How to Enhance Your Legal Services with Microsoft Copilot

Episode Notes

Transcript

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’re very pleased to have Ben Schorr join us today to talk about how lawyers can enhance their legal services by using Microsoft’s co-pilot. Ben works at Microsoft developing content and designing user experiences to help customers get the most out of Microsoft 365 and artificial intelligence. Well-known for explaining often complex technologies in a way that regular people can understand and use them in their day-to-Day lives. So with that, Ben, could you please share some additional information about yourself with our listeners?

Ben Schorr:

Sure, happy to. I’ve been in legal tech now since the late 1980s, believe it or not. Started off in-house at a law firm in Los Angeles back in the days when we had 2 86 PCs and we were sharing our HP laser Jet twos. Of course, that was just the legal assistance. The attorneys didn’t dare have any tech like that on their desks come a long way. Since then, I’ve been in legal tech or in tech at least for pretty much the entire time, and then joined Microsoft about eight years ago and love getting a chance to help our customers be more successful.

Molly Ranns:

Thank you so much for being here with us today. To get started, can you help our listeners understand what copilot is?

Ben Schorr:

Sure. So copilot is our productivity AI for artificial intelligence. It is a generative ai, so it means you give it prompts, which we’ll talk about more shortly. I think it gives you a response and it’s incorporated throughout most of our apps. It’s coming to basically everything we do if it isn’t already there. So you’ll find it in Word, PowerPoint, outlook, OneNote and so forth, and also in the web services, things like Forms and Stream and SharePoint, things like that. So that’s what copilot is.

JoAnn Hathaway:

So a question, Ben, that’s on everyone’s mind. It seems as this with the introduction of copilot and other AI platforms, do you think this marks the end of lawyers as we know them?

Ben Schorr:

Oh, absolutely. No, I’m kidding. I’m kidding.

I get that one all the time. No, it really doesn’t. The best way to think of copilot is to think of it as a first year legal intern. It’s not going to take your job. It’s there to be helpful. You need to be as clear, give it tasks, be clear and specific with what you want it to do, and absolutely review what it comes back with. I say at every session I do, and in fact probably three times a day is never ever show the output of a generative AI to a client or the court unless you’ve reviewed it first, kind of the same thing as you would with an intern. You’re not going to take a brief that an intern wrote and just file it without reading it, right? So same thing with copilot. It’s there to help you. It’s there to work alongside you, not instead of you. There is a reason we named it copilot and not autopilot. So no, it is most definitely not the end of lawyers.

Molly Ranns:

Ben, what kind of things can copilot be used for by attorneys?

Ben Schorr:

There are a few different areas that I think copilot excels. One of the scenarios we talk about all the time, it’s the obvious one, is create. So that’s you’ve got a document you need to make or write, and you can have copilot help you do that. So maybe it’s a blog post, maybe it’s a memo, maybe it’s a letter, maybe it’s a brief, and you can go and ask Copilot to give you a first draft of that document. The more specifics you can give it, the better it’s going to give you a better result. And then of course, once you’ve had it, create that first draft, you could have it, revise it, make edits or changes. You will almost certainly need to make your own edits and changes as you go, but it really can speed up that whole create process. The next area that copilot is pretty powerful and attorneys are using it fairly often is in summarize and understand.

That’s where you’ve got to file a large document you’ve received and you want to very quickly get up to speed on the key points of it. So what you can do is you can show that file to, so let’s, let’s say it’s a Word document. So you might open it in Word and go to copilot in Word and say summarize this document. But you could also be more specific than that if you wanted to. You could say, what are the key dates or deadlines mentioned in this document list, all of the key people mentioned in this document and what their roles are, things like that. So you can have a conversation with copilot about the document and that can be a big time saver, especially if it’s a very long document and you can ask very specific questions. So for example, you could say, what jurisdiction does this document mandate?

Things like that. And instead of you having to page through a 50 page document looking for that information, copilot can find that info and tell you. Then the third area that I find copilot to be pretty powerful the attorneys can use it for is brainstorming. So for example, you could have written an opinion or a memo. What you could do is show that to copilot and say, what are some arguments against this position? What are some apparent weaknesses in this argument? Things like that. You could say, what are some things I may have overlooked? You can kind of ask it almost anything you want to Now are the answers, it’s going to give you brilliant jurisprudence, maybe, maybe not, but it’s easy to ask. And again, the co-pilot, the AI doesn’t get bored. It’s not judging you. It’s happy to sit there and have a conversation with you for as long as you want.

You could have it brainstorm marketing strategies. You could have it brainstorm just about anything with you. I’ve had it do things like I’ve asked it to, maybe we’re writing a new article about a piece of our tech and I’ve asked it to suggest possible titles for the article and it’ll come up with however many I’ve asked for. Let’s say I’ve asked it for 10 possible titles. And of those 10 titles, are they all brilliant? No, are eight of them brilliant? No, are two of them brilliant? Maybe I often get one or two pretty good ones out of that set. And so that’s an important thing to think about is keep that expectation reasonable too. You can do all those things, but then again, remember, it’s there to work with you and not instead of you,

JoAnn Hathaway:

Ben, as with any new technology, there are bound to be some pitfalls. What are some common mistakes people make when deploying copilot?

Ben Schorr:

So probably the biggest one I see is they don’t get their house in order before they do it. I see these news stories that talk about copilot is creating all these security issues and showing users content that they didn’t have access to before. That’s not true actually. It’s showing users content they always had access to. They just didn’t realize they had access to it before. Copilot in Microsoft 365 respects your Microsoft 365 permissions. And so if your user doesn’t have access to that file normally, then copilot doesn’t have access to it either. So that’s one mistake I see people making is they turn on copilot and they haven’t gone through and done the due diligence first to make sure that their permissions are correctly set. They also should make sure that any old content that really should have been archived off a long time ago actually is.

So make sure that your document retention policies have been properly enforced. And then also if there’s content that you want copilot to be able to see, you need to put it in your Microsoft 365. So if you’ve got files, for example, on your local hard drive or on a USB stick or something like that, copilot doesn’t see those files, it only sees things that are in your Microsoft 365. So you’d need to put those files in your Microsoft 365 if you want copilot to be able to refer to them. Now the other thing you can do to help give copilot access to data is you can install connectors or plugins. So some third party services, I believe NetDocuments is creating one, but I could be mistaken about that. Law Toolbox has one now. I think Clio is making one. A lot of different vendors are making them, but you should check with whoever your legal software provider is and see if they have a plugin or a connector for copilot that would help copilot be able to access the data in that system if you want it to. That’s another issue people are having is they’re wondering why copilot isn’t seeing the files they have in their document management system, for example. Well, that’s why, because you didn’t show it to copilot. So just to sum that up, make sure your permissions are right and make sure that you have the data that you want copilot to see and not the data you don’t want copilot to see in your Microsoft 365.

Molly Ranns:

We are now going to take a short break from our conversation with Ben Schorr to thank our sponsors.

JoAnn Hathaway:

Welcome back. We’re here with Ben Schorr talking about Microsoft copilot.

Molly Ranns:

Ben, you mentioned earlier something about prompts. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

Ben Schorr:

Sure. So the simple answer to what are prompts is that prompts are how you tell the AI what you want it to do. They can be super simple. They could be write a blog post about probate or they can be much more complex, in fact, almost infinitely complex. The reality is, would the prompt write a blog post about probate work? Yeah, it would write something. Would it write a good blog post about probate? Maybe, maybe not. You’re going to get a much better result the more detail you give of the ai. And so telling it to write a blog post about probate would do something, but telling it write a blog post about probate in the state of Michigan for an audience of seniors who are not sophisticated on the topic would probably be better. You could then also tell it things like keep the tone professional and friendly.

There’s a lot you can do in your prompts. Prompt engineering is an emerging field and there are a lot of people who are getting up to speed and getting expert on it very quickly. And if you’re going to use a generative AI like copilot, it’s a good idea to learn about prompts, to learn about what makes a good prompt, and to learn about how you can make your prompts better. And then the other tip I give people with prompts is try stuff. Write a prompt, see what it does, write the same prompt a different way. Give it a little bit more instruction, see if it’s better. So ai, it doesn’t get bored, so keep trying and you will eventually over time, you’ll sort of refine your prompts and figure out what works best for you and what gives you the best output. So hopefully that answers the what are prompts question, the prompts that key, how you tell the AI what you want it to do.

I guess I should elaborate just a little bit too. Within the prompt, we talk about what makes a good prompt, so there are different elements to it. So the main one is the goal. That’s what you want it to do. Really the goal is you want that blog post. So if you give it just the goal, it’ll do something. The next one is context, so you can tell it why you want it to do something. So you’re writing a blog post about probate, again, for an audience of seniors who aren’t sophisticated, you might also say to promote my law practice, give it as much context about what you’re trying to do in addition to what you want, you can also tell it references. So you can say, refer to this document or refer to this website as a source of information about the subject. And finally, you can also give it some information about how you want the tone. You want the tone to be friendly. You want the tone to be professional. You want the post to be longer, shorter, more concise, more verbose, more expert, clearer, more persuasive. You can play around with different terms and different conditions and see what the output is and what works best.

JoAnn Hathaway:

There’s been some discussion around AI generating inaccurate information. There are more than a few incidents where lawyers have been sanctioned for producing briefs that contain inaccurate or false information. So Ben can copilot make stuff up, and what can lawyers do to prevent this?

Ben Schorr:

Did I mention that you should never show the output of a generative AI to a client or the court without reviewing it?

JoAnn Hathaway:

You did.

Ben Schorr:

Okay, glad I mentioned it again. I might mention it one more time. So could it make stuff up? Yes, of course. It’s a generative ai. Does it make stuff up? Not very often in my experience, but it can. One of our VPs at an event said something I thought was brilliant. He said that copilot will often be right and occasionally be usefully wrong. And what he meant by that was that the pu you’ll get will be often right, but even when it’s not right, sometimes it’ll point you in a direction that’s useful. So in other words, it may have written something that isn’t exactly what you’re going for, may not even be a hundred percent accurate, but again, you’re revising it, right? You’re reviewing and revising. So you look at what copilot wrote and you might say, okay, that’s not exactly what I wanted to say there, or That’s not exactly right. Let me fix that, but I see where it’s going. And so it was usefully wrong in that context, right? It’s written you something that got you pointed in the right direction. So yes, it can, and you should of course always review and make sure that it’s correct. Again, never show it to a court or the client without reviewing it.

Molly Ranns:

Ben, as a therapist, I constantly thinking about confidentiality. Can you talk about showing copilot confidential client information and what does this mean for privacy?

Ben Schorr:

This is important. We get this question a lot too. So copilot in Microsoft 365 respects your Microsoft 365 permissions. So we’re not training the model on your Microsoft 365 data or on anything that you show copilot in Microsoft 365. We talked earlier about how your permission settings are respected as well. So if Alice has a document and Bob in the same firm asks copilot questions about Alice’s document, well, if Bob doesn’t have permissions to see Alice’s document, then Bob’s copilot doesn’t either. Alice’s copilot could see it because she has permissions to it. The privacy settings in copilot are the same as your privacy settings for Microsoft 365. You shouldn’t have any extra concerns as far as showing confidential client data.

JoAnn Hathaway:

Ben, before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts or tips for attorneys looking to integrate copilot into their practice?

Ben Schorr:

One thing is I’ve been referring to co-pilot in Microsoft 365. We also have copilot in Bing search, and you can also see that in the Edge browser. So those are free copilots that you can use, anybody can use on the web. Now, I would use those. I get the question a lot about when should I use that versus using copilot in Microsoft 365. So for anything relating to clients to anything related to confidential material that’s sort of business content, I would use Copilot and Microsoft 365 for that. Copilot and Edge or Copilot and Bing are great for the sort of general web query stuff that you might’ve been using Google or Bing for to search for. So I use copilot in Bing for lots of personal stuff, for drafting blog posts for my hobby blog, things like that. But anything I’m doing for work or for clients or for customers, that’s all going to happen in copilot from Microsoft 365.

So that’s one tip I have is be aware of which copilot you’re using and use the right copilot for the right thing. My second tip would be to again, try it. I have a legal customer I talked to that one of the really valuable things he’s found with Copilot is he’ll be writing something in a brief or a memo or a letter, and what he’ll do is he’ll write it because he likes to write, but then he’ll show it to copilot basically and say, can you suggest ways to make this more persuasive or can you suggest ways to make this clearer? Things like that. And copilot will give him some suggestions, and sometimes he accepts those suggestions. Sometimes he doesn’t, but he finds it really helpful to have copilot, take a look at what he’s written and also tell copilot what he’s going for. In other words, more persuasive, clear, or whatever his particular approach is for that, and just see what it says.

Right? Gives him some useful feedback in many cases. The third tip I would have would be that copilot is also available on mobile. A lot of people don’t realize that you can have it with you on your smartphone on the go. So there is a Microsoft 365 app that you can use, and again, if you’re signed in with your Microsoft 365 account and using copilot for Microsoft 365, it does have a lot of the same capabilities you would have on your desktop or laptop computer in terms of being able to ask questions about documents, files like that. Copilot also exists in Microsoft Teams, and that’s actually one of the really powerful uses of copilot is being able to record or transcribe a meeting that you were in and then have copilot summarize that meeting and ask copilot questions about the meeting. I use that all the time, especially if it’s a meeting I was late to or a meeting I couldn’t attend.

I will open up the meeting transcript after the meeting and ask Copilot, summarize this meeting. It’ll give me three or four paragraphs about what happened. Were there any action items for me? Were there any dates or deadlines Mentioned Was Copilot lab, that’s a product I work on sometimes was copilot Lab mentioned. I could spend five or 10 minutes having a conversation with copilot about the meeting and probably get almost as much information as if I had been there. Copilot in Teams is a really useful use case of it, of copilot for attorneys that they really should take a look at.

JoAnn Hathaway:

Well, this has been wonderful information, Ben, as we sign off from this podcast episode, we’d like to thank our guests today, Ben Shaw, for a great program.

Molly Ranns:

Ben, if our listeners would like to follow up with you, what’s the best way to reach you?

Ben Schorr:

Probably the best way to reach me these days is on LinkedIn. I’m one of the very few Ben Schorrs, S-C-H-O-R-R on LinkedIn and the only one at Microsoft as far as I know.

Molly Ranns:

Thank you again for joining us today.

Ben Schorr:

Thanks for having me.

Molly Ranns:

Absolutely. This has been another edition of the State Bar of Michigan On Balance Podcast.

JoAnn Hathaway:

I’m Joanne Hathaway.

Molly Ranns:

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

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