AI And The Terms Of Service. Know What You Are Sharing!

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

So if I was starting today as a New Solo, I would

Speaker 2:

Entrepreneurial aspect,

Adriana Linares:

Change the way they’re practicing

Speaker 1:

Leader,

Speaker 2:

What it

Speaker 1:

Means to be,

Adriana Linares:

Make it easy to work with your clients,

Speaker 4:

New approach, new tools, new mindset, New Solo.

Speaker 5:

And it’s making that leap. Making that leap leap.

Adriana Linares:

Welcome to another episode of New Solo on Legal Talk Network. I’m your host, Adriana Linares and today I have a really great guest who’s been on the show before, back in October, 2019. Daniel Whitehouse came on and we had a long talk about terms of service because many attorneys like to use an at gmail or a free Dropbox or an Outlook account, which are free services. And many times y’all don’t read the terms of service and understand what you’re doing when you’re using something that’s free versus paid. So if you want to really dive into that, please go back and look for the episode from October, 2019 it’s called. Did you really read those terms of service? Daniel Whitehouse was my guest back then and he’s back now and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your time. Daniel, thank you so much for coming back.

Daniel Whitehouse:

Thank you for having me here. And I will say that I’m not sure lawyers are reading those terms of service now even though we’re a few years after we recorded that episode. But I do think the message was hopefully clear then that don’t use free services because you are not protected in many areas that we can probably get into when we talk about our subject today. But that premise has not gone away. If you’re using a free service, you are probably not protected. So then the terms of service will tell you to what extent you are probably not protected.

Adriana Linares:

That’s right. If you bother to read them and you alluded to today’s topic, which we’re not going to rehash that topic because I’m pretty sure if you go back and listen to that episode, everything still applies Today we’re actually going to talk about the terms of service with some of the wonderful artificial intelligence tools and services that are readily available to us. But before we get into our topic, I think it’s really important, Daniel, that you tell everybody about yourself, where you practice, the type of law that you practice and why you’re my expert today.

Daniel Whitehouse:

Thank you. I’m a technology attorney that practices transactional law, so I represent a lot of technology companies. We deal with their contracts, data privacy, sometimes some data security issues. Hopefully they’re listening to me at the beginning and not running into data security issues, but it does happen. So most of our clients are technology companies and dealing with the types of issues that we talk about and translate to law firms and the legal tech challenges that law firms face as well. So I’m based out of Orlando and the firm is White House and Cooper.

Adriana Linares:

Wonderful. So actually write terms of service for these technology companies

Daniel Whitehouse:

All day long.

Adriana Linares:

I just feel like I couldn’t have a better expert if I had gone fishing for one in the pond of lawyers out there. Lemme start with a real general question before we dive into some of the specifics that I want to ask you about Jet GPT and copilot, which is every time I talk about this with lawyers, I say, well, you’re the lawyer, go read the terms of service, and they all kind of look at me the way, I hate to say this sometimes the way my mom does. What do I know of terms of service? Obviously any attorney who decided to actually dig in could read those terms of service and understand what they were saying and what the company is trying to message. So can you give us kind of a high level, here are the things you’re looking for, here’s what you really want to see. Maybe you could even put a terms of service into an AI and ask it, do these terms of service meet such requirements? Do they say this? Give us an idea sort of the CliffNotes of what we’re looking for when we are reading some terms of services.

Daniel Whitehouse:

Great question. And the one that I always want to focus in on first is confidentiality. Who owns the data that is entered into the platform or product or whatever? What license are they taking to that content? Is it purely just for purposes of delivering the service back to you, the user who is hopefully paying for it or are they doing something else with it? Are they learning from your data, your information? And if they are learning from that information, what are they doing with what they learn? For example, when we talk about AI here, we talk about learning from the inputs, learning from the corpus of data or documents or chats or what have you that are input into the tool. And when they learn from those, are they using that to improve their platform and to give those responses to everyone else who’s a user of their platform?

Or is that learning localized just to me or my firm, my tenant? So if we’re talking about Microsoft 365 and the users who are in my Microsoft 365 environment, I’m okay with Microsoft learning from that data and supplying it back to my other users and my firm. I’m not okay with them learning from data and information that we might put into Microsoft and then sharing that publicly. Great example here, if you’re familiar with OneDrive for document storage, I’m okay with being able to share OneDrive documents in my office in and around my office. I’m not okay sharing OneDrive documents publicly. And if we think about terms of artificial intelligence, think about what would happen if you were to share your entire OneDrive with the general public as opposed to sharing that with your internal firm. And sometimes it’s as easy as a checkbox to make a mistake that, I mean not from our side, not from the end user side, but for some of these products that are available on the market, it’s truly just a checkbox is the difference between whether they’re learning just within your tenant or if it’s learning for the entire platform.

Adriana Linares:

I just want to just explain the word tenant. I think we’ll use it a lot. I use it a lot in my last podcast and I will probably use it a lot going forward. And that is, it’s real simple. When you lease an office, you become a tenant of a building owner, property managers, and it’s kind of the same idea with Microsoft 365, right? We are renting services from them. We are renting a server for OneDrive, we’re renting a server for exchange, we’re renting services. So when you hear us talk about the tenant, it basically means your little installation and rental from Microsoft, that’s your tenant and that means that everything inside of your tenant, much like everything that would be inside of your brick and mortar office is private and confidential to you confide. So is that a good analogy there when we talk about a tenant?

Daniel Whitehouse:

I think it is. I think some lawyers might think of multi-tenant office spaces that have different companies in them. And so if they do get that picture in mind, then just narrow down, keep narrowing it down. We’re talking about just your space that is within that office building that is reserved for you and your employees. That’s it. No one else.

Adriana Linares:

And kind of like you would have your own wifi inside of your office and then the next law firm next door would have their own wifi and the twains shall not meet. So your data is kind of the same idea with a Microsoft tenant, right?

Daniel Whitehouse:

Yes it is.

Adriana Linares:

I think that’ll help us. Okay. And then I also just want you to just say out loud, Microsoft OneDrive does not share our data with the public. You were using it as an example,

Daniel Whitehouse:

Right? I was using that as an example. Yes. Microsoft OneDrive does not share our data with the public. We could make a very bad mistake and share it with the wrong people, but that’s user error. That is not Microsoft, that is not platform type error.

Adriana Linares:

Very good point to make everyone calm down. OneDrive is good and private and confidential and secure. Back to just general things that we’re looking for when it comes to terms of service. We talked just now about what we might be looking for with ai, but what about advertising? What if I go to read my terms of service and they say, okay, we’re not going to share your data but we might use what you’re putting in for advertising purposes.

Daniel Whitehouse:

If they’re using it for advertising purposes, what else are they doing with it? That means they’re extracting something from our data for the purpose of being able to use it for advertising. And generally when we say use it for advertising, they’re thinking about targeted ads back to you. So they know that you are in a certain type of just let’s just say family law, they can learn from you that you’re a family law attorney and so therefore they might target ads to you for products that are related to family law. But if they’re using that information for advertising, that means they’re learning something from you in order to retarget that information. It really depends on the service that we’re talking about that could be doing this. I tend to shy away from that and personally I want to turn off as many of those optional advertising settings as possible. One, because we get fewer targeted ads, but more importantly we’re not granting them the permission to be reviewing our information. So I really do try to turn that off as best as available.

Adriana Linares:

And I have a feeling that if you’re reading a terms of service and they’re talking about advertising, it’s probably going to be a completely different type of service than using and sharing your firm data. So maybe Instagram’s terms of service are going to be more, you’re probably going to see more heavy language about advertising then you shouldn’t see any of that inside of your terms of service for a business account for Microsoft 365, you want to just make sure that you don’t see anything about sharing and using your personal, and by personal I mean firm data, which you also should not see when it comes to a paid Microsoft 365 account. Is that

Daniel Whitehouse:

Right? And I think your distinction there is spot on. We’re talking about paid services versus free services. So Instagram, you don’t pay to use Instagram, you are the product in Instagram, they’re targeting you ads and that’s how they’re making money off of the product. Whereas if you’re paying for the Microsoft 365 business suite, then again you are paying for that. So part of what you’re paying for is not to have ads targeted back at you because you’re giving them revenue from a different source.

Adriana Linares:

Excellent. Okay. Any other key things we should look for when we’re looking at terms of service? And I will ask you to talk about this too. What about when I pull up the terms of service for a product, a service or a platform that was built specifically for lawyers versus something that was built for consumers or business professionals? I think those are two different categories for sure. Consumer business professional and then a subcategory of business professional would be lawyers.

Daniel Whitehouse:

Yes, there are two different categories. Let me back up to what else we’re looking for in the terms of service because sometimes depending on the product, it can be very difficult to find even that suggestion around who owns what license to data. It might not be in the terms of service, it might be in a privacy policy. Instead it might be in some frequently asked questions document buried on their website. One of my cues to lawyers who are researching products is if you can’t find what you’re looking for in those documents, why are they making it so difficult for you to find it? It should be in bright, bold letters, what the confidentiality obligations are to you as a lawyer if you’re going to use that product. So use that as your red Flagg if you can’t find it or you have to look 10 layers deep into nested documents that could tell you some indication of the potential product that you’re looking at there.

Flipping over to your other question around products that are marketed specifically to lawyers or legal professionals, generally speaking, they know what we’re looking for upfront and they’re working to put that information front and center for us to tell us all about their privacy, all about the security levels that they go through, the steps that they take to ensure that they’re protecting our data, what license, if any, they need to our content in order to deliver the service back to us. Generally speaking, those products are giving you the information that you really need right upfront. I’m not saying that all of them are trustworthy, you still need to do your due diligence and review the terms and conditions and understand the vendor that we’re talking about here, but they should know by now the questions that we’re all asking and seek to address ’em upfront.

Adriana Linares:

That’s excellent and I’m glad to hear you supporting what I often say, which is read the terms of service but and not, but also And if it’s built specifically for legal, chances are it’s what you want and it’s also likely already been vetted by a bunch of other professionals, including the IT companies and committees and technology committees for legal professionals. So great. Okay. Anything else before we move on to our next topic that we should think about when we’re looking at reading, digging through? Maybe don’t be lazy. What you just said made me think. Okay, you just said if you go to the terms of service and you don’t see it there in there, it might be in the privacy policy, which they typically link to within the terms of service. Yes. Okay. If you don’t find it there, you said it might be somewhere else. And I guess the suggestion is don’t get lazy and if you can’t find it, maybe go look somewhere else for what you’re looking

Daniel Whitehouse:

For and by somewhere else it might be a different product instead. Right? Yeah. Okay. One other thing, and I think this will transition us to our next area in AI is now the question when you’re reading terms of service is we talked about confidentiality and what they’re doing with the data, but what are they learning from us and what are they doing with what they learn? But with regard to ai, the whole model around artificial intelligence, a continuous learning model, it’s always ingesting new information and providing us insights into that information. So is that learning happening from the data that we are supplying the tool, the LLM, the large language model, or is it coming from all of that publicly accessible information and ingesting that into our results? So it’s a whole new level of how AI works for lawyers and what information it’s feeding back to us.

We really need to know if we’re submitting a query to an AI tool, is it searching our information to provide us back that answer or is it going out to that LLM that it’s collected from all of these publicly accessible sources? And is it answering that information based on that publicly accessible information? Perfect example, when chat GPT was first coming out and was making waves, I was asking it questions such as what is the non-compete rule or non-compete laws in California? It’s a fairly specific, right? I want to know one area of law and it gave me an answer. And then I tried a different artificial intelligence tool and I asked it the same question, copy, paste, same exact question, show me the results. Two different tools, two completely different answers. One of them was closer to correct, one of them was not even close.

Adriana Linares:

And is that because you knew what the answer should look like? Which I think is really important for lawyers to realize is if you’re going to use these, you want to use it, you don’t want to go in blind, you want to have some expectations of what you’re looking for. Or was this a question you’d never ask?

Daniel Whitehouse:

Oh no, I knew the answer and I was testing the tool. I wanted to see how the tool responded. And one of the issues we deal with is when did the tool stop learning? So with one of the older versions of chat GPT, it had an expiration date. I think it was September, 2021, that’s when it stopped scouring the web for information. Well, so if something changed between September, 2021 and when I was running that search, obviously it’s not going to be capable of providing a proper response. And as lawyers know, the law does change on occasion quite regularly. And so if we’re trusting information from publicly gathered sources, well we need to know the answer before we just blindly go to the search tool and say, give us a response back.

Adriana Linares:

Very good tip. Well, let’s take a quick break, listen to some messages from some sponsors and when we come back I’m going to ask you specifically about Chachi PT and its terms of service, the types of things we as legal professionals should and should not be using that for. And then we’ll see where we go from. We’ll be right back. Okay, we’re back. I’m here with Daniel Whitehouse. He’s a technology lawyer based out of Orlando. Very good expert to have today to talk about terms of service for today’s growing, budding popular and sometimes controversial AI services. So I want to ask you specifically Daniel about G PT because that I think has been obviously the catalyst for an interest in ai, one that all of us can try and use for free. And then you can also pay $20 a month, which I do because if I’m going to use a service and there’s a free versus a paid, and I know this might not be terms of service free versus paid, I want you to tell us about that then I pay, but have you been using chat GPT?

Daniel Whitehouse:

Good question. I have used chat. GPT, what are you using

Adriana Linares:

It

Daniel Whitehouse:

For? I’ve used it for a lot of things. I’ve used it to answer questions about household chores and give me a simple answer. Don’t give me many links to other answers. I’ve used it to generate summaries for presentations. I’ve used it to test its boundaries on whether it knew the non-compete laws in California, which it did not by the way. Right? That’s about the extent of it. I have not trusted it well enough to ask substantive legal questions and I’ve run up quite a few tests around legal issues, legal questions, things of that nature. But it’s only been for testing purposes, it is not for the actual answers to their questions. I used it once to generate a sample letter of recommendation for my high school daughter who was asking me for samples of letters of recommendation that she could see. And again, that’s about it. Personal uses.

Adriana Linares:

Excellent. How about its terms of service

Daniel Whitehouse:

Backing up to our last conversation around what it’s doing with the data that it learns where it’s getting information from that it’s displaying back to you. It’s essentially a free service and even if you pay the $20 a month, it’s learning anything and everything that it can from you and it’s pulling data from just publicly accessible web sources that may or may not be right. It’s the same as putting something into Google and finding a source that you know to be wrong either because it’s outdated or you just don’t agree with that source. So one of the issues that people run into with chat GPT is it doesn’t tell you where it pulled its answer from. It just gives you the answer. So there’s some other tools that are trying to do a little better at that and show their work, if you will. For our math friends,

Adriana Linares:

I’ll give an important tip and maybe, I don’t know if you’ve dug this deep into it or not, but when you create a chat GPT, which you can do and it’s easy, you do have to give them your cell phone number, it’s the way they prove that you’re a human and they attach cell phone number to your account, you can go into the settings and specifically tell it not to use your inputs to train the models. I don’t know how true that really is that they wouldn’t, but I think what I’ve been talking to a lot of lawyers about is it’s really good at generating text. So if you just wanted a generic consent, and I’m reading some of my prompts that I use when I’m talking about this, but let’s say you didn’t want specifics for your client, but you wanted a generic consent of a lessor to an assignment of a lease by a lessee to a new lessee and add a provision disallowing alterations without landlord consent.

Okay? If you’re asking it to generate a generic legal text, it’s going to do a pretty damn good job. And I find that a lot of attorneys who even try asking it to generate a statement of facts based on these facts, but then they don’t put any actual names, just have it give you a shell or a draft, find that it’s really useful. And I have certainly seen a lot of attorneys who are surprised at just how helpful it can be with that. But I think the key is not trying to use it in the examples that you just gave, which is in legal research and there are probably reasons for that,

Daniel Whitehouse:

And I am sure most listeners have heard some of the bad stories around using it for legal research and the hallucinations and the one case in New York that just completely created a new case that was submitted to the court and everything that’s evolved from that. And so there is a level of trust when you’re using this tool to give you specific answers back. Part of the issue is it’s just pulling, well, unless it’s hallucinating, it’s just pulling from public sources. It’s not pulling from legally trained tools that are specific to lawyerly research and precedent specific court cases. It won’t tell you whether a case has been overturned like the many of the research tools that we subscribe to outside. And of course they’re all working to catch up and integrate AI to cause us to use their platforms more instead of having to go outside, which is a good thing really.

It’s a good thing not to have to go to external sources when you already subscribed to something. And so I’ll say that my firm recently subscribed to copilot as part of the Microsoft 365 Suite, which is essentially a version of chat GPT and I feel a lot more comfortable entering questions and inputs into the version of copilot that is local to our firm, our tenant than I do just opening the standard chat GPT iPhone app or web browser and putting anything into that. One is because I paid for copilot, we pay for copilot and we’re paying Microsoft for that. And Microsoft is the largest investor in OpenAI. So they’re using chat GBT in the background, but they have their own flavor of how they’ve incorporated it and they’re giving us the same data protections that we are accustomed to and Microsoft 365 and OneDrive and many of the other suite of services that we use for Microsoft. So that’s my one personal plug for the day.

Adriana Linares:

Well, we’re going to talk about Microsoft 365 after our next break. I’m so excited about it, but I just pulled up a document. So the lawyer I live with, he printed out, oh yes, he printed it out. This chat GPT history that I just want to read to everyone very quickly because it’s going to circle back to the comments you just made about legal research tools versus none. So he asked it, he said, you’re a lawyer representing an owner in a construction contract draft a liquidated damages provision with the daily damages of $500 per day. It spitted out. He thought it was great and then he said that he wanted more. This is good, but can you make it even more detailed using the date of substantial completion as the date by which contractor must complete the work before damages commence, but also provide a grace period after the target date of substantial completion before damages commence of two weeks.

So he said, okay, dig a little deeper and then chat. GPT said, absolutely, I can further refine the provision to include the substantial completion. Spits out another response. The lawyer I live with was quite pleased. He was like, ah, this is good. Now I can just tweak this, add my own voice a couple more things. But he writes, can you tell me the source of your answer or the source of this language? And it said, as an AI language model, I generate responses based on a vast data state of information available on the internet including legal knowledge contracts and common clauses used in various industries. And then it goes on. So that gave him, thank you for being honest, you can only do so much. But then he asked it, are you able to access legal treatises like Westlaw or Lexi or similar legal library books?

I don’t have direct access to subscription based legal databases like Westlaw or LexiNexis or proprietary legal library books. My knowledge is based on a diverse range of publicly available information. I think that’s the key, right? Publicly available information including books, websites, articles, and other sources until my last update in January, 2022. So if you’re going to do legal research, you need to use L models that are trained on legal research like the ones you’ve been using all of these years. But if you’re looking to draft content, come up with social media posts, do your personal things, and you’re not putting in your 16-year-old daughter’s actual name as you’re writing a letter of recommendation for her,

Daniel Whitehouse:

Which I did not,

Adriana Linares:

I know you wouldn’t, and fix it to be in your own voice and make it make sense to where you’re putting it.

Daniel Whitehouse:

The last part is key there in that the lazier we get as professionals, the worse off we’re going to be. And we can’t fully trust any technology to do our jobs. For us, the technology is a tool to make our jobs easier, make our lives more efficient. And that’s where AI comes into play. It’s all about finding that right balance of efficiency and saving us time so that we can be focusing on the tasks that really matter, the strategy, the output, the business decisions that we’re helping our clients make based on all of the other supporting data. And if you’re just going to turn over the entire work to the tool, you’re going to get yourself in trouble.

Adriana Linares:

Yes, and we have seen plenty of examples of that. So I think it’s worth it for legal professionals to look into paying for the AI tools and services at Lexi Westlaw, fast case text, Vieth, co-counsel offer you and make sure you just can sleep well at night that you’re paying for. And these are business assets. These are business tools. Sometimes attorneys are so cheap, gosh, it makes me crazy and I just don’t get it. These are business tools. So if they cost a couple hundred dollars but they provide you with the output that you want and you’re feeling confident in the security, the confidentiality and the output, I think it can be worth it. So we’re going to come back after this next break with some messages from some sponsors and talk about my favorite thing in the whole world, which is Microsoft 365 as we all know.

And co-pilot. Last month I had Adam Alexander on, he’s my favorite IT guy. And we were lamenting about how us as small business owners solos and smalls couldn’t have co-pilot, which is Microsoft’s AI built into our Office 365 tools because they were only selling it to organizations and companies that were 300 users or more in mid-January early to mid-January, they announced that it was now going to be generally available even for US littles out here in the world. Daniel and I were talking in the green room, we both jumped on it, are paying the $30 a month. And so we’re going to come back in a minute and talk about those terms of service and why you should be excited about using Microsoft 365 copilot even at a cost. We’ll be right back. Alright, we’re back for the juiciest most exciting part of this conversation. That is Microsoft copilot. So Daniel, how do you describe copilot to your peers or your clients when you’re talking about it?

Daniel Whitehouse:

I refer to it as being my own AI assistant, if you will. Very similar to some of the marketing around what Chet GBT was designed to position itself as. But copilot is searching within your own Microsoft 365 tenant intending to relay information back to you. That is your information. It’s just helping you find your information faster. It’s giving you intelligence on your information. And if you want it to go outside and search some of those publicly accessible sites, it can do that as well. But more importantly, we have so much data, so much digital footprint nowadays that we have to deal with. And it’s in email, it’s in documents, it’s in spreadsheets, it’s in teams messages, it’s in teams transcripts for meetings that people have and having to go and remember where a certain conversation occurred, where you stored that, what chat thread it was in. It’s become a chore. So we’re seeing that copilot is helping us to find that information faster and we’re talking about finding our own information. We’re not just talking about what’s generally available on the web. So from that standpoint, I’ve been a fan.

Adriana Linares:

Me too. So if you’re new here, I’ll just really quickly fill you in. As Daniel mentioned earlier when we’re talking about chat, GPT, the behemoth that created this whole new world we’re living in or really rocketed us to understanding what AI could do for us, its biggest investor has been Microsoft and they are partnered together and they try to work together. Now, Chachi PT had been available for the public and Microsoft as we know had been an investor. So then a few months ago, Microsoft made an announcement about Microsoft copilot, which can sound confusing because everything is a copilot. So long story short, when you hear the word Microsoft copilot, they’re actually using it sort of across the board to mean a robot, an AI robot inside of Word, one inside of Excel, one inside of Outlook, one that sits inside of Microsoft Edge and being chat and allows you to also search the web.

So their term copilot is kind of broad, but once you start using it, you’ll just sort of get used to it. That is kind of everywhere. So then they had made it free originally for us in Windows, if you have Windows 10 or 11 over the last few weeks and updated your computer, you’d see a copilot in your task bar. Didn’t very do very much I didn’t think. And then we talked last month about how copilot was available for Edge, which is remember the new version of Internet Explorer and it’s very good and I encourage everybody to try it, but it was inside Edge. It very clearly tells you when you were signed into your Microsoft 365 business account. When you open edge, it says your personal and company data are protected in this chat and you want to see that. You want to look for that and make sure you see Microsoft yelling from the top of its lungs. This is inside your tenant, it’s not leaving versus if you’re logged into your Microsoft 365 personal account, you will not see that. So it’s really important that you as attorneys, especially if you’re using this inside your firm, are up to date on the terms of service between Microsoft personal account and a business account and that everyone in your firm has the business account and take it advantage of copilot inside of your tenant. The way Daniel is describing,

Daniel Whitehouse:

I think that sums it up and going back to our conversation earlier about how easy is it to find questions in terms of service around confidentiality and things of that nature. Microsoft is yelling it at you. They want you to know that your data is secure, they’re showing it, putting it right in front of your face because they know that the astute user is asking these questions. And if it’s something that matters and confidentiality is important, then they want us to know that it’s also important to them.

Adriana Linares:

And I just want to read a couple of the sentences out of Microsoft’s actual terms of service are your business data is always protected with commercial data protection. Now this is the important term, right? Daniel? Commercial data protection. So it says with commercial data protection chat data isn’t saved. Microsoft does not have access. Your data is never used to train the models. One more out of a different place somewhere in Microsoft. Copilot doesn’t retain any of the data after the chat session is over. These measures are aimed at ensuring that copilot handles proprietary organizational data in a secure, compliant and privacy preserving way. Do you like that technology lawyer?

Daniel Whitehouse:

I do. And that’s the language that allowed me to say, yes firm, we can proceed and subscribe to copilot because if I didn’t see that in such clear terms, I would’ve questioned it and I would’ve been skeptical.

Adriana Linares:

Excellent. So attorneys, please figure out if you’ve got a professional account or a personal account and you will know because typically a professional account is your law firm email address versus if you log into Microsoft 365 with your Gmail account, your EarthLink account, your A OL account, your bellsouth.net account,

Daniel Whitehouse:

Hopefully after today nobody will be doing that anymore.

Adriana Linares:

I could only pray Daniel. Okay, any other tips, tricks, suggestions, things we should know? And obviously getting examples from another attorney of how you’re using tools like copilot are really helpful. Are you using it to help you respond to emails? You having it analyze Excel spreadsheets? Are you using it to create and draft content inside of a Microsoft Word document?

Daniel Whitehouse:

Some of the fun features are the summaries that it generates of. So even things like daily newsletters that we receive on the day’s current events, it will give you a five line summary of the email versus having to read the entire newsletter. Same with documents. It can summarize a document for you. So if we’re looking at well, is this the one that contained that clause or contained that issue, it can answer specific questions. The more specific you are in asking the tool the question, the more specific the response. Or you can just say, give me a summary of this document and it will give you that streamlined version. So those are the couple of the helpful points that we’re seeing so far. It’s definitely a time-saving tool and time matters from that standpoint. I like it. Just changing gears here for a moment on AI in general and the number of products that are out there and coming out there, there’s going to be no shortage of AI tools that are going to change our lives, make our lives easier, et cetera, so on and so forth. And every time we consider one of those new tools or the 20 that launched today,

We have to be diligent and understand what they’re doing with not only what the tool is doing but what it’s doing with our data. So we keep preaching the same point here, but just because we say that copilot might be acceptable for use in our firm, it doesn’t mean that other add-ons that are available within the Microsoft. There’s other apps that you can add to your Microsoft 365 suite. They may not have the same terms and conditions.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, good tip, right? When you get an add-on

Daniel Whitehouse:

In Microsoft Word or in Microsoft 365 in general, there are third party applications that you can incorporate into your Word suite, your Excel, whatever, PowerPoint. And those all have their own individual terms and conditions. It may not be the case that they’re governed under the Microsoft terms and conditions. So anytime we’re adding one of these tools into our Microsoft Suite, we need to understand what those tools are doing with our data.

Adriana Linares:

That is such a great comment and I think I can give an example that makes sense to people. A lot of us have subscribed to Grammarly and then Grammarly sits inside of Word and it sits inside your Outlook. Those are the third party services that Daniel is talking about. So I hadn’t thought about that. It makes sense though if you’re going to add Grammarly, go read their terms of service. But I’ll also say that Microsoft created its own answer to Grammarly. It’s called editor and it’s right in your Microsoft 365. It comes with it and it’s going to fall under the privacy terms that you want because it’s a Microsoft product I should mention too, copilot everybody, a LA Microsoft. It is so confusing. Copilot comes in a couple of free versions for you. It comes if you’re a Windows user, windows copilot doesn’t do very much comes in edge for anybody, whether you’re using Edge on a Mac edge on a pc, you can even go to bing.microsoft.com and access copilot, especially if you’re logged into your Microsoft 365 account.

And then they had also given us a little flavor of copilot somewhere anyway, so you can get a little bit for free. But what Daniel and I are talking about where you’re specifically seeing a copilot button inside of Word inside of Excel, you pay for that and that’s $30 a month per user. You have to go into your admin account for Microsoft 365. You have to unfortunately go through this very confusing new billing setup process. It walks you through it though, so hopefully you or your IT person can figure it out and you are paying $30 a month per user to get that higher, deeper integration of copilot, which remember is chat GPT on the backend just encapsulated inside this secure format. And Daniel, do you think it’s worth $30 a month for you and your firm to pay for that

Daniel Whitehouse:

So far? It is. Yeah. I mean in a few years, maybe not. Maybe there’ll be different or better tools then. And the other thing is you have to subscribe for a year upfront. You have to make a one year commitment. So for one year commitment, I think we’ll get our investment out of it.

Adriana Linares:

That’s great. I want to also remind everybody, it’s really hard to keep up with all this. As Daniel said, the 20 products that came out today, one of my favorite resources for legal specific information tools and services that are being built for the legal profession is of course Bob Bai’s [email protected]. Every day he’s writing about updates with Westlaw, new services from Lexi, clear brief spell book, all the tools that are being built for lawyers. And I strongly recommend you subscribe to his newsletter when you’re looking for legal specific stuff. Of course, he’s also a great follow on LinkedIn. Damien real, R-I-E-H-L is one of my other favorite follows on LinkedIn for what’s going on in legal AI tech. Carolyn Elant, who we’ve had on the show is also a great resource for how she’s really using and taking advantage of AI in her practice and she’s always talking about being secure and confidential. Daniel, do you have any resources that you can share with us about how you keep up with everything? It’s really hard.

Daniel Whitehouse:

I follow all of the same folks that you mentioned there and I certainly appreciate their content and they are some of the experts in the field and I think are giving valid current advice.

Adriana Linares:

Speaking of LinkedIn, Daniel, before I let you go, tell everyone where they can find friend, follow you, hire you, get more information from you.

Daniel Whitehouse:

Our website is white house cooper.com. We have the firm on LinkedIn and then of course I’m on LinkedIn, Daniel Whitehouse and the other usual social channels I suppose.

Adriana Linares:

That’s great. We’re not

Daniel Whitehouse:

On TikTok, that’s not our jam.

Adriana Linares:

It’s where you draw the line on privacy is with TikTok. I cannot thank you enough for your time. It’s really important for me to have lawyers talking to listeners who are lawyers. It means a lot to them and to me. So thank you for your time. Really appreciate it.

Daniel Whitehouse:

Thank you for having me back.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, you’ll have to come back as this stuff is going to be ever evolving, but maybe we won’t wait four years.

Daniel Whitehouse:

You know where to find me.

Adriana Linares:

Well, thank you everyone for listening. I hope this information was helpful. If you have any questions for Daniel or for me, please reach out to me. You can always reach me at New Solo at legal talk network.com. Until next time, I’m your faithful host, Adriana Linares. I’m here to help and see you. The next episode of New Solo.

Speaker 7:

I’m running from nine to five. Been my tongue for all this time. Won’t let anyone clock me. Sure. I was thinking this was the way to go and you put up your pocket show. I say to.

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