Preparing for the Legal AI Era with Ed Walters | ClioCon 2025

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hello and welcome to On the Road with Legal Talk Network. I’m Gyi Tsakalakis and I am super excited to welcome my friend, ed Walters. We are here recording live from the exhibitor floor of Clio’s Clio Con 2025 in Boston. Ed, thank you so much for joining us today.

Ed Walters:

Thank you for having me. It’s great to be on the road with you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, it’s wonderful to be on the road with you and you are very soon to be, if not already identifying as a Cleon.

Ed Walters:

Not quite yet. We are still awaiting FDI approval. The regulatory authority in Spain still has to sign off, so we’re very close to closing. I’m really looking forward to being a Cleon.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Awesome. And I am very grateful that you joined us today and very grateful to consider you a friend, but for people who don’t know you who’ve been living under a rock for the last 30 years, tell us a little bit about Ed Walters.

Ed Walters:

I was born, no. Yes,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes.

Ed Walters:

Let’s, I grew up in Louisiana and I’ve lived in Washington, DC for I guess the last 40 years I suppose. I was the co-founder of Fast Case and now the chief strategy officer of V Ls following the merger of those two companies. In 2023, I teach at Georgetown Law, a class called Generative AI and big law and a class called the Law of Robots. And then I’ve been teaching at University of Chicago for the last couple of years, a class called Gen AI and Legal Practice.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very cool. I wouldn’t be presumptuous to say that it’s too soon, but a uniter of brilliance as well as a godfather of legal AI potentially in your obituary someday.

Ed Walters:

Yes. Well, that is the theme of this conference, isn’t it? I mean, CLE Con is about uniting brilliance and I’m happy that the very smart team at VL is going to be joining into the very smart team at Clio and share Do too. Great team.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, no, very cool and very exciting. Reflecting back on the keynote, a couple things ultimately take us back to 2018 because I’ve heard a lot of people, AI is still fairly new, feels very, but not new for you. I went to the archives and looked up your malpractice of hunches talk from the two civility Illinois Professionalism Committee. And you were talking about, and I love this talk because you were talking about how lawyers, basically we make guesses, right? We make guesses. And so I think one of the things that I’d like to hear your thoughts today as we’re here in 2025 now many years later, because a lot of people are worried that the AI is making guesses. So talk to us about how we’ve got this Clio library, Vincent, this really cool stuff, this AI legal brain being built. How do we think about it in context of reliability and hunches and that kind of stuff?

Ed Walters:

Awesome. So this will be about a one hour Perfect. No, no. Plug in the phones, right? Charge up all the equipment. No. So the idea of that talk was that clients bring these super hard problems to us as lawyers, like they’re having the worst day of their life, the worst month of their life. These are existential questions for small businesses. These are the most difficult questions families face. Who’s going to get custody of this kid? How do we manage divorce? How do I keep my abusive spouse away? Sometimes in large law firms, it’s bet the company litigation. And when clients come to us with these questions, we answer them using our experience, I guess. But I mean really when we look at this like a law firm that’s very experienced might have 20 of these matters under their belt, a really experienced one and high volume might have 84, but social scientists would look at this and say, look man, if you are doing bet the company were, if you are helping a family in their worst month of their life and you are doing that with five data points, we would call that a hunch.

And so this is a hard truth about the profession. And my point in that talk was we need to collect as much data as we can inside of our firms from the world so that we can answer these questions more effectively. It’s a cliche that lawyers always say it depends, but this is not a cliche in the sense that it is a risk transfer mechanism. It moves all of the risk from lawyers who have all of the information and all of the expertise to clients who for the most part don’t. Okay, that’s chapter one. Chapter two, we’ve been collecting this data for a really long time. It’s almost unmanageable. I mean, there’s more than a billion documents in the VLE library. Amazing docket alarm has all of the docket sheets and the documents from state and federal litigation of all kinds. How do we make sense of that vast tro of data?

And my answer is ai. Now, I don’t want to confuse AI in the chat. GPT sense magical AI and the kind of fictional robot lawyer for me, I’m talking about using AI to access this data to make good sense of it and organize it and then to empower lawyers to use that data to make better decisions to help clients better. It doesn’t even need to be like something as radical as fixed fees. I know people kind of hate that. It could be to say, look, I’ve looked in our billing data, we’ve handled 18 of these. The median is $9,700. The mean is $8,800. There’s a handful of them that have these weird facts that skew towards the most expensive end. You don’t have them. And so I’m not going to quote you a fixed fee or maybe I’m going to quote you a fixed fee that’s a little bit more than the average. But every one of those things helps clients. And that’s really what AI is about to me. It’s about empowering lawyers to do better work for clients and to create a better product market fit for the delivery of legal

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Services. Awesome.

Ed Walters:

Thank you for coming to my TED

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Talk. Excellent response as always. And the other thing that it makes me, it’s hard for me not to watch the keynote and hear that response and having known Jack you Cleo’s mission and what they’ve been putting out in the world for many, many years, it seems natural that aren’t we unlocking this potentially directly for consumers as well? Isn’t that part of the solution, the access to justice to be able to unlock law for the consumer?

Ed Walters:

Well, I have to say that’s not really my mission.

I think ultimately you will have better consumer tools than say, chat GPT. The mission for Fast Case and VL and Clio is really all about empowering law firms. And I want that expertise at the end of the process. So look, I will get on my soapbox about this. I will die on this hill. I think that AI is replacing some parts of legal representation, but not all parts. Hopefully the EST and the dirtiest and the worst parts of representation like the way eDiscovery did. But I don’t think of legal work as a single event. I think of it as a chain of events. And even though we might replace individual links of that chain with software or AI or data, the most important ones, and especially the ones at the end have to be legal expertise, legal judgment, discernment. And that is not something that AI does.

That is something that human lawyers do. And so I really want that representation for clients to come maybe less expensively, maybe a higher volume. Maybe we help people we haven’t helped before. But I want lawyers in that process as navigators, as guides, as expert counselors who really help people with the last part, I know what the law is now, what do I do? And so that’s my aspiration here. I hope they’ll be great consumer tools, especially for commonplace forms, but for legal work, I really want lawyers to be empowered with these tools to provide better service for clients.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Excellent. And this is just my own personal question for you because I’m super interested in this and this is out of left field, but you’re a smart guy, so you’re going to be able to,

Ed Walters:

Let’s go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re going to have opinions on it. Alright. Is there any concern, there’s been some reports about this de-skilling. So in medicine, their doctors relying on AI and they test the doctors on diagnosis before they use ai. Then they do better with the AI and they take the AI away and they did worse than they did before they were using ai. Is there any concern of that

Ed Walters:

In legal? I think it’s a real concern. My model for this, I hope is calculators. So we have dealt with software that does this computational work before and that we had this exact concern with calculators, will it make us dumb at? And I think our

Gyi Tsakalakis:

History, how’s your math ed?

Ed Walters:

My math actually is pretty good because my teacher said, I want you to learn the fundamentals first and then learn to use a calculator. And sort of, if you look at the history of it, what’s happened is because we were smart about it, because we trained people with this in mind, the best mathematicians do better math than they ever could before. The heights that we can achieve in mathematics are vastly superior. And ai, by the way, is another computational jump. So that’s my aspiration for law. Now, let me say one other thing. We have trained lawyers and law students with brute force, right? That’s document review, that’s research that’s drafting. A lot of that work is going to go away. And guess what? That work never trained law students or associates to become great lawyers. And so what I would like to do is take this opportunity, this invitation from AI to reconsider the way we skill lawyers.

What kinds of things are we training them for? And to realize that this brute force computation work was never training in the first place. And so let’s think about what we want lawyers to do in 2030. We want to train them for discernment. We want to train them to be expert counselors. We want to train them for empathy. These aren’t, some people call them soft skills. I like to call them human skills. The things that AI cannot be good at. If we’re training lawyers to do the brute force computation, we’re going to fail. They’re not going to be very good at the things we need them to be good at, and they’re going to be good at things that AI is better at. And so let’s identify the unique role for lawyers in a world where the brute force computation is removed and let’s train them to become those lawyers and counselors and expert decision makers that we want them to be in the first place.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thank you for that. I’m grateful for your time here. Let’s talk product. Let’s dive into the product. We’re here at CLE Con. You had a lot of big announcements. Let’s focus on, well, the two that jump out that I think they natural for us to talk about are Clio Library. And really to me, the one thing that I was kind of curious about is the intersection of Clio Library with some of the other products. Talk to me how that works as an end user. You sign up for it, you get Vincent to be able to access to do your research. Tell us what that feels like from a user standpoint.

Ed Walters:

Yeah. Well, so I want to start with the intelligent legal work platform, which Jack announced yesterday in the keynote. And this is a fundamentally different way of doing work in Clio, but of doing work anywhere. And the idea is that you have the entire suite of tools at Clio with AI as the foundational architecture. That is all the way from grow to manage to pay. And now with Clio work, Clio work is this fourth leg of the stool. And Clio work is going to be an environment where people can actually do their day-to-day work, research, drafting, client work, the practice of law, not just the business of law that we’re used to. And so the Clio Library is a foundational part of Clio work. It is the cases and statutes and regulations that I spent 25 years and all my hair turning gray to build

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re thankful that you did.

Ed Walters:

Yes. Well, it looks like one very simple product at the end, but it’s like 5,000 different data pipelines that we had to build one by one. Anyway, so the Clio Library, formerly known as Fast Case or VL, becomes that kind of foundational grounding in law piece that differentiates Vincent and Clio from OpenAI and Gemini. The reason that we can trust these results is that we are grounding them in cases and statutes in a way that’s really transparent and people will see this when they use it. When you use Clio work, when you use Vincent and Clio, we’ll show all of the cases that go into it, all of the statutes and expert commentary that we’ve built over all these years that go into making the answers. I sort of think of it like the requirement that the FDA has, that we list ingredients in packaged foods.

I think lawyers deserve to see what the ingredients are in these answers and this expertise that AI is delivering. And I want lawyers to be critical about it. I want lawyers to read through them and say, I don’t want to use this one, which they can exclude if they want to. Anyway, so the Clio Library is going to be this kind of foundational grounding piece of cases and statutes and regs. It’s updated every day. We built a Tator called Cert, which tells you whether cases are still good law. There’s a lot of hard stuff behind the scenes that goes into this expertise. The really good team at VL has been working on this for the last couple of years, but I think at the end of the day there’s a lot of sort of brand names in here. I want people to reimagine the way they work and take the worst parts of their practice of law, job and automate it so they can spend more time on the judgment and counseling and discernment.

And I think in the same way that Clio made law firms better businesses, help them to really think about the business of law differently so that they can be better law firms. I think that the Clio work product powered by Vincent, powered by Clio Library is going to change the way lawyers deliver the practice of law. The pleadings will be faster. I would love it if lawyers never ask for an extension again, when they’re using Clio work, they push opposing counsel to go faster and always keep them on their heels because Clio work is a proactive platform that is helping them do the work and just crush it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Amazing. Listeners with questions that want to learn more about this, what’s the best way to connect with Ed Walters in the world?

Ed Walters:

I’m on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/ian/walters. You can get me on Sky at EJ Walters. I think there’s a couple of ways to get me here at, I don’t know if people are going to be listening to this contemporaneously, but I’m definitely here on the floor and you’ll see me around at conferences and stuff. I’m not going anywhere. I’m very excited to join the CCLE team, so you’ll see me around

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Ed. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations. I think I speak for many people that this uniting of brilliance is something that’s exciting watching your career, Jack’s career unfold, like what a cool combining of forces, uniting of brilliance. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Ed Walters:

Thanks, Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’ve reached the end of the road for this episode, unfortunately. Thanks again to Ed for riding along with us today. Thank you for listening in. Please subscribe to On the Road in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Amazon Music. I’m Gyi Tsakalakis with Ed Walters and you’ve been listening to On The Road on the Legal Talk Network, your podcast resource for lawyers and legal professionals.

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