have multiple —

Jared Correia: Three thousand different counties in the US we’re talking about, gosh.

Nicole Clark: Correct.

Jared Correia: Wow, that’s horrible.  That sounds like a nightmare.  So how do you manage that?  Is it just like I’m going to tackle one state, one county at a time?  Because I think that’s what you were doing to start with.  Right?

Nicole Clark: I mean, that’s right. We started with California way back in the day.  Really with basically creating a secret weapon for me.  Where was I practicing most often and then expanding and then you expand by priority in terms of number, the legal population, population in general value of litigation, volume of litigation.  We are now, believe it or not, we’ll be 44 states by the end of this year.

Jared Correia: That’s amazing.

Nicole Clark: We are over 2000 counties right now.

Jared Correia: Wow. That’s tremendous because I think maybe the last time we talked you were like maybe 10 or something like that.  That’s been rapid, right?

Nicole Clark: We move fast. Yup, absolutely.

Jared Correia: Okay.  I think you got some funding in between too, which I’m sure helps out with that.

Nicole Clark: It does.

Jared Correia: Okay. So can I guess the states you’re not in yet?  Just tell me when I’m wrong.  South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana.

Nicole Clark: I think we have Montana.  I think you’re right on the Dakotas.

Jared Correia: Okay. Let me go with Wyoming, Idaho.  How am I doing?  Alaska?

Nicole Clark: I think you’re pretty good.  Honestly, we’ve added so much recently that it’s hard for me to keep up with the team.  I swear to you, I’ll go in and I’ll say we have 2000 counties and they’ll be like, we have 2500.  I’m like what?

Jared Correia: You’re like, wait, we added 500 counties?  I had no idea.

Nicole Clark: Yeah.

Jared Correia: Do you have a target date of when you’re going to hit all 50?

Nicole Clark: Yup, Q1 one next year as we call it our race to the 50 and we’re going after everything by then.  We’re on track with, you know, we’ll be at 44 by the end of this year.

Jared Correia: Race to the 50.  I hope there’s going to be like a little trophy for that.  That would be amazing.

Nicole Clark: We’ll self-appoint it, give ourselves a trophy.

Jared Correia: So it’s interesting when you were just talking about launching, you kind of were like, okay, I’m launching this software company.  But I think you were still practicing at that point.

Nicole Clark: I was.

Jared Correia: So the idea was like, oh, I can give myself a little bit of an advantage here by building the software.  I don’t know if we discussed this in detail last time you were on, but I’m always interested in people’s founder’s stories, especially if you’re an attorney who’s built a legal software product because a lot of people who build legal software products aren’t attorneys.  So I think you got a little bit of a built in advantage there.  Talk to me about why you were like this sounds like a really fun thing to tackle.  Let’s go after the state course and get their data.  Why’d you build this out?

Nicole Clark: Yeah.  Founder delusion.

Jared Correia: Is that what it is?

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Nicole Clark:  I started in California, California has these specific rulings that judges issue. Basically, the day before they’re going to rule on the record where they say why they’re going to grant or deny killer motion. This doesn’t end up on the public record. So it’s this beautiful judicial thought data that is released for one day and then taken down.

Jared Correia:  It’s like the Snapchat of law?

Nicole Clark:  Yes, that’s exactly right. Exactly like really substantive data. And so it occurred to me that this information was being released and nobody was aggregating it. And here I was practicing in State Trial Court. I did a lot of employment litigation, and I couldn’t believe that there was this sort of ephemeral data that was out there. And so I complained to smartest engineer that I knew, really the only engineer that I knew. Let’s be real.

So we started just collecting that data in the courts that I was appearing most often as really a secret weapon for me, and I wanted to see if the data was valuable for me. It ended up being so valuable for me. My motion practice changed dramatically when I could see what the judge, the case law heard and how to organize motion. And so that sort of, over time, became very obvious to me that there was something massive here, not just for me, but for others. So I continued practicing for about two years.

Jared Correia:  Did you have the thought at that time that, like, “Oh, I’m going to do this and leave practice,” or was it like kind of a slow realization?

Nicole Clark:  I had the thought at the very beginning, let’s try this out. I want to make sure and validate whether this is real. It was terrifying. I didn’t have a huge cushion of savings to rely on from practice. I had a young daughter at the time, but it ended up over those two years. So it took a while to really convince myself to go for it. And over those two years, it ultimately, towards the end, began to feel like it was a bigger risk not to start the company, to just stay practicing.

Jared Correia:  Yes. A great way to look at it. There’s a little monkey that comes out of a closet and tases me if I don’t talk about AI on every podcast.

Nicole Clark:  I get it. AI monkey.

Jared Correia:  So we’ve got the AI conversation.

Nicole Clark:  Yes, we do.

Jared Correia:  So what I think is interesting is people talk about AI like, oh, my God, AI is something like, AI is happening. But AI has been around for a while.

Nicole Clark:  What a while? Yep.

Jared Correia:  So I think that E-discovery and legal research platforms were really like the first ones in legal to jump on the AI train and really do something with it. Why do you think that is? Because there’s obvious applications and other software, but nobody did it until now ChatGPT is a thing, and every freaking case management software out there is like, “Hey, we got our AI platform”, but never did it before. So why were you in your industry so far ahead on this? Do you have a thought on that?

Nicole Clark:  I think there’s a couple of things to think about there. So if you think about the big legal research players you have, Lexis, Westlaw and even E-discovery, these are sort of cash cows in terms of dollars that they bring in. So the ability to experiment and to utilize new technology, which was fairly expensive and difficult to do previously. Now AI is like this commoditized thing where anyone can slap it on their website, make some calls to open AI, and suddenly you’re an AI company. And so I think that’s been one big difference. We were venture backed. We were able to put dollars into AI team machine learning algorithms early on. But it took until now for wild commonization of this technology to start moving so fast that really anyone could use it.

Jared Correia:  That’s a good answer. Yeah, OpenAI, the nonprofit that wasn’t. Had a CEO, didn’t have a CEO. Now is a CEO again.

Nicole Clark:  One of my favorite weekends. I mean, the twist —

Jared Correia:  It was wild, wasn’t it?

Nicole Clark:  It was so wild. Every time I looked, I was like, and he’s coming back and he’s leaving.

Jared Correia:  All right, so your product features, AI, as you talked about.

Nicole Clark:  Yes.

Jared Correia:  So how did you build that in over time? What’s the process on that? Because that’s not all that — your software is not just an AI software for you, AI features. So when do you decide, “All right, we’re going to build this in, this is why we do it, this is how we’re going to create this and have people use it and test it”?

Nicole Clark:  So we needed it early on. If you think about our, we have a massive amount of data. I mean, it’s the largest court system in the entire world.

Jared Correia:  I was reading. Yeah, go ahead.

Nicole Clark:  And this is data that’s unstructured, meaning case type is not called the same thing across 1000 different courts, it’s 1000 different things.

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So we needed to basically build in algorithms and machine learning to classify this data so that we could make it one searchable and the ability to deduce meaning from it, but also, obviously for the analytics. And so that was really built out of necessity for billions of data points. How could a human possibly really classify all that information? And then that gives way slowly other time to additional applications. But it’s an interesting point of the difference between AI and generative AI, right? There are companies that have been utilizing AI for years, and then now when folks say AI, it seems like they’re talking about generative AI, which is a very recent aspect of AI.

Jared Correia:  Right. I think a lot of people who have not been in on this, people who are not necessarily very online, don’t do a lot of tech stuff. I think they think AI is only generative AI.

Nicole Clark:  They do.

Jared Correia:  But I think it’s cool that your use case is for predictive analytics, which I think is a great use case for AI.

Nicole Clark:  Absolutely.

Jared Correia:  Let’s talk more broadly for a second. Where do you think this ends up going? Let’s say five years from now, what’s the average lawyer’s workday look like, and how much is that affected by AI tools? Are they doing less? Are they doing more? Are they using more tools? Are they using fewer? Because I think everybody’s caught up in the moment. They’re like, “Hey, I’m just trying AI, just messing around with it”, but this is going to become entrenched at some point. What does that look like?

Nicole Clark:  I think it depends. So it’s a timing question for me. Will it massively impact the way that all attorneys work? Yes, some practice areas are going to be disrupted much faster, and then in general, it’s a timing question. It will happen. How long will it take? I think transactional work. I mean, they should really start planning. That’s something that it’s going to be —

Jared Correia:  Because you generate documents, which sounds suspiciously similar to how the generative AI works.

Nicole Clark:  That is exactly right. I also think even when you’re talking about litigation, there’s so many different aspects where it is going to be able to produce first drafts faster. And then I don’t think litigators are going away. I think the type of work that they do is changing. And I do think that ultimately, whether it be five years, whether it be sooner or longer, there will be a disruption in terms of sort of amount of overhead of staff that a law firm will have to have. I think the number of associates will go down dramatically. So it will be a wild transformation. In general, I think, from billing models are going to change. There’s a lot of stuff coming. The question is really, when? How long will it take the lawyers to really jump on board?

Jared Correia:  Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because I don’t think a lot of people are talking about that necessarily. But this whole notion of pricing for law firms like, oh, the billable hour is going to be dead. And people have been saying that for 30 years. But this is kind of like a real thing, because if I’m a client and I’m like, I just paid you like five grand to build a document, why don’t I just use ChatGPT or Google bar to do that? What’s the difference? And I think that lawyers are going to have to view themselves as like competing in the marketplace with AI tools more directly than they think.

Nicole Clark:  I agree with that. And then you have the thought of, “Okay, well, give it to the lawyer. They can create a first draft and then review”, or the client can create the first draft and then only take x amount of time of the lawyer. And that, I think is an interesting place to be in.

Jared Correia:  That’s for sure interesting. And if you’re a savvy enough client, you might be like, “Hey, I just built this myself on AI. Dress it up for me” which is going to cost me less. It’s certainly an interesting time to be alive, an interesting time to be practicing law.

Nicole Clark:  For sure.

Jared Correia:  So I want to come back to this data analytics thing, which is AI driven in your program. I love this. This is like maybe one of my favorite tech features of any legal tool. So could you talk a little bit about how it works? Because I think it’s two things, right? Like, part of this is judge analytics and part of this is law firm analytics. So how does that work?

Nicole Clark:  That’s true. We also have court venue analytics as well.

Jared Correia:  Oh, great. Okay, yeah, throw that in there as well. Let’s put some logs on the fire and let’s talk about that.

Nicole Clark:  Awesome. So, judges, to start with, right? You are appearing before a judge in the state trial court system. It is the wild west in terms of the way judge’s rule. The outcome of your case is just dramatically impacted by the judge that you happen to be assigned to. So some of the work that we do is understanding really the judge’s caseload. What are the types of cases that they hear most often? So how sophisticated are they in particular areas? How long do they take? How long by practice area and matter type? And then very specifically, how do they rule on important pretrial motions. If it’s a case where you need to win on a dispositive motion, is that going to happen with this judge?

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All the way down to timing, analysis, not just time to trial or average time to the case likely getting dismissed, but if you’re going to win on a dispositive motion, if the case is going to end there, how long will that take? If that’s really what you’re shooting for? And so there’s a lot of different ways to think about judge analytics and just being prepared. What types of motion does a judge never grant a specific motion. Cool. Don’t waste your client’s money bringing that motion. Do some other things so you can make a lot of decisions that way.

Jared Correia:  Before you get to the other stuff. I could also see a situation where a judge is accessing their stats, right? “Oh, shit. I never rule in a positive way on this motion. Maybe I should change it up.” Has that happened?

Nicole Clark:  Well, I mean, we don’t know, right?

Jared Correia:  No one’s ever reached out to you and been like, “Hey, you know like”.

Nicole Clark:  No one has said, I changed my mind because I saw my own data.

Jared Correia:  Thanks for showing me that. I’m going to throw a few change ups here.

Nicole Clark:  I think it’s super interesting questions. And that’s something that data and time will be able to tell us.

Jared Correia:  Right, Yes.

Nicole Clark:  It’s having any impact in the way the judges are thinking about ruling. That being said, judge looking at their own data, probably a data of other judges in their county.

Jared Correia:  I’m sure they are.

Nicole Clark:  They basically want to see what the lawyers are seeing, right? They want to understand. We do judge biographies, too. So you have all the subjective information about your judge, career, history, political affiliation, all that stuff. And judges reach out to us all the time. “Hey, add this award that I received, or what have you.”

Jared Correia:  Now that I could see, and this is why I’m probably not a judge, because I’d be fucking with people constantly. You think I’m going to rule in a negative way on this motion? Well, watch me go against trend. All right, so you’ve got a couple of other items. You’ve got the law firm stuff, and then you’ve got the venue stuff. You want to hit the venue stuff first?

Nicole Clark:  Yeah, let’s hit the venue stuff. So this is high level. Think of it as setting expectations/venue shopping, if you will. If you have a choice where to bring a case, look high level at the court and you can actually compare up to three court against each other. See how long matters take, how quickly they get dismissed. Grant rates, denial rates, all that same kind of stuff you’d see on a judge level, but really at a county level, so you can make better decisions about venue. And then law firm analytics is one that we worked super hard on, really proud of.

Jared Correia:  The very little in the way of law firm analytics, by the way, tools in the marketplace. So go ahead.

Nicole Clark:  And that’s even true at the federal level, where it’s one structured data set, let alone at the state trial court level, where it’s just a mess. So, yeah, at the law firm level, part of what makes it so hard at the state trial court level is that most counties will list an individual attorney as appearing counsel, not the law firm.

Jared Correia:  Oh, interesting.

Nicole Clark:  Now, add in that lawyers move laterally and firms merge and firms change. So trying to track across the nation at a law firm level is just incredibly complicated. We did a ton of work utilizing AI to extract information out of documents, captions, lawyers signature blocks, all of this. And then basically think of it as a giant LinkedIn who worked where, when, and then mapping that at the law firm level.

Now the law firm analytics are used as much for business development as for strategic purposes. Who are my peer firms? Who am I competitive with? Who are their clients? Do we share clients? Do they have business that I don’t have? What practice areas are they growing in this year by volume of cases that they’re representing? Is their firm growing? Are there regions? So where are the opportunities that my firm can move forward in a way that someone else’s, or where are they leaving things on the table that we can go grab as well?

All the way down to, can you think about at a litigation level, what types of cases have they handled that are similar to this? In my region before my judge, have they appeared before the judge? How many times? Do they have a ton of experience? And then digging in, obviously down to the individual cases. What happened in these motions were filed in this cases. And then corporate counsel is another one that utilizes law firm intelligence, which is, I have panel counsel and I actually want some transparency into how they’re doing across the nation. Are they winning summary judgment motions? What outcomes are they getting? How long do they take in comparison to other firms and making some better decisions about evaluating counsel?

Jared Correia:  That’s awesome. I think you’re doing some really good stuff and continue to do so. Nicole, thanks for coming back on again. Can you stick around for one last segment? You want to come back on the rump roast for a second?

Nicole Clark:  I’d love to.

Jared Correia:  Awesome. We’ll take one final sponsor break so you can hear more about our sponsor companies and their latest service offerings. Then stay tuned. As I mentioned, and as always, for the rump roast, it’s even more supple than the roast beast.

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Dave Scriven-Young:  You like legal podcasts because you’re curious and want to be the best attorney you can be. I’m Dave Scriven-Young, host of Litigation Radio, produced by ABA’s litigation section with Legal Talk Network. Search in your favorite podcast player for litigation radio to join me and my guests as we examine hot topics in litigation and topics that will help you to develop your litigation skills and build your practice. I hope you’ll check out litigation radio and join the ABA Litigation section for access to all of the resources, relationships, and referrals you need to thrive as a litigator.

Jared Correia:  Welcome to the rear end of the legal toolkit. That’s right, everybody. It’s the rump roast. It’s a grab bag of short form topics all of my choosing. Why do I get to pick? Because I’m the host. As I look around, Nicole, at my seven Christmas trees in my home, which is not egregious at all, I’m getting into the holiday spirit for real. And I don’t even have a quiz for you. I just want to talk about Thanksgiving. Because it’s a great holiday where you can just be a fat piece of shit and it’s totally socially acceptable.

Nicole Clark:  Absolutely.

Jared Correia:  So let’s do a little overrated. Underrated. Properly rated Thanksgiving edition. Because I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Okay, I got three categories. Category one is food stuffing, or in some parts of the country, they call it dressing. Overrated, underrated, properly rated. Your thoughts on stuffing? Turkey stuffing.

Nicole Clark:  Inside the bird. I like it. Separate stuffing.

Jared Correia:  Excellent point.

Nicole Clark:  I think it is rated correctly.

Jared Correia:  Okay.  I will tell you; I am actually an out of the bird stuffing person. Can I tell you something about myself that I don’t know if I’ve shared publicly before, which is that when I was a child, I used to eat stovetop stuffing dry from the container.

Nicole Clark:  Well, your opinion can’t be counted. Automatically excluded.

Jared Correia:  That’s fair. And I did eat a shit ton of stuffing this Thanksgiving, as I always do. I basically make a plate. This three quarters stuffing. This is my life. All right, next one. Next one. In the food category, thanksgiving without turkey. I have seen a lot of people go in the anti-turkey route. I had somebody tell me they were doing tamales. I had somebody go with chicken. I have heard people do fish. So lack of a turkey at Thanksgiving, properly rated, overrated or underrated?

Nicole Clark:  The turkey is symbolic. It’s a hard thing. I think it should still be there. I actually struggled this year because the kids were like, I don’t want turkey, or salmon or McChicken or something like that. You know what I did? I told them it was chicken. No complaints.

Jared Correia:  All right, next on my list, category one food. The last one. Dinner, Thanksgiving dinner. So let me be clear. This is a big debate in my family. Up here where I live, we do lunch so that you eat quickly and then you snack for the rest of the day and then you do other stuff. But I do have family members, they don’t eat on Thanksgiving until like 9:00 p.m. which I think is crazy. Okay, so Thanksgiving dinner, meaning dinner, like the supper meal. Overrated, underrated, properly rated?

Nicole Clark:  Well, now it depends because you’re saying that time period, I think —

Jared Correia:  When do you have your big meal, really about this?

Nicole Clark:  The right time period for Thanksgiving meal is that like four to 6:30. It’s still early enough that you have time to feel less fat before you go to bed. But what are you going to do? You’re going to wait till nine to eat Thanksgiving. You’re going to be eating all day. Then you’re not even going to be hungry for your Thanksgiving dinner by that time.

Jared Correia:  Yeah. So you’re a 4:00 person?

Nicole Clark:  Yeah, I would say I’m not in general, I’m a late dinner person.

Jared Correia:  Oh, sure. But on Thanksgiving.

Nicole Clark:  But on Thanksgiving it’s an earlier one. You should go early. Early bird special.

Jared Correia:  Interesting. Yeah. I do one for Thanksgiving.

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Nicole Clark:  But you had to get up early to start cooking in order to make that work out.

Jared Correia:  If I cooked, no one wants me to cook. I’m an awful cook. Well, the reason I ask is because now we’re entering category two, which is activities.

Nicole Clark:  Okay.

Jared Correia:  Watching football on Thanksgiving. Overrated, underrated, properly rated?

Nicole Clark:  There are people that like that. I’m not one of them, so I would say overrated, but there are many people that enjoy that.

Jared Correia:  Yeah. If you were a lions fan this Thanksgiving, it was —

Nicole Clark:  Was it a good game?

Jared Correia:  Very much overrated. Now they got hosts. All right, here’s an alternative. Playing football on Thanksgiving, not watching it.

Nicole Clark:  That sounds fun. I’m all about that.

Jared Correia:  I would even go so far as to say underrated.

Nicole Clark:  I like that. I would say underrated. That should be brought around more often.

Jared Correia:  All right, number three, post, feast, walk. This is a big thing up in New England. Everybody has their Thanksgiving lunch, dinner, liner, whatever you happen to eat, and then you go out for a walk. Underrated, overrated, properly rated? Do you do this yourself?

Nicole Clark:  You know, I feel like when I lived in the northeast, I did do it. So it’s funny, I just thought to myself, maybe because it’s not as cold or there’s something different in California where you don’t really think about doing it, but I like that. I think underrated.

Jared Correia:  Okay, last one. Category three, the miscellaneous potpourri category. You don’t know where this coming from. Going on vacation for Thanksgiving instead of doing stuff with your family. Overrated, underrated, properly rated.

Nicole Clark: You know, I think that’s underrated. I think people should take more time for themselves. I did this one year, had the kids somewhere else, and just went away for the weekend. Phenomenal. It was a great.

Jared Correia:  It sounds amazing. I have been trying to get my wife to do this for years. Like, I want to go to light Jamaica for Thanksgiving because it’s not a heavy travel time for vacation stuff.

Nicole Clark:  Exactly. Less people, less expensive. I support that.

Jared Correia:  I think you’re right on there. All right. Political discussions on Thanksgiving. Overrated, underrated, properly rated. I hate talking about politics. I think it’s asinine and I don’t like it. But I sort of enjoy the drama a little bit because I’m not involved in it. It’s really funny sometimes to see your relatives get heated over politics while I’m over there eating a shit ton of stuffing. How about you?

Nicole Clark:  So it depends on your family. I’ve seen it backfire many times. Thanksgiving fight is almost part of thanksgiving.

Jared Correia:  A tradition.

Nicole Clark:  Yes.

Jared Correia:  A tradition like no other, as they may say about the masters.

Nicole Clark: So, I like your approach. Don’t engage. But watching works.

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Jared Correia:  Yeah, I think it’s underrated for watching purposes. I like to just watch people go at it. Nicole, this was fun.

Nicole Clark:  Super fun.

Jared Correia:  We’ll have to have you back for another holiday at some point.

Nicole Clark:  I love it.

Jared Correia:  So we can discuss overrated, underrated, properly rated. Thank you for coming on. Enjoy the Trellis Retreat in Maui, which I believe is where it is.

Nicole Clark:  Exactly. Awesome. Great being here.

Jared Correia:  If you want to find out more about Nicole Clark and Trellis, visit Trellis Law. That’s T-R-E-L-L-I-S-L-A-W Trellis law. Now, for those of you listening in Memphis, Tennessee, perhaps you’re going to Graceland, maybe sitting on a toilet eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich? I don’t know. I’ve got a dope playlist I’ve put together for you. It’s a career retrospective for Paul Simon, including some of Finn’s inspirations for Graceland. Give it a listen.

Now. Sadly, I’ve run out of time today to discuss the urban dictionary entry for cobbing, which probably has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, right? Probably. This is Jared Correia reminding you that the Tunguska event was a real thing, actually the largest impact event to earth in recorded history, not just something that was made up by Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz. Come on now.

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