AI Adoption in Law Firms: What’s Really Happening Behind the Numbers

Episode Notes

Transcript

Nicole Black:

First, look at the software you’re already using. Everybody’s into their software. Look, decide what you need it for. How are you going to use it the most in your firm? Talk to your employees. Don’t just decide. Find out from them and then see what are the tools you already trust and already rolled out into your firm. What are they doing right now and what’s on their roadmap in the near future? Because everyone’s moving really fast. And then fill in the gaps with external software that you’re not already using. But first, look at what you’re already using because it’s very possible that you may not even need to use someone else’s software that and vet them and go through that whole process. Someone you already trust, this may roll it out really soon.

Phillip Vaden:

What’s next in AI? Big question, requiring big insights from someone who is the exact kind of expert we need to hear from. My guest today is Nicole Black, known across the legal tech world as Nikki, a Rochester, New York attorney, author, journalist, and one of the most consistent voices at the intersection of law and technology for the past two decades. Nikki has been writing a weekly tech column in The Daily Record since 2007 and also writes regularly for the ABA Journal and Above the Law. She spent 20 years telling lawyers to pay attention to what’s coming next. Nikki and I cover how our attorneys are leveraging AI in their practice today, legal tech consolidation and what it means for you, and will there be a rise of the vibe coders that undoes the consolidation? I’m Philip Vaden, partner manager at InfoTrack, and Nikki and I dive into all of that and more on this episode of The AI Sidebar.

Hey Nikki, how are you?

Nicole Black:

Good. How are you

Phillip Vaden:

Doing? Great, great. Hey, thank you so much for joining us and giving us this time so I can pick your brain. You are regularly at the forefront of everything that’s going on with legal tech. And so I’m really happy to have you here so I can just pick your brain and get all your thoughts.

Nicole Black:

Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

Phillip Vaden:

All right. So you have done a lot of research over the years on AI adoption in legal tech. And I wanted to get all of your research and knowledge over the years and from where we started 2024, 2025, and then where we are in 2026 today in the legal space and what that adoption of AI tools looks like.

Nicole Black:

Absolutely. Well, so it’s interesting. I started covering AI tools in legal in about 2007, predating generative AI. And there were a handful of software tools out there that did use artificial intelligence. And I wrote about them for the ABA Journal, but obviously once generative AI came along in 2022, there’s been just an explosion of new tools and outside the industry and inside the industry as well. So it’s been interesting to see how adoption has changed over the years.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah. And in looking at some of your statistics and just listening to podcasts with you over the years too, it seems like every year we’ve seen kind of a doubling from 2024 with about 30% usage. And then last year I think it was somewhere at 67%, something like that. Obviously there’s one question I always have with usage, what does that mean exactly for the attorneys? Do they have access to it? And they’re like, “Yeah, we have these tools. The firm bought these for me,” but they’re not actually using them very often. Are they just using them to draft emails? Which is not to say that’s a bad thing. I think it’s nice to be able to draft that way, but do you have any feel for how in

Nicole Black:

Depth they’re using the tools? I write a legal industry report every year for 80M, the company that I work for. And this was the fifth year that we wrote this report. And since generative AI came out, we’ve been tracking generative AI adoption in the industry. And this is the third year that we’ve included generative AI data points in the report. And so what was really interesting this year, we have a question where we ask, “Are you personally using generative AI tools for work-related purposes?” And last year that number was at 31%, and this year it was at 69%.

So it has gone up significantly just in the span of one year. But what was interesting was when you then ask that, and it was a survey of 1300 people, definitely lean more smaller firm than large firm, but there were large firm and mid-size firm respondents as well. And when you asked them if their firms had rolled out generative AI, what was interesting was it was closer to 41% more. So these people were using generative AI off the books, so to speak. And the only other really interesting data point that relates to generative AI, I thought was that when it came to governance training and generative AI policies, those numbers were almost in the single digits for these law firms. So it was a pretty crazy disparity there when you look at that compared to the usage you’re seeing.

Phillip Vaden:

I guess what accounts for this? Is it just the law firms not having. And it’s tough because law firms are different than standard corporate structures most of the time, just the way the hierarchical structure is in law firms and everything. So is it like there’s no change management and so there’s no champion? And it feels like in law firms you may have one attorney or two attorneys that are really excited about new tools that are coming out, “Hey, we could use Claude for this. We could use ChatGPT for this.” But then you don’t really want to pull them off of their billable work and put them on something that’s not billable. Is that a lot of what we’re seeing or is it not bringing in experts from the outside that they don’t have to worry about losing that billable time? Just curious what your perspective is on that because I’ve been so curious about this.

Nicole Black:

I mean, I think part of it is that there’s risk involved in adopting AI. So they want to do it the right way and they want to choose the right tools. The smaller firms are able to pivot and adopt tech more quickly. You get into the mid-sized firms and they often have a very small IT team internally or they use consultants. And then the large firms have a large team that’s devoted to technology and rolling it out into the firm. So what you normally see is solo and smalls are often the first to adopt any kind of tech. And you are seeing that with AI because it’s easier for them to do it. And then large firms and then these mid-sized firms in the middle are often the slowest because they just don’t have the resources available to devote to tech adoption and change management within their firms.

But I think part of it is just that the AI is unique. It’s rolling out so rapidly. It’s constantly changing. And there are these very unique risks which are very public. At this point, over 1600 court cases have had fabricated case sites submitted to the courts. There are websites that track that, and a lot of these make headlines. So not only is there a risk from a malpractice or client representation standpoint, there’s also PR risks. And so the firms are slower to adopt for any number of reasons. And meanwhile, a lot of the legal practitioners across roles understand how this can make their job a lot easier. So they’re just sort of using it off the books sometimes because they’re trying to streamline their workflows.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah, that’s a common thread with all of my friends that I’ve practiced with. They’re still practicing. And I was a litigator and they’re still doing litigation. And that was a really common thread. It was just that risk factor of, hey, you hear about all the stories of the people that really jumped out, usually small solo firms jumping out, “Hey, draft my motion for summary judgment and I’m just going to trust all the citations and just file it and just assume it was great.” And three years ago, the difference in quality between the models three years ago and today is kind of a night and day. Obviously you still have to use your lawyer brain and make sure that you’re shepherdizing things and all of that. And the one thing I’ve been talking with them, I’m like, “Well, you guys…” One of the shareholders at the firm that I was at, he would say something that the first time he told it to me, it really hurt my feelings.

But then after that, I thought more about it. I was like, “This is just really good advice all the time.” Which is he was like, “Don’t check your common sense at the door.” And so you could see how it hurt my feelings the first time he said it to me. But then it’s really sage advice because it’s like, well, you have these tools. We can use them and get all these efficiency gains out of them, but don’t check your common sense. We need to go in, we need to read the cases, we need to shepherdize the cases. The same we would for anything. If somebody was, hey, you sent another associate off, “Hey, can you help me with this and do this research?” If they brought back those cases and said, “Hey, these are perfectly on point for what we’re arguing here,” that’s lovely, but that doesn’t happen very often.

And so you’re going to trust but verify. And certainly with artificial intelligence still today, as good as it’s gotten for the generative AI, you still got to check it.

Nicole Black:

Well, I think that’s a basic confidence issue. I think AI, you can’t not read the submissions that the papers you submit to the court. You got to read them. You got to read the cases. I don’t understand. I mean, we all get a brief from a friend and use it as a starting point or to have someone else, like an associate do the work. But when I was a young associate in a litigation firm, they read everything through and through the first few times I committed it to them. And over time, when they started to trust me, they started to put my name on the submissions as well, and they started to trust my output. And I feel like we’re not at that point with AI, so you can’t trust the output and you can’t just submit stuff that you haven’t read. But one of the places where it’s kind of strange is the pro hac vice cases.

And I do think they’re in a strange situation because plenty of people have just signed off on it. You’re just sitting there and standing in court and everyone knows you’re not the one doing the work. They’re starting to get in the hot seat now too, which is a weird turn of events in the AI area, I think.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, pivoting off of the usage a little bit, which I think we’re going to continue to see this just evolving over time as the trust grows, and I think that there’ll be gateway tasks like drafting emails will then lead to you maybe getting your first draft of even a proposed order, things like that out. And then eventually it’ll become more fully integrated in the workflows. One topic that’s been talked about for 30 years, maybe longer, and that is the way that attorneys bill. Now, hourly has been the way people have been talking about the demise of the billable hour for a really long time. And there’s always been, I think, a couple of problems. One is that you don’t have. Big data was a problem. How do we aggregate the data across all of these cases that we handle over all of this time?

There’s so many law firms that have been around for a hundred years, and over time they should be able to track this data, but how did they do that? It was difficult before. It’s gotten so much easier in the last 10 years to be able to track that and see, hey, here’s the average amount of time that it takes us to do these cases. Here’s how much we typically bill out. And then the other thing is there’s a wildcard element to litigation. You don’t know, you are not entirely in control of how much work you’re going to do. If the other side is just filing motions left and right, you have to respond to them. And so you can’t just let those things slide. So I think that it seems to me anyway that the junction of big data and artificial intelligence have made it to where I think that it feels like to me we should start seeing a lot of firms adopting a flat rate model because they have confidence that the price they’re going to put up is one that they’re not going to lose their shirt on.

Is that something you’re seeing in the legal field? Are you seeing firms starting to adopt that flat rate pricing?

Nicole Black:

Well, I think that the theory is that AI is finally going to be the death of the billable hour, but the industry, the legal field is slow to change. Large law firms, as some of my colleagues that used to work in large law firms point out, it’s more than just the billable hour. They have entire compensation structures built around the billable hour. So it’s more than just simply changing how they bill. They’re going to have to change a lot of structural issues within the firm if they change from the billable hour. So I think what you’re going to see, I mean, there’s a few interesting things about it. One is that when you have AI built into your billing software and your practice management software, when the software’s built out enough with the AI functionality, it’s going to get to the point where you’re going to actually be able to use the artificial intelligence functionality applied to your firm’s billing and practice management software to help you actually come up with a fee, crunch the numbers and come up with a fee that is both reasonable and very likely profitable.

So it’s going to make it even easier to make that call when you have artificial intelligence applied to looking at your firm’s entire billing history and practice management history. I don’t think any of the software tools are out there quite have that built in quite yet, but they’re all working towards that. So that’s going to help. But then the other issue is firms are really slow to change and it’s going to take time for them to change. But what I do think is going to happen, I think there are two things that are really going to force two groups that are going to force this issue. One is in-house counsel and the other are insurance defense attorneys. So in-house counsel, both of these insurance companies and in-house counsel are sophisticated purchasers of legal services. And so we used to handle insurance defense at my firm and plaintiff’s work.

But with the insurance defense, you had to be very careful about how you build everything. You had to make sure it was attorney’s work versus paralegal work because the insurance company would come and if you used the wrong billing codes, they wouldn’t pay you. Write it off. And so you had to be really careful about that. And they now understand what you can accomplish with AI and the efficiencies that you can achieve just as in-house counsel understands that outside counsel can get this work done more efficiently. And so I think those are two of the most sophisticated purchases of legal services, purchasers that are going to start pushing towards flat rates and more reasonable, predictable ways of billing. And I think that’s going to start the trend. And then also boutique spinoffs from big law. They’re going to take the business, and I’ve always said this about all of tech, but I think it’s going to really happen with AI.

If they can spit off, take their book of business, take their talent, and then pitch a flat rate fee or some sort of AFA, like alternative fee arrangement to their clients or potential clients that completely undercuts what the firm’s charging, then they’re going to start to steal some of that business away from the large firm. So I think you’re going to see a couple of those forces making things change, and I think it’s already happening in some ways for sure.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah. And for the in-house counsel, do you see that there may be some more pulling that work into the in-house counsel office? Yeah, because I didn’t know if there was going to be a lot of hesitation there where it’s like, “Hey, let’s not go down that path.” Because a lot of in-house groups that I talked to seem to be people that were more. They weren’t so much litigators in a past life. Whenever they were at a firm, they were doing transactional work. But I did wonder if we’d start seeing more and more of that where they’re like, “Hey, you know what? This is a matter that’s $100,000 or less. Let’s just bring it inside and get it resolved here.”

Nicole Black:

Well, what I’ve heard is speaking to in-house counsel and at conferences on panels, what I’ve heard is happening is that they will do some of the initial work themselves now in-house before they send it over to outside counsel. So it cuts down and they’ll use AI to do it. So one example is those 50 state surveys where they need to know the law across 50 states that’s applicable to the business that their company handles. It used to be that a firm would handle that and constantly update those rules for 50 states. AI can do that every day and accurately.

A lot of different AI tools have that functionality built into them that are targeted to the legal space. So that’s one example. But they also can just do some of the analysis in-house to understand whether it’s factual analysis before they hand it off so that they’re not paying outside counsel to read through all the facts or just even predicting how long it’s going to take to handle the case or how to approach the case and what the strategy should be. They’re doing some of that stuff in-house before they hand it off and it’s saving a lot of billable hours. So I don’t think they’re not doing it all in-house, but they’re doing a lot of the initial work in-house to reduce the amount that they pay outside counsel.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah, that’s interesting. And then adoption. So I think that what I’ve seen is litigators seem to be sort of the Johnny come lately to the AI party, largely from the fact that the most public humiliations of misuse of AI have been litigators because that’s where you’re going to get exposed very publicly. And then a judge is going to not treat you very kindly after that. But I wondered if it was starting to segment throughout litigation. Are we seeing more people that are practicing family law leveraging it more versus on the criminal side? Maybe not at all. I didn’t know if you had any insight into that, because I’ve been curious if that was pretty standard across the litigation space or if it was sort of lumpy in those different areas.

Nicole Black:

Our data shows the data from the legal industry report breaks things down by firm size, by practice area. And one thing that we did find was that immigration attorneys in particular, in terms of the frequency of use, 28% of the respondents overall use generative AI daily. Immigration attorneys used 41% of them used it daily. So there are definitely some of the practitioners using it the most. And one thing that we’re also seeing both within my company and in the industry report, some of the top uses are brainstorming, but also messaging and correspondence with clients. It’s a great way to tell the client the next court date’s X, but it makes it pretty and it makes it sound a little more professional. It saves you the need to dictate the entire letter. So you’re definitely seeing attorneys from all practice areas do that. I’ve talked to lawyers who, a public defender I know locally, one of his colleagues very early on, like 2023, had used ChatGPT to help with voir dire on a murder case for a very specific issue on the murder defense and asked ChatGPT to come up with 15 questions for that very specific issue that they could use on voir dire to try and get a gut check with the jurors of how they might respond to the argument.

And the ChatGPT came up with some ideas that they otherwise would never have thought of, and they used a bunch of them and they got a not guilty verdict. Does that mean that successful voir dire got them a not guilty verdict? Of course not, but it certainly helps if you’re able to pull a jury that’s more receptive to the argument. So it’s great for that type of brainstorming. Certainly it shouldn’t draft your entire voir dire, but if you’re trying to get ideas of how to on voir dire or cross bring out a point, it can be a really good way to brainstorm.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah. And for all of the litigation associates, whenever there’s a big trial going on, they’re not going to have to stay up all night combing through the transcripts, getting things prepped for the next day. That’ll take minutes, not all night. Awesome. Okay. And then I want to pivot over to a little bit more of the, I know we’ve been talking about fee structure and that is certainly part of the business side. Let’s talk more about the legal tech companies and what we’re seeing in this space because we’re obviously seeing just a massive expansion of legal tech startups that pop up. We’re seeing a lot of money flowing into them. And now we’re starting to see, I think, phase two of these rapid expansions in technology like we saw in the ’90s and 2000s. And now we’re seeing this with largely legal tech AI companies where they’re starting to consolidate.

And I wanted to get your thoughts on, number one, do you look at this as generally a good thing that’s going to happen? And what does this mean for the average attorney that’s practicing today? How is their life going to change because of all this consolidation?

Nicole Black:

Well, so for any Battlestar Galactica fans out there, I’m going to quote a closing section from that movie, which it’s all happened before and it’s all going to happen again. And you alluded to that because it’s happened before. But it’s interesting because I’ve been with MyCase for 14 years. It’s Practice Management software now owned by. 8:00, it’s now part of 8:00 AM. And when I started 14 years ago, MyCase was a small startup and there were a few other cloud-based startups in the practice management space, and that was it. And then over time, you had this whack-a-mole of law practice management software tools. They’re all over the place. And I remember saying to one of my colleagues, a lot of people at the company that MyCase was initially with AppFolio for eight years came from Citrix, server-based software. And I said to someone, “I can’t believe how many startups there.” And they’re like, “Well, within the server space, where with Citrix, this same thing happened.

All these software companies popped up in this certain types of categories of software. And then there was all this consolidation, and then there were just a few big players, and that’s what’s happening now. And eventually, there’s just going to be a few big players standing, and this is just what happens. And sure enough, with AI, you’re seeing the same thing. You saw this with cloud, especially in the law practice management and e-discovery spaces with cloud-based software. And you’re seeing the same thing with AI. And I don’t think it’s going to be a new thing that happens for the consumer. There are all these small AI startups. They either get acquired or they disappear. I mean, that’s really what’s going to happen to them. And then there’s these large companies investing heavily in artificial intelligence into the software that’s already trusted and is a lot of firms are already using.

And as a firm that’s trying to make a decision of whether to use artificial intelligence, and if so, what tools to use, you need to take all those factors into consideration. And I always tell people, first, look at the software you’re already using. Everybody’s rolling AI out into their software. Look, decide what you need it for. How are you going to use it the most in your firm? Talk to your employees. Don’t just decide, find out from them, and then see what are the tools you already trust and already rolled out into your firm. What are they doing right now and what’s on their roadmap in the near future? Because everyone’s moving really fast. And then fill in the gaps with external software that you’re not already using. But first, look at what you’re already using because it’s very possible that you may not even need to use someone else’s software that and vet them and go through that whole process.

Someone you already trust, this may roll it out really soon.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah. Yeah. And one thing I saw with some of my friends who were at some of the largest law firms in the country is that they’re not very cost sensitive. They’ve got a lot of money. And what they’ll do is, and they also have those internal teams that can take this work on. But they’ll say, “Hey, we’re not going to pick between Harvey and Ligora. We’re going to do both. And we’re going to have people who volunteer to be the pilots for this and see how it goes.” And if they have these volunteers, occasionally I think they have some voluntolds, but they let them go through, work through it. They then just use data. How do they feel about it? That is an important aspect of it, but then what were the outcomes? And then from there, they’ll make a choice about a broader adoption.

But it seems like they are purchasing everything in the space, but in a small way. I’m purchasing it for this bucket of five attorneys over here, and they’re going to use it and report back. And that’s a great thing if you win that space, if you win those attorneys over with your product, because then they can proselytize within their firm to say, yes, we should expand this contract to the other 30 people that do what I do and expand it that way. So it’s really interesting to see the different things. And money is obviously a really nice thing to have whenever you’ve got some pretty expensive products out there in the space. Yeah.

Yeah. And then so the last thing is, and it touches on this actually, is with these different legal tech startups happening all over the place, and we are seeing this consolidation. I’ve seen another angle. I was recently visiting with an attorney. He’s a managing partner of a law firm, but he also, he loves vibe coding. He just loves it. He and I both have fun with that. And so we’re always talking about different things that we’re building out, like a spelling bee test for my kids so they can practice their spelling words for their tests that are coming up. And he has a personal injury firm and really smart guy. And he’s like, “We didn’t have a product that really fit perfectly to what our operations were. And whenever we talked to salespeople, they didn’t fully understand even how personal injury firms move their cases through.” And he’s like, “So I just decided I’m going to sit down and try to vibe code something out that consolidates all of these disparate products and put them into one application.” And he sat down and he did this in some iterations with that, but he eventually just built his own plat.

He hired an outside developer. He hired a contractor to come in and put the finishing touches on it because it’s real dangerous, I think, to just rely on your own vibe coding and push it out in the world and put client stuff in there. So he had a developer come in and make sure everything was secure. He has it hosted in Azure. And he’s like, “We built the shoe. We didn’t go out looking for the shoe that was going to fit our foot. We made the shoe.” And I just think as time moves on and we see more people coming into the legal profession that are AI natives, they’ve been having Claude and ChatGPT write their term papers since they were in eighth grade. I’m wondering how much of that we’re going to see, which would be a first I think for technology, which is see the consolidation, but then these tools allow people to be able to go out and build their own bespoke solutions.

And I don’t know if you’re seeing a lot of that and a lot of that being done successfully or if my friend, he’s just a random offshoot and that’s not going to be super common.

Nicole Black:

I mean, I think your friend’s a little bit of a unicorn. I absolutely do see some lawyers doing this. They tend to be pretty tech-savvy. It takes a level of tech savviness. And also your firm can’t be that large to be doing this in terms of the number of people, I think, unless you’re just doing it for your own use. I’m not sure if that approach is necessarily sustainable because the tech is changing so fast, but I do think that there’s a fork in the road right now in terms of what is it going to look like in the legal space. And I’ve written some articles about this. Is it going to be a single platform that your firm uses the most and that’s the home base, like a legal tech platform? And then you have all these integrations into other products from that platform, but that platform is your AI home base?

Or is it going to be Claude as this top layer or possibly OpenAI because there was just a big hire from the legal tech space to oversee their legal implementation at Ironclad’s former CEO, I think it was. But what we are seeing at Legal Week at the beginning of this year, and what we saw is Claude rolled out a whole bunch of legal functionality is why what it may look like is Claude becomes the conversational interface through which law firms access all of their software. And some of it is Claude and potentially some vibe coding that a lawyer may do for a specific feature or function. But then you have the business software, the billing software, the practice management software, HR software, payroll software. That’s the sensitive data that your firm uses to run its practice. And there’s a lot of overlap with documents and the practice of law too, like storing documents, but then creating documents and using old documents to create new ones.

And so there becomes an overlap with AI. And so what you may see is that firms will Really want their sensitive confidential data handled by the companies they’ve always trusted. And then when it comes to the practice side, possibly use some software or else actually just have Claude handle a lot of the practice side of the firm and then draw on that trusted data to inform some of the practice related work that needs to be done. I mean, it’s going to be interesting, but it’s unclear whether it’s going to end up. We do word processing in Word, right? We don’t use it as a legal specific tool most of the time. It’s Word. Word won that battle. So I think you may see that happening in legal, but time will tell.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah. Yeah, it’s going to be a very interesting thing. And I do tell people that are looking at building their own special thing and pushing it out. I’m like, the build is one part of the equation for software. Then you also have support. And if you’re building it, you also have to factor in those costs and that headache and that risk. And so if you’re ready to bring on a full dev team to make sure everything stays up to date and secure, then great. But don’t take that lightly. If for anybody who’s listening is like, “Yeah, I’m going to vibe code my own thing.” There are a plethora of headaches.

Nicole Black:

Analysis too over time. That’s why I’m not sure it’s necessarily sustainable for most law firms, but I could be wrong. I don’t have a crystal ball.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah. Yeah. I know that if anybody can do it, I think my buddy’s going to crack that egg, but he’s also, like you said, he’s kind of a unicorn guy where

Nicole Black:

He

Phillip Vaden:

Can kind of figure that stuff out.

Nicole Black:

In forums and stuff that are clawed legal specific forums, there are some lawyers that are doing this and a lot of the others are like, “I don’t understand how you’re doing this. It seems like too much work.” So I think the majority of lawyers just aren’t able to do that, but maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s going to be this new class of lawyers coming in that are going to be more fluent. I mean, time will tell. We’re at a really interesting point where it’s hard to tell what’s going to happen and where things are going to go.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah, I think a lot of things are going to end up like I started doing an open class setup towards the end of last year, and I’m not a highly technical person. And so I felt like I was spending eight hours a week just fixing it to make it do what I wanted it to do on a consistent basis. I was like, “I don’t think this is actually saving me any time.” And so when Claude Cohort came out, I was like, “I think I’m going to take that for a test drive.” And I was like, “Okay, well, it does everything I need and does it pretty seamlessly.” And then with the agents and then the model context protocol framework and all of the available tools you have there, you can do things. And one of the things I lead at InfoTrack is the model context protocol ecosystem.

And what used to take people nine months to integrate for e-filing, you can do, and if you have an AI agent, you can hook it in half a day and test it out. That’s testing, that’s everything, and have it running, which is just wild.

Nicole Black:

Todd Cowork is really interesting. My husband and I are starting launching a virtual winery. My husband’s making the wine and I’m doing the whole business side of things. And I was a litigator, so I have no familiarity with liquor licensing and trademarking, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it but for ChatGPT in the beginning and then Claude Cowork. And I was able to navigate all of that on my own using that as almost like an advisor, even helping me fill out certain applications where I just didn’t know I’d upload a photo, a screenshot of that question. What am I supposed to put in? And it would tell me. And I got the New York liquor license in four months and usually it takes six to nine months. So I

Phillip Vaden:

Answered

Nicole Black:

All the questions right, had all the documentation that it kind of walked me through that I would need. And so it can be really helpful as almost like a consultant when you’re trying to walk through that stuff, if you already sort of have the skillset.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah. Yeah. You know the right questions to ask. Yeah, absolutely. Well, cool. Well, I really appreciate the time. I do want you to tell me when the vineyard opens up, I want to taste the wine.

Nicole Black:

Fermenting now. We’ll get

Phillip Vaden:

Cheers to that. All right. But then I do have one question that I like to ask, and this is going to be putting on your lawyer hat along with your tech expert hat. What do you think is the best argument from the tech optimist side and the tech pessimist side? And which side do you think that you land on?

Nicole Black:

About AI?

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah.

Nicole Black:

Well, I mean, listen, I’m a sci-fi nerd, so a lot of the news that has been coming out, I mean, I’m looking at this less from legal tech and more from a broad humanity tech standpoint. I’m not really sure. But I mean, I’m very concerned about a Terminator or Battle Sarge Actica outcome here. The silence. Where the machines are already jumping sandboxes, all these test scenarios, and they’re doing things to prevent them from being shut down. It’s often when they’re told we’re going to shut you down, that they start doing crazy stuff and lying. So we don’t have an understanding of how AI works and really don’t seem to be able to control it. So that’s really scary. And the ability to regulate it, I think that ship has sailed. I don’t think the regulators are going to be able to move quick enough to contain or control this.

So I tend to be on the pessimist side. I’m concerned about the future of humanity here. I mean, I’d love it to be the Jetsons, but I’m not sure that’s where we’re going.

Phillip Vaden:

Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully I see a lot of bright lights and there’s also, I’m sure, a lot of weird stuff going on too with AI that’s not coming into my feed online, the weird stuff. I think I’m generally just an optimist all around and I’m like, “Oh, we’re going to figure this out. We’re going to make it work for us in a really great way.” Well, Nikki, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on and giving us this time and all of your expertise.

Nicole Black:

Absolutely. It was a lot of fun. Thanks, Brad.

Phillip Vaden:

All right.