How Today’s (And Tomorrow’s) Legal Tech Can Up Your Game

Episode Notes

Transcript

Dave Scriven-Young:

Hello everyone, and welcome to Litigation Radio. I’m your host, Dave Scriven-Young. I’m a commercial and environmental litigator in the Chicago office of the Peckar & Abramson,, which is recognized as the largest law firm serving the construction industry with 115 lawyers and 11 offices around the us. On this show, we talk to the country’s top litigators and judges to discover best practices in developing our careers, winning cases, getting more clients, and building a sustainable practice. Please be sure to subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcasting app to make sure you’re getting updated with future episodes. This podcast is brought to you by the Litigation section of the American Bar Association. It’s where I make my home. In the ABA. The Litigation section provides litigators of all practice areas, the resources we need to be successful advocates for our clients. Learn [email protected] slash Litigation. On today’s episode, we will unravel the intersection of law and technology shaping the future of Litigation from artificial intelligence to blockchain.

We’ll explore how emerging technologies are revolutionizing legal practice, case management, and Courtroom proceedings. And today we’ll navigate the dynamic landscape of legal tech and its profound implications for the future of Litigation. And our guest today is Katie DeBord. She’s disco’s vice president where she works with the product team to help strategize how disco can change how legal is practiced and delivered using technology. Prior to joining disco, Ms. DeBord served as the global Chief Innovation officer of a large international law firm where she led an international cross-disciplinary team that was dedicated to legal service delivery innovation. Before joining the world of legal innovation, Mr. Board was commercial Litigation partner and a trial attorney specializing in complex contract patent and IP licensing matters, as well as consumer class action defense at an AM law 50 firm. She has extensive experience serving as an advisor to various companies and legal innovation initiatives as a guest lecturer to law schools teaching legal innovation and the business of law. And as a speaker on legal innovation. Katie Deboard, welcome to the show.

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

So glad to be here and thanks for having me.

Dave Scriven-Young:

So my understanding is that you were the first chief innovation officer at a very large law firm. And so tell us about innovation at law firms because I don’t think lawyers are known as being very innovative, creative, maybe especially in making arguments that make the law or make the facts apply to the law. So tell us about innovation at law firms and what your position entailed.

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

Yeah, I mean, so you’re right that historically I don’t necessarily know. I always struggle with the comment lawyers are not very innovative because on the one side, it’s true on the other side, not we can get into that more in a second, but the firm that I was at, Brian Cave had really a long legacy of innovation, and we had a long time partner there by the name of John Alber who really drove innovation within the firm. Before that was even a thing when I came in, I was asked to, the firm had created a new strategic plan and they actually created a formal team for innovation. Instead of having the more elusive partner who’s also practicing looking at innovation, I came in as a result of several conversations with John and my chair, but it was really scary because the strong appetite there was, we don’t want you to keep practicing. We want this to be a dedicated c-suite role, which never had happened in a law firm to my knowledge before me. And it’s scary when you work really hard as a litigator, as I know David, making partner, all that stuff to say, okay, I’m going to stop and refocus my career on this elusive self-indulgent term innovation.

And so I really thought about it and I talked to my partners who I litigated with at the time, and one of my partners who was a mentor to me for a long, long time, said, Katie, one of my biggest regrets in my career is that I didn’t take more left turns. And this is a left turn. This is an opportunity for you to really learn an adjacent area. It may be great for you, you may hate it, but if you do hate it, you can always come back to Litigation. You’ve proven yourself in Litigation, so why not give it a try? It’s fairly low risk. And so I did it. And honestly when I started doing it, when I started off, I think actually I think the role started in 2014. I wasn’t sure if I would last more than a year to be honest with you, but seven years later, after the first year, I knew I was in it for good, right? I mean, there was just so much opportunity in this space. And seven years later, I had a team of about 40 people, transatlantically. We were on the really cutting edge of a lot of things that we see a lot that are a lot of firms are doing today. And then I decided I wanted to go to a tech company. So that’s the sum up of how that happened.

Dave Scriven-Young:

So the way I think about innovation and the law is that we seem to be a little bit behind where technology is going because we are slow adopters, at least my opinion. You can tell me whether that’s wrong or not. And I wonder how your colleagues reacted to having a chief innovation officer at a firm where, as I’ve said, lawyers are slow to kind of take up. I mean, I remember when I was in law school, Lexi and Westlaw was a thing. They were both a thing, but I still was trained in how to do research using library books. And I still to this day don’t understand why. I guess they thought maybe the internet was a fad and maybe computer aided research was a fad. But yeah, I mean, tell us a little bit more about how things transpired over there.

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

Wasn’t that a pain, by the way, to do that research? God.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Oh gosh, yeah.

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

So I think the reaction was very dependent both on the practice and the mentality and maybe age of the lawyer, although it is not true that the older lawyers were necessarily less innovative or less interested in thinking about different ways to practice, but it ranged anywhere from skeptical to fully embracing. I think the thing that was important was a couple of things, right? One was that I could speak their language that it’s not somebody coming in who’s never practiced, who’s never faced risk. I mean, that’s the thing. These lawyers face a kind of risk in the kind of high stakes that a lot of people, unless you’ve practiced in that sphere, whether it’s Litigation or transactional, you just don’t really have a good idea of what that risk feels like and how scary it can be to release your trust onto something and not know exactly how it works.

So I think that helped. I think also finding low hanging fruit. How can we look at maybe find some margin challenged practice areas and help them leverage technology and process of people in a different way and show them that they can become more profitable and then have them tell that profitability story to their peers. Because at the end of the day, lawyers want, all of us are sorry in this for the money. And if you could show true economic value, either through increasing client stickiness or through efficiencies or whatever it is that sells itself. And then I think the third thing is speaking the language of the client. So even lawyers who may have been skeptical of this legal innovation concept, increasingly, and I really mean this increasingly became true, their clients not only would talk to them about it, but you would see it in RFPs, you would see clients really drilling down into how are you practicing, how are you leveraging technology? And if you’re just as good as X firm across the street, but one’s leveraging the latest technology well and one is still working with red ropes hard copy folders for our younger audience, you’re going to go with the more technologically proficient firm. And so I think those three concepts kind of woven together, even brought the skeptical people further on board.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And now you’re continuing on to assist law firms with innovation at disco. So for folks who don’t know about disco, can you tell us a little bit about the company?

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

So disco was started off as an alternative e-discovery platform to sort of the historic e-discovery platforms that when I started practicing, eDiscovery wasn’t even a term, but quickly there became an entire ecosystem around eDiscovery. You had the people who collected the information, the people who would surface the information on the platform, and then the people who would review the documents. And all of that kind of became this diaspora of separate companies. And then there firms really were forced to work within that ecosystem, which isn’t necessarily always good or efficient. I have lots of horror stories about that just for my own practice, but disco really felt like for lawyers, you’ve got to minimize the amount of places the lawyers have to go, the things the lawyers are touching, and the people who are touching it, really for your highest value to get the highest value in my mind, use out of it.

We can go more into examples that I’m talking about, but at any rate, disco really saw a way for lawyers to work with the technology differently and is now beyond that core product of eDiscovery, disco’s really on the cutting edge of looking at end-to-end Litigation management, and I mean real Litigation tools that from the very start, when you get that complaint in, or even before you get the complaint in when you know something’s coming and you’re trying to do early risk assessment, what do I advise my client? Do we need to settle quick because this is going to be a disaster for us? Or we know our CEO, we have some bad stuff and our CEO is going to get deposed and we need to get rid of this. I mean, we’ve all been in those scenarios all the way through that, through deposition prep, through trial prep, through really understanding, thinking through what your order of proof is and what evidence is supporting that and what your law is, and having it all in one place and creating a space for collaboration. That’s where disco is now in terms of working through that technology. And that’s why I came to disco is because they have the right vision and they also have a very agile way of working, which is let’s give this a try. Let’s try this out, let’s experiment. And now with gen AI and all the possibilities both with AI and gen ai, we just have a lot of exciting things on the horizon.

Dave Scriven-Young:

I came across disco I think for the first time as one of those alternative eDiscovery vendors to some of the more traditional websites. But I understand you mentioned using generative AI to create work product and also to aid in that early risk assessment and case preparation process. Can you talk about what sort of products or other things that disco might have that could help a litigator do things more efficiently in those areas?

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

Yeah, I mean, so we have a suite of generative AI skills. We call them our Cecilia skills. And the way that I like to think about the suite of skills isn’t on a product basis, but I’ll tell you the products, but it’s more on a functionality basis. And part of that is to just help people understand how gen AI can be used differently than maybe the typical AI that they’ve used. But the first skill is creating content, meaningful content out of multiple documents or a large document or something like that. And I’ll give you a specific example. So the first thing that we’ve done with that skill is we’ve created the ability to auto generate a chronology, a timeline. And in order to do that, people can upload witness statements, they can upload complaints, they can upload. If you’ve internally done statement of facts, anything you want, you can upload into this tool.

The tool will understand what facts go together, what is a fact, what is not. Because oftentimes in those documents you have things that aren’t statements of fact, although I shouldn’t even use the term fact, I should use the term allegation when it comes to complaint. But regardless, it is basically auto accelerates your chronology, and then you use that as your baseline to do whatever you want with your chronology, but then it will also attach where it got that information, it will allow you to validate where everything came from so that you’re not trying to back hack why did it say that this was an event that occurred? So that’s the first thing is creating content. The second skill is auto tagging. So auto classifying, I should say, how we’re using this skill right now in the eDiscovery database is you can upload a review protocol into your eDiscovery database and then through generative ai, it will start auto tagging the documents that it thinks it’s responsive to each of those categories of documents.

And you can imagine it’s really funny to watch lawyers’ reception of this because they sound super skeptical until they see it and then they’re like, oh my God. And that’s the power of generative AI to really understand contextually the context of things and then to classify them. And so that’s what we’re using for that. And then another skill is interrogation, which is we have a chat bot basically Cecilia chat within our e-discovery database. And you can ask Cecilia questions like, what was Katie Dhir board’s role at disco? If I’m, God forbid if I’m involved in a lawsuit, you can get a summary of Katie Deboard was the vice president of product strategy. She joined disco in May of 2022. Before that she was blah, blah, blah. And that summary, that answer will then have pin citations to all of the documents that Cecilia relies upon to come up with that answer.

And I gave you a really simple question, but you can imagine more complex questions that you can interrogate Cecilia with. It’s really interesting watching the evolution of lawyers go from thinking about how they would just do a Boolean search for information they want to get to going to that interrogation of Cecilia where they want to see how the tool talks about things or the evidence the tool says is in support of something, right? It’s an interesting dynamic and it does create more interesting inquiries. And again, all of these are tools is none of this is to say that it’s doing the lawyer’s job. It’s just a tool for looking at facts and issues differently for interrogating your evidence, for understanding what happened in the case for thinking about how you’re leveraging your evidence in the case. It’s also a tool in my mind for more efficient workflows like deposition prep, let’s use that tool to ask what are the core documents that support this allegation?

And thinking about how you’re using that in the prosecution of the case. So that’s a third. And then the final one is summarization. And this is, you think about the first place that we’re doing this is depositions. And so, right, and this hasn’t been released to the market yet, but we are summarizing deposition testimony, but in a way that’s helpful for the lawyers, not just line by line, but topics and identifying the topics that are more fulsome discussed in the deposition. And what we want to do with that once we have that established and good, is then you can think about, okay, how do you look at testimony across 20 depositions and identify nuances and where things might be different? And so you can see a lot of activity coming with that. So long-winded answer, but that’s where we are with N ai doing a lot more stuff in the background that I can’t talk about, but it’s really cool and fun stuff.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Do you have any troubles having lawyers trust the AI that is kind of embedded in your programs? And the reason I ask is I know lawyers tend to go to the worst case scenario, and we’ve all heard the story where lawyer wrote the brief and we actually didn’t write the brief, just asked AI to write the brief and came up with answers that fake case sites and that sort of thing. And so do you have lawyers come back and just say, well, why should I trust this tool? Because it could pretty much just make up whatever it wants

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

At first. And that’s why lawyers really have to understand who’s building these tools and how they’re being built disco’s tool points. So we have answers for all of that, right? We don’t hallucinate. And you can actually, lawyers have tried to make our tool hallucinate, and if the tool doesn’t know the answer, it won’t hallucinate. And it also gives you, it validates, so it actually validates what documents it’s relying on. So it gives lawyers that independent verification method, but our tool, the q and a tool, for example, only points to the document set in the e-discovery database. And so we’re very mindful of all of that in creating these tools so that lawyers can actually use them. Because just like anything, right? If you have an associate or a Paralegal or any other technology, you have a duty of oversight. That’s the ABA role. And so you do have a duty to use tools where you can validate the responses.

And the lawyer in New York, and I think we’ve had a couple other lawyers since then, haven’t used tools where they can validate their responses and they haven’t really understood that lawyer in New York thought the tool was a replacement for Westlawn Lexus, which it’s not. So yes, we do, there’s a really good program out of MIT led by a guy named Daza Greenwood. Basically he’s running something out of MIT to create some standards for lawyers and using all technology. And he has this list, this chart of best practices of when you’re a lawyer, what should you be thinking about? And it is these concepts, can I validate it? Do I where the data’s going, right? You need to make sure your data isn’t going somewhere else and that it complies with privacy laws, that your data is secure, that your data, all of that stuff is being handled correctly. And lawyers, they don’t need to understand how all this works, but they do have to have the basic ability to supervise this technology and to confirm that they’re comfortable with it just as they’re comfortable with using TAR or even lower level types of technology.

Dave Scriven-Young:

One of the other maybe pushback things that lawyers might say as well, I work on a billable hour. Why would I give up some additional hours that I could be spending? Why do I want to be more efficient? I mean, maybe that’s, and ethically speaking, of course, you want to be more efficient because you really shouldn’t be billing your clients for more hours than it should take. But do you ever find pushback in that area as well?

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

Especially I have found in the United States as opposed to the UK market where the market is so squeezed, lawyers in the United States have more luxury to say, I don’t need to be efficient. In fact, that runs against my economics. I think that is becoming less and less of the case. And you think about back in the old days where we had massive document productions and you’d have, I remember a certain very notable firm that everyone wanted to go to when I was in law school, and this firm did all the finfin Litigation and they would put their first and second associates, your associates in a warehouse offsite to just review documents for responsiveness, hard copy again, for those who are too young to know how things went back then. But then other firms saw this, including Kirkland. This is one of the reasons why I went to Kirkland and said, what a waste of resource and talent, we worked so hard to identify the right lawyers, the right people to come into our firm.

Why would we use our people to do that instead of hiring other people to do that document review and then put our lawyers that we hire on the higher and better use cases. In doing that, you skill up your teams faster, you do deploy resource in a higher and better way and put out better product. And putting out better product ultimately means you create more client stickiness and you get better cases and you’re a better lawyer. So I think lawyers are figuring that out. I don’t think that’s unanimous. I mean, you certainly have, you’ll always have the laggards who want to bill for inefficiency. I think that we also now, I mean obviously we have an ABA rule now that specifically addresses this and requires lawyers to be technologically competent, and clients are looking at this, and if they see that lawyers aren’t practicing in a technologically astute way, they’ll question that a lot of the times.

Sometimes they won’t. I also think though these tools, and this is true even for tar ai, right? The prioritize review type of AI or automation or anything else, but it’s especially true for generative ai. I don’t think generative ai, at least what we’re doing, is not so much of an efficiency play as it is a strategic play. It’s leveraging technology to see things differently, right? To see things that the humans may not be seeing, to see commonalities, to see behaviors that things that are happening within your fact pattern across your witnesses that maybe the humans will pick up on, but you’ll pick up on a lot earlier leveraging this kind of technology. And I think that’s what we’re going to see more and more is that technology in legal practice is no longer just an efficiency play. It really makes you, it positions you for strategic decision making and more creative lawyering and better lawyering that you would be able to do on your own.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And what can we look forward to from disco next? Are there any upcoming developments or innovations that, and I’m sure you can’t tell us everything, I’m sure some things that you’re working on that are secret, but what is the next phase of things that we should be looking forward to, either from disco or from the legal tech community generally?

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

Yeah, I think from disco, all of those things that I talked about, interrogation, summarization, work, product creation, you can think about other things that you can do with those skills to really uplevel the litigator’s experience. And one of the things that I can talk about is disco, recently licensed federal and state law. We’re now working to create an integrated experience for lawyers where they can see their facts and work with the law in the same place. And we’re working on how can we enable litigators to leverage generative AI in the legal to identify fact patterns that are similar to the fact patterns that they’re facing. And that becomes very, very cool, especially as you get more complex and you get into more complex Litigation. You can imagine a generative AI tool, for example, saying, Hey, you’re litigating under this statute. There’s not a lot of historical treatment of the statute or analysis of the statute under this fact pattern, but this statute has a very similar structure, has very similar treatment, whatever. Maybe you can apply by analogy, this fact pattern, and here’s the law that specifically deals with the facts, like the facts of your case. That becomes very cool. That’s down the line. That’s not immediate, but that’s the kind of stuff that we’re working on and looking at as we go forward, as well as, again, just bringing more and more to the front for litigators to be strategically better as they’re prosecuting their case.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Very exciting. And so we are coming to the end of our time together. Katie wondered if you had any kind of last thoughts to share with our audience today?

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

I think it really is the don’t be afraid to take left turns. We have a lot of exciting things. I think we’re at a time in the legal profession where things are really quickly accelerating, and whether you’re a litigator who’s trying to figure all this stuff out and trying to sort through the wheat and the chaff, do it. You’ll be ahead of most litigators if you just do what litigators do and research and learn this subject area. And if you want to do more and kind of get more and more into the space, don’t be afraid of that either.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Excellent. And for folks who wanted to reach out to you or to learn more information about disco, how would they go about doing that?

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

Yeah, DeBord, D-E-B-O-R [email protected].

Dave Scriven-Young:

Wonderful. Well, Katie DeBord, thank you so much for being on the show today. I think I know I learned a lot and I’m sure the audience did too. Thanks so much for sharing your information today.

Kathryn “Katie” DeBord:

Thanks so much for having me.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Thank you to disco for sponsoring Litigation Radio Disco makes the law work better for everyone with cutting edge solutions that leverage AI, cloud computing and data analytics to help legal professionals accelerate e-discovery and document review. Learn [email protected]. And now it’s time for our quick tip from the ABA Litigation section. I’m pleased to welcome back Latasha Ellis to the show. Latasha is a litigator in the Washington DC office of Hunt, Andrews Kirth focusing on insurance coverage cases. Welcome back to the show, Latasha.

Speaker 3:

Excited to be here.

Dave Scriven-Young:

All right. Well, I understand you’re going to be giving us tips about providing feedback to junior attorneys. So what’s your quick tip?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I think that all of us inevitably have found ourselves revising work product by junior attorneys or summer interns. It’s usually the same. A junior attorney gives you a draft and for whatever reason you think maybe it doesn’t work. So you might explain the problem. You might ask your inexperienced colleague to revise and resubmit it, but in some instances that next draft might also fall short. So then you repeat that process perhaps a couple of times, and in the end, you ultimately take the document and rewrite portions of it yourself. I know this sounds familiar to a lot of our litigators. The issue with this process, however, is the junior attorney likely understands that the final iteration is certainly better than their own initial effort, but they haven’t learned how to achieve that excellence on their own. So I have four tips that I think will help that feedback process with junior attorneys more effective.

We obviously cannot avoid editing junior attorneys writing. It’s part of our profession, it’s part of the mentoring aspect of our profession, but I think that we can make that process more effective. The first tip is provide instructions. This seems very elementary, but of course a good foundation is the best place to start to turn junior attorneys, junior novice attorneys to experienced attorneys who ultimately one day supervise tomorrow’s junior novice attorneys. This will allow you as a more senior attorney to focus on your practice, which sounds a bit selfish, but of course, we’re lifting as we climb, and that is the best way to help the firm. This instruction can be as simple as providing writing related resources or maybe even providing sample documents. Of course, the big piece with providing sample documents is that you have to provide a proper guidance because using samples can demonstrate an effective approach, but it of course is not the only approach.

The second tip is providing explanations. And there are two types of feedback, two types of ways to provide feedback, and that is directive and facilitative. Both are super helpful, both are necessary, and each has its own place in value. Directive feedback will be essentially telling the recipient what to do, or perhaps maybe you just do it. This can be useful at the start of a document. The first time maybe you run into a repeated problem, you can demonstrate a certain kind of revision and how to fix it and allow the junior attorney to independently make the rest of those revisions to the document. The second type of feedback is facilitative feedback, and this is where you might note the problem and prompt the recipient to figure it out on his or her own. So you might point out some general problems with the document, maybe ask some questions, raise some issues, propose certain revisions.

This type of feedback certainly takes more time, but that extra time spent is certainly not feedback wasted. It really is an investment because it will pay off when that junior attorney is more quickly and more effectively creating work product for clients and for the firm. So the second tip is providing explanations. The third tip is avoid using track changes. This seems counterintuitive, but track changes is in some respects the worst type of directive feedback because it requires little to no thought to simply accept the changes. In contrast, when using facilitative feedback such as comment bubbles or even notes in the margins, if you’re still doing handwritten notes, it really forces the junior attorney to think a bit more about the changes that he or she is making to evaluate and to understand the feedback. The fourth and final tip is always include positive feedback. So in the midst of providing this instruction and providing the directive and facilitative feedback, it’s so important to explain why good parts are good.

And this is not just necessarily to protect the ego of the junior attorneys, but it reminds the attorney that they are capable of doing what needs to be done. And they do in some respects and maybe in certain aspects of the document, understand what makes good writing. So I think our goal is certainly not to make just any one document better, but when providing feedback, the goal should be to make the junior attorney a more effective writer for future projects. And sometimes we do have our looming deadlines or things that have to be done right away, and it can certainly prevent this type of this level of feedback. But when you can to the extent you can, it is good to remember these tips, providing instruction, providing explanations in the form of directive or facilitative feedback. Avoid using track changes when you can and including positive feedback.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Thanks Latasha for those tips. Really do appreciate you being on the show today. And that’s all we have for our show today. And I’d love to hear your thoughts about today’s episode. If you have comments or questions you’d like for me to answer on an upcoming show, you can contact me at [email protected] and connect with me on social. I’m at Attorney Dsy on LinkedIn, Instagram X and Facebook. You can also connect with the ABA Litigation section on those platforms as well. But as much as I’d like to connect with you online, nothing beats meeting in person at one of our next Litigation section events. So please make plans to join us at the 2024 insurance coverage Litigation Committee, CLE seminar in Tucson, Arizona, taking place March 6th through the ninth. Join us to learn about the very latest developments in insurance law from leading lawyers and insurance professionals, as well as valuable networking events and a variety of outdoor activities that only Tucson can offer.

This year’s meeting will feature the same high quality programming that has attracted insurance practitioners from all over the US and other parts of the globe from more than 30 years. To find out more and for registration information, go to mbar.org/ Litigation insurance. If you like the show, please help spread the word by sharing a link to this episode with a friend or through a post on social and invite others to join the show and community. If you want to leave a review over at Apple Podcasts, it’s incredibly helpful. Even a quick rating at Spotify is super helpful as well. And finally, I want to quickly thanks some folks who make the show possible. Thanks, To. Michelle Obert, who’s on staff with Litigation section. Thanks. Also goes out to the co-chairs of the Litigation Section’s audio content committee. Haley Maple and Tyler, true thank you to the audio professionals from Legal Talk Network. And last but not least, thank you so much for listening. I’ll see you next time.

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