AI and ChatGPT’s Impacts on the Legal Profession

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Molly Ranns: Hello and welcome to another edition of the State Bar of Michigan’s On Balance Podcast on Legal Talk Network.  I’m Molly Ranns.

JoAnn Hathaway: And I’m JoAnn Hathaway.  We are very pleased to have Niki Black join us today as our podcast guest.  Niki is an attorney, author and journalist in the legal tech space.  She is with us today to talk about artificial intelligence, otherwise referred to as AI and more specifically ChatGPT.  And now Niki, could you share some additional information about yourself with our listeners?

Nicole Black: Sure thing.  I’m really happy to be here and looking forward to talking to you today.  I’m an attorney.  I practiced for over a decade here in Rochester, New York, and for the last 11 years, I’ve been with MyCase law practice management software which was recently acquired by AffiniPay, LawPay’s parent company and during my time with MyCase, a large part of what I do is I educate attorneys about the intersection of law and technology both your podcast like this speaking at CLE events and also through the various articles, various columns that I have with the ABA Journal, Above The Law, and the New York Daily Record and ChatGPT another things that’s been super exciting.  So, I can’t wait to talk to you about it today.

Molly Ranns: Thank you so much for being here with us today, Niki.  Can you share some of the most significant technological changes you’ve seen in the legal industry since you began writing about law and technology?

Nicole Black: Absolutely.  I initially started writing about tech in 2006 I would say.  I’ve been blogging for a little over — a little under a year at that point.  My blog is still around.  It’s called Sui Generis, a New York Law blog and, initially, I wanted lawyers to understand the value of blogging because I was doing it and that blog truly is what sort of catapulted me into the legal tech stratosphere and to where I am now with all these other people in the space.  I really enjoyed the intersection of law and tech.  So initially, I started writing about the intersection about blogging and then social media came along in around 2007.  And so, I became very focused on helping lawyers understand why they needed to understand social media and that really was the first pretty transformative thing that happened since I was covering the intersection of law and tech and that was social media and initially was helping lawyers understand what it was and potentially how they could use it for marketing at that time in conjunction with the web.

But then, it became the fact that online interactions became evidence in trials and why they needed to understand this for that reason, and I co-authored ‘Social Media for Lawyers’ with Carolyn Elefant in 2010 and the ABA published that book.  Since I had an editor and I noticed another new phenomenon coming along which was cloud computing, I pitched a computing book to my editor and, in 2012, my book ‘Cloud Computing for Lawyers’ was published by the ABA and the cloud and mobile computing together were really the next big wave in legal tech.  You really couldn’t have one without the other because you needed them to truly bring value, especially for mobile computing.  You need it to allow the processing and storage to occur off those small phones that don’t have a lot of space for that type of thing.  So, cloud computing really was transformational, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that lawyers are really convinced of the value and the security of it.

So, that was a long haul trying to get lawyers to understand that the cloud truly was this transformative technology that not only would allow them to be more efficient but also provided them with a guaranteed disaster back-up plan should anything happen and they’re displaced from their offices like what happened during the pandemic.  So, those really were the — you know, the largest shifts began with the internet.  Well, when you agree with what Bill Gates recently said.  PCs were the first huge shift.  That was the internet and I would argue that social media and cloud computing were sort of a subset of very interesting ways to use the internet.  But at the end of the day, they really fell under that umbrella of the internet.  And then, I agree with what Bill Gates said which is that Generative AI and AI in general is the next big thing and we’re starting to hit that tipping point with those tools and it’s going to happen exponentially quicker than you ever would have set them.  That’s happened with all the other tools in the past in terms of adoption.

JoAnn Hathaway: Niki, what exactly is AI to include ChatGPT and exactly what can I do?

Nicole Black: AI, you’re going to have the experts disputing the exact definition of AI.  But generally speaking, it’s when you teach computers to think like humans and to make decisions like humans.  So, my favorite example that I use when I give AI talks is dynamic cruise control versus self-driving cars.

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If you have ever driven a car with dynamic cruise control, what happens is that once you put it on cruise then you turn the dynamic cruise control on, the car will keep jerk your vehicle within the lane, centered in your lane and it will also stay at one speed.  But when cars in front of you slow down, it will slow down.  It will speed up, up until that speed is up when they speed up, and it will even break on your behalf should it seem like you’re about to run into a car or something else.  But at the end of the day, you control the steering and the actual sleep breaking and anything else that you would need to do to avoid that accident.  You have to jump in and make those executive decisions, not the computer, not the car in order to avoid some sort of accident that’s on the horizon.

So, that’s sort of what I would suggest is more not so much AI as, you know, that what preceded AI.  What happens with AI is autonomous vehicles.  Those vehicles can drive on their own and make all those decisions before an accident occurs.  So, they’ll avoid the accident.  Right now, most laws require a human to being the car to actually take over, but those cars are designed to actually deal with that themselves.  The programming and the algorithm will tell them what to do should something be in front of them, but some of that algorithm, there’s some problems with it and there’s also a built-in bias which comes in more often with facial recognition, for example, than cars, but the algorithm sometimes has problems and an example with autonomous cars is when it was not programmed to recognize a pedestrian outside of a crosswalk, and there was a case in California where I think it was a Tesla, an autonomous car, hit and killed a pedestrian because the pedestrian wasn’t in the crosswalk and it didn’t recognize it as an object to avoid.  So, there’s still a lot of problems, but we’re getting to this tipping point in the last few months with ChatGPT and other Generative AIs in terms of the value and the combination of the technologies needed to truly bring AI to its full potential of where it becomes truly valuable and can really change our day-to-day lives and the way that we work.

Molly Ranns: Niki, could you give us some examples of how ChatGPT could be used in a law firm?

Nicole Black: Sure.  And what ChatGPT and Generative AI tools are is a way to interact with a computer via text, but there’s also some tools build and now that I have talked to it and asking a vast array of questions or ask you to do things for you and it’s truly like having an assistant there with you who understands context, understands follow-up questions.  So, you don’t have to keep repeating the same inquiry to get a different response and has such a vast amount of data available to it and such sophisticated algorithmic programming behind it that it truly is like having in many ways a human assistant, but it often suggested it’s almost like having a 3-year-old in terms of its ability to look at you with innocence and blatantly lie but probably more like having an adult human assistant that somehow never matured past 3-year-old in terms of their actual sense of self.  So, it can be a little bit naive but it’s an incredibly smart tool.

And so, what you do is you can ask it to do any number of things.  You can ask it for super simple stuff like I use it in my writing all the time to ask, I can’t find this word.  There’s a word that means this and you use it in this context and I try to find it on some source online and it wouldn’t work and it will come up with it immediately for me.  So, when there’s that word that’s on the tip of your tongue and it’s a very specific word, it can tell you if you give it the right to you that’ll come right off of it for you.  So, you can ask them for simple things like that.  You can ask it for difficult conversations that’s great for advice like that.  So, if you have an employee who’s you need to have a discussion with or even in a more basic context continue to send condolences to someone.  It can provide you with beautiful language for that and I know it sounds a little heartless.  You know, you’re trying to do something superhuman that is the essence of humanity, express your condolences, but it really does provide you with the tools you need to do it in a way that’s much better than you probably would be able to do it on your own and the same goes for asking it for assistance in creating a template.

So, a list of ways that you can use it.  I’ve written some articles about this for the Daily Record, and I’ve also written some for ABA Journal, but there’s a ton of ways lawyers can use in their day-to-day practice.  So, first of all, you can ask it.  One of the best ways of summarizing documents or information, you can copy and paste the document into it or an email or anything like that and ask it to summarize for you and it will do that or to create a summary for you, so like deposition transcripts, for example.  It can create a summary rather than having an associate or a paralegal do that for you.  You can ask it to create templates.  So, I’ve asked it to create a personal injury demand better.  It does a very good job, especially if you’ve never written one before.  You can ask it to create an —

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— NDA or unemployment agreement in the tech space, for example, or any number of things like that and it will create these things for you and writing pretty thorough answers.  The only thing, the only caveat, a couple caveats, our ethics and I’ll probably get there a little more later because that’s a separate question.  But also, it will throw out to you what they called hallucinations.  It makes stuff up.

So, for example, one of the things that happened recently is someone was writing about a legal tool that you used it and they provided some screenshots.  So basically, people are creating legal assistance within the context of legal software that you can use and it’s trained to understand legal issues and respond within the context of legal discussions.  And so, someone asked some questions of a legal assistant like that and then wrote about them and someone else that read the article noticed that the chat tool had made up California Ethics Code.  So, just out of the blue and it does that.  It will make that up.  It will make up case citation.  So, the thing that you really need to understand about this, if you don’t have the necessary context or you don’t have someone around, you can skim over it that has that context and that foundational knowledge about the subject area.  It will sometimes throw up these hallucinations and if you don’t have that context, you’re not going to be able to spot them and you’re not going to realize that some of this information you’ve been fed is false that will improve over time, especially as the legal software companies get a hold of it and improve it within the context of legal discussions, but it’s something that you do need to be aware of when you use these tools within the text of your day-to-day work.

JoAnn Hathaway: Niki, how do you see AI and more specifically, as we’ve been discussing ChatGPT transforming the legal industry and what potential benefits or challenges?  And I think you just touched on a few of those challenges, but if you can expound upon those as far as what do you foresee for the future for lawyers.

Nicole Black: So, that’s a really interesting question.  Generative AI is going to rapidly change the way that lawyers do work and it’s also going to rapidly change some legal functions.  There are a number of articles that have come out by analysts and other groups that use analysts predicting the top jobs will be affected by Generative AI and legal is one of them.  Oftentimes, the top jobs that they predict will be affected, not replaced by it are ones that require high degrees and higher education levels.  So, oftentimes, it’s going to replace some of the work of journalists, legal research, possibly law librarians, low-level attorneys in terms of some of the work that they do and then there’s other.  There are certain jobs that is going to do a lot of pre-screening for doctors down the road as well and even just content creation online in general.  There’s a lot of ways that it’s going to replace work that gets done.

In the legal space, you’re going to see an impact the following areas first and quickly.  You’re going to see it affect document review.  You’re going to see it affect litigation analytics and prediction.  You’re going to see it affect document creation, document summaries and those are work that associates often do.  You’re going to see it affect a lot of the work that paralegals do in terms of creating forms or updating forms or creating documents.  Also, legal research, you’re going to see it significantly impact that essentially anything that requires the knowledge of large data sets or large amounts of information because the AI is able to so rapidly consume all of that, makes sense of it and then provide useful output based upon the input that is being requested.  It does a great job at a lot of these functions.  So, it can create online content, online articles, online social media posts, blog posts really well, but you need to have that ability to review it, update it, change it and make it your own because, otherwise, soon everyone’s going to be able to tell what was written by AI and what wasn’t and that’s going to increase the value of the stuff.

The art and the content that was not created by AI as well which will be an interesting after effect.  There’s a lot of short-term problems with using ChatGPT and tools like it that I think are going to very quickly become non-issues because of how rapidly this technology is going to accelerate at exponential rates compared to any other type of tech we’ve ever seen and also as legal companies get a hold of it and revise this technology and put algorithms and confine this technology ways to make it specifically useful to legal and try to remove all those hallucinations that could be occur in the legal context, but there’s a number of issues right now you need to be aware of because it is still in many ways in its infancy.  One of them is confidentiality and you’ll have to read the service level agreements carefully because they do change quickly as this tech progresses, but you need to make sure have a good understanding of whether they’re using your input to improve their output.

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In other words, they’re saving your request in your writing or the information you provided to improve the system and then produce better output using what you’ve given them.  So, for example, in the coding context.  Its coders are constantly using it to improve their code or find bugs in their code, but when you provide it with code and takes that code and it later improves the output based on that code.  So, Amazon, for example, forbade all of its employees from using it for that purpose because what they were finding was happening was when they input request to update code specific to Amazon, the responses included code that was considered to be proprietary to Amazon.  So, it incorporated the proprietary code into the system and was using that for the output.  In other words, corporate secrets, privilege confidential, corporate information was already in their system and being output to everybody including their competitors.  So, as an attorney that creates a very specific issue, you don’t want to input any specific confidential information.

So, you can tell the Generative AI, anything you would tell someone who is not a lawyer involved in your case or someone that was not contracted to keep this information privilege.  So, instead of using your client’s name, you can just say my client has this issue.  You know, but you need to leave out any identifying information that could potentially be considered confidential and privileged right now in order to preserve the confidentiality.  That being said, if you are using legal specific tools, for example, case text has one called co-counsel.  Law Droid has a legal assistant and other tools are rapidly incorporating this technology into their legal technology.  In that case, they created within a confined system and if their agreements indicate that it’s going to be confidential, then you can rest assured that it’s going to be because they’re legal software companies that understand your confidential needs, but you still need about the provider and make sure that they’re understanding of mental is the same as yours.  Just like you have to have that any third-party provider that’s going to handle your confidential information, like cloud computing providers, like process servers to understand how they’re going to maintain the confidentiality and who has access to that data.

But I would suggest that over time that issue is going to become a non-issue as the tech improves and as they create more gates around the tools that are going to be available for your use.  There’s also technology competence.  It’s another ethics issue that’s really important.  You need to understand the tech.  You need to understand that as it evolved and you need to stay on top of it.  It’s going to evolve rapidly.  So, if ever there’s a technology that you want to learn about quickly, this is it because not only is it important that you understand it, it’s going to make your life so much easier.  All those mundane stupid tests that you hate doing that you have to pay someone a lot of money to do so.  You don’t have to do it.  You can outsource it to this technology very quickly.  I already use it constantly and everyone I’ve talked to.  Once you added into your workflow, you’re going to find yourself using it all the time.  So, those are some of those ways that I see it shaping the legal industry and then some of the issues you need to be aware of as you use it right now.

Molly Ranns: That’s so interesting, Niki, and there are certainly challenges, but with the benefits you’re talking about, do you envision law firms becoming less dependent on newer attorneys, for example, or legal assistance as ChatGPT and its successors mature?

Nicole Black: Well, that’s a really interesting question and no one really knows the answer, but looking forward, I think you’re going to see that it is going to replace some job functions and it may mean that you need less associates or less paralegals, for example, to accomplish certain types of tasks.  But what you’re going to see up like eDiscovery is a really good example.  The only reason eDiscovery software is so prevalent in the legal industry is because the federal rules change and lawyers had to use it.  eDiscovery software and the eDiscovery function have created so many jobs in law firms.  Certainly, it’s replaced some entry-level associates.  But then, there are other ones that have had to have the skill set of using eDiscovery software and there are, like I said, there’s a number of different roles that have been added into the mix as eDiscovery software and the importance of eDiscovery became increasingly relevant for law firms and you’re going to see the same thing happen if certain tasks are replaced by ChatGPT or improved so that you don’t have to deal with the really monotonous stuff over and over again.  It is going to present some interesting challenges though in terms of the training of lawyers.  I think these are issues that have not been addressed and should have been addressed a long time ago, and it’s going to force the legal field to address them.

You know, there’s an argument a lot of a mundane stuff teaches you how to deal with lawyer because law school doesn’t really give you that training, but a lot of it, you know, you don’t need to do four years of mundane stuff.  You probably need to do six months of it.  And then, you can move on to more sophisticated things as entry level associates often have to keep doing that mundane stuff for years because someone’s got to do it and they need warm bodies to get that stuff done.  So, I think it’s going to shorten the amount of time that lawyers have to do that stuff, and it’s going to force us —

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— to come up with better ways to train law students and entry-level lawyers to actually be better lawyers because, otherwise, you’re not going to have anyone with a skill set to be promoted and you’re going to run out of partners.  You can only lateral in so many partners, and if the young lawyers aren’t getting this training, then you’re going to have this glutton the middle where there’s no one to promote.  And so, I think what we’re going to see over time is that it’s going to start out of — we’re going to be forced to start training them kind of like how the medical profession has residency.  Maybe, it’ll be some sort of apprenticeship.  I’m not sure, but I think we’re going to actually start ensuring that lawyers in particular are getting this kind of training somehow so that they can then shift very quickly into the more analytical lawyer and skills that they went to law school to do in the first place.

Molly Ranns: Thank you, Niki.  We are now going to take a short break from our conversation with Niki Black to thank our sponsors.

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JoAnn Hathaway: Welcome back.  We are here with Niki Black talking about artificial intelligence and more specifically ChatGPT and its impact on the legal profession.  Niki, how do you see ChatGPT specifically benefiting the solo practitioners or smaller law firms in terms of efficiency and cost savings?

Nicole Black: I think that solo and small firm lawyers are ideally positioned to make use of this tool.  I’m going to suggest some ways, but I’ll also suggest a resource.  My co-author, Carolyn Elefant that wrote the ‘Social Media for Lawyers’ book with me, she focuses on helping solo lawyer.  She’s a solo lawyer herself.  She’s written books on solo lawyers and she just released sort of a course on how to use AI in solo and small firm practice.  So, that’s definitely something you might want to look up and make use of if it is something you’re really interested in, but I can give you some ideas up front in terms of how you can use this in your practice.  One of the challenges of being a solo lawyer, especially right out of the gate from law school is you don’t have a lot of forms.  You don’t have a lot of letter templates and tools already written.

Our tools already created to help you run your law firm.  So, you can use to actually put in the documents that it creates to help you run your practice more efficiently.  I would strongly suggest that you also consider as a solo or small firm attorney getting practice management software because what that will allow you to do or at least document management software somewhere to store these documents online with legal specific tools.  So, either legal document management or law practice management software because that way you’re going to be able to store these tools somewhere once you create these documents and stuff in a place that is secure and safe and easily accessible for everyone in your firm is your firm skills and growths, but you can create all sorts of documents with it.  So, I mean, it’s a very based level.  You can save a ton of time just with letters.

So, you can tell the software that you want to either create a very basic letter or email that’s in response to somebody else that sent you an e-mail and you can copy and paste that email or letter into the ChatGPT and tell to respond to it redacting of course the confidential information and it’ll draft you a fantastic response that you can cut and paste into your email, quickly edit and send it and that will save you so much time just in terms of drafting and responding to emails and other types of correspondences.  It also does a really good job of if you feel like you have an issue with me little blunt, putting some fluffiness around the edges of your correspondence so that you’re not just diving right in and I think lawyers often sometimes have that issue and especially with the written form.  It’s hard to communicate your tone as well as it is when you’re speaking to someone verbally.

So, that’s a great way to just use it to streamline and cut out a lot of time throughout the day for social media, for creating social media posts or responding to social media posts.  There are add-ons.  I just wrote about them in an article that I published on Sui Generis for Daily Record.  I repost my articles on my Sui Generis blog.  Otherwise, they’re behind a pay wall, but if you go to newyorklawblog.typepad.com, that’s newyorklawblog.typepad.com or just Google Sui Generis and Nicole Black.  It should pop up.  I listed a whole bunch of different add-ons that you can use either with your browser or with Google Suites that allow you to have this functionality built right in.  So, some of them will allow you, for example, on a LinkedIn post that you want to comment on to click on it and it’ll come up with a draft comment.  So, you can just edit the comment —

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— rather than having to recreate comments on your own.  So, it just saves a lot of time in that way.  You can also use them to create document templates.  So, whether it’s template letters or discovery demands in a criminal case and then you can give them the jurisdictional information and what it does is it searches online and find these templates are created elsewhere.  Then, we’ll create a very usable one for you.

You can use it for, like I said before, summarizing documents that are somewhat lengthy that you made.  Before you dive in, you can ask it to create the bullet points from that document so that you can quickly understand the context of it or articles.  If there’s a really long article, you want to get the gist of you can just copy and paste it in there or there is a tool, and I also include this in that article I referenced that you can add that turns it on so that it searches the web ChatGPT.  Right now, ChatGPT doesn’t search the web and it’s only up to 2021, the data that it has, but if you just install this tool on your browser whenever you’re at ChatGPT, there’s a little button you toggle on and when you run the search, it gets information from the web and provides really helpful output that way, and the other tools you can use right now that are readily available are Google Barred or Ding’s Chat and those are also both really useful.  I prefer ChatGPT.  I’ve used all three of them and I subscribed to ChatGPT Plus.  So, I have access to GPT4 which is the most advanced version, and I also get access to the updates as they come out and the other thing I want to mention is that GPT announced a couple weeks ago that they’re rolling out plugins.

So, similar to the tool I’ve already talked about, their approved plugins from other tools in the ChatGPT that make it more functional.  They’re rolling those out slowly.  I haven’t gotten access yet and I put myself on the waitlist a while ago.  What that allows you to do is, for example, oh, it’s great for trip planning.  So, if you’re planning a trip for your family or for work, it’s great for that.  So right now, I’ll tell it to create a trip itinerary for me and it does a great job.  Then, you can tweak it and say, add more foodie events or add more art and it’ll come up with a great list.  You just have to check the restaurants because some of them are out of business because it only goes through to 2021, but it’s going to, for example, integrate with Expedia so that you can plan trips using ChatGPT.  Expedia just released its ChatGPT tool and it doesn’t work as well as ChatGPT right now.

So, I think sometimes you’re just going to better results once there’s the plugins are available through ChatGPT rather than through those companies, but Expedia is one of them.  I can’t remember.  There’s a number of really other interesting ones, but I can’t remember that off the top of my head that already have plugins.  It will be readily available soon.  So, those are some ways that I think it’s really going to be the game changer for solo and small firm lawyers because it’s going to take a lot of that mundane grunt work yet to do ahead of time and just as part of your daily practice both to launcher practice and then just to run it.  It’s going to really streamline a lot of that for you.

Molly Ranns: That’s all really amazing.  You’ve already touched on this a little bit, Niki, but what are some of the additional ethical considerations that lawyers should remember when using AI technologies like ChatGPT in their practice?

Nicole Black: Any technology that you use like this cloud-based.  So, and if you’re going to be giving them confidential client information, typically that’s not only be happening when it’s legal GPT tools that are already integrated with legal software.  But whenever you outsource the storage and processing of confidential data to a third party, you have to vet them.  I talk about this in my cloud computing book and I also have a list of questions available online that I’ve updated since I wrote that book, but there’s about 24 questions that you need to do.  Ask a provider about an annual basis depending on the jurisdiction, but it’s good practice anyway.  You want to vet the provider before you give them access to your confidential data.  The primary areas that these questions focused on our confidentiality and protection of the data, who will have access to it at their company under what circumstances and how do they protect the data?  Is it encrypted?  Is it encrypted and transit and it rests while it’s going across the internet and while it’s stored?  Where is it stored?  Where are those servers?  Who owns the servers?  Is there geo redundancy meaning is it stored on two different servers and two different geographic locations, where those servers talk to each other frequently?

So, if one of them is damaged in an earthquake, for example, the other one had another part of the country still stands with a frequent with an updated copy of your law firm’s data.  You want to understand is the data that it always stayed within the confines of the United States and that doesn’t leave the US and trigger data privacy laws in other countries.  You want to understand who the company is, who owns the company, are they funded, how long have they been around?  There has been a lot of legal consolidation in the legal tech industry in the last few years and not a lot of lawyers are aware of this.  I oversee some reports for MyCase and LawPay.  One of them is illegal industry report.  I oversee and I write it.  And in the one that was published in December 2022, one of the things I focused on in that report that we included in the survey and then the report is how many survey respondents were aware of all the legal tech consolidation that had occurred, a lot of companies that are getting acquired or either by other companies or by private equity companies or getting investments from private equity companies that then change who has control over the decisions that they make and not a lot of lawyers are aware of this.

So, it’s really important to understand who the company is, have they recently been acquired and, if so, by who, and if they’ve been acquired by private equity or another legal tech company, learn a little more about that company or the private equity.  Is it a private equity growth channel?  Do they try to grow a company?  So, it is kind of come in, cut a lot of employees and sort of stuff, the technology down and resell it or something, like what do they do when they acquire companies?  So, it’s really important to understand that too when you choose a technology provider and the longer they been around, I would suggest the better because that means they truly understand your needs and the legal industry and confidentiality obligations that you have.

JoAnn Hathaway: So, Niki, what are the most critical skills for lawyers to develop to adapt and thrive in the rapidly evolving legal tech landscape?

Nicole Black: I think the first thing that I always tell lawyers that they need to do is educate themselves on a daily basis, learn a little bit so that you have this foundation of knowledge that helps you make decisions that are educated decisions and informed.  The example that I always use relates to my kids.  When they were 13 and 15, we went some to a relative’s house for dinner.  When we were traveling in later on, my 13-year-old told me that this person served them wine at dinner and I had noticed that.  And so, what did you do?  And she told me, eighth grade Health class didn’t prepare me for this, Mom.  Should I know I’m supposed to just say no, but I’m also supposed to be polite.  I was like, what did you do?  She said, well, I thought about it and I decided it was more important to be polite.  So, I drank some of the wine and I couldn’t falter because she made an educated decision.  She drew on what she’s been taught.  She applied it to the situation at hand and she made an informed decision and did what she thought was best under the circumstances and that’s what I always tell lawyers that they need to do.

You can’t make an educated decision to use or not use technology if you don’t understand it and what’s happening right now is technology is changing at an unbelievable rate.  We are at this point in the maturation of technology that what’s happening is a number of fundamental technology tools and processes that were kind of experimental or not very mature over the years because we just either didn’t have this memory processing or the storage or the data sets available yet to make these AI tools functional in a really useful way.  It’s all coming to this tipping point because the technologies are all maturing and almost the exact same time.  What that’s doing is making it so that all of a sudden AI is incredibly useful and not only it’s useful for us, it’s useful for creating new technology in ways at a pace at which humans just couldn’t do it.

So, what you’re going to see is AI creating AI, which is a little bit of an alarming topic and it’s a subject for a different day that could take up the whole podcast, but the technology is going to improve so exponentially quickly because of all these pieces coming together all at once that if you don’t make it a point to learn about Generative AI, to subscribe to one of those three things or at least download them and try them out like ChatGPT, Bart AI or being AI.  If you don’t try those Ding Chat, Bart AI chat or ChatGPT, if you don’t try those out, you’re not going to understand how they work or the value that they bring.  So, you really need to use one of them and start incorporating it in your day-to-day work, even for smaller things and subscribe to a few legal blogs or take a course, like the one I mentioned, like Carolyn’s, there are other people that are providing that type of information as well, but subscribe to a few legal tech blogs whether it’s ones that I write like my ABA Legal, ABA Journal Legal Tech column.

Above The Law has a whole legal technology section where me and a bunch of other legal tech folks right under their legal tech tab on their blogs.  Bob Ambrogi has a great legal technologies blog that covers all the changes in the industry, especially the acquisition and funding and new features.  I definitely recommend following in reading some of those or Legal Tech News or Law 36 today.  They also do a great job covering this and the ABA Journal in general, it’s really would be really helpful to learn about those things as well as using this tech as it improves.  I think that those are some of the best ways that you really can try to make sure that you’re in the know as a second provers improves.

JoAnn Hathaway: Well, thank you so much, Niki.  This has been just fascinating.  With that, it does look like however we have come to the end of our show.  Molly and I would like to thank our guest today, Niki Black, for a wonderful program.  Niki, this has been great if our listeners would like to follow up with you, what is the best way for them to reach you?

Nicole Black: Either my email [email protected].  That’s N-I-K-I –-

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— dot B-L-A-C-K @mycase.com, but I’m also on LinkedIn.  Definitely follow me there.  I share all my articles and sometimes some humorous legal things as well.  So, definitely follow me there and connect with me on LinkedIn.

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JoAnn Hathaway: Thank you again, Niki.  This has been another edition of the State Bar of Michigan’s On Balance Podcast.  I’m Jo Anne Hathaway.

Molly Ranns: And I’m Molly Ranns.  Until next time, thank you for listening.

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Outro: Thank you for listening to the State Bar of Michigan On Balance Podcast brought to you by the State of Bar of Michigan and produced by the Broadcast Professionals at Legal Talk Network.  If you’d like more information about today’s show, please visit legaltalknetwork.com.  Subscribe via Apple podcast and RSS.  Find the State Bar of Michigan and Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or download Legal Talk Network’s free app in Google Play and iTunes.

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The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network or the State Bar of Michigan or their respective officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries.  None of the content should be considered legal advice.  As always, consult a lawyer.

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