Today’s Tech: Tools, Not Toys. What You Need Now.

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Managing your law practice can be challenging, marketing, time management, attracting clients, and all the things besides the cases that you need to do that aren’t billable. Welcome to this edition of the Unbillable Hour, the Law Practice Advisory podcast. This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guests and host Christopher Anderson here on Legal Talk Network.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Welcome to the Unbillable Hour. I am your host, Christopher Anderson, and today’s episode is about production. We are going to speak today not to a vendor, not to a CEO of some technology company. Today we’re going to talk to a guy whose job and business it is and who’s a leader in implementing technology into his own businesses. Our guest is Richard Dukes and Richard is a lawyer who’s committed to fusing technology into his practice to be more effective for his clients, for his business, for his team, and for himself in the main triangle of what it is a law firm must do. We all remember that we have to do three things. That’s why we call it a triangle. We acquire new clients acquisition, we have to produce the results that we promised to them, production, and we have to achieve business and professional results for the owner.

And of course, in the center of that triangle, driving it all for better or for worse is you. And today we’re going to talk about how we bring technology into our business, not as a toy, but as a tool, and how to think about implementing a new tool to ensure its effectiveness. And my guest today to have this conversation is Richard Dukes. And Richard is a shareholder at Turner Paget, South Carolina law Firm Rich’s practice centers on guiding businesses through employment law and liability matters. He’s also though been a proponent of helping attorneys across practices serve their clients more efficiently and more effectively. He’s a leader in the innovative use of technology to streamline information management in both complex litigation, but also to facilitate effective collaboration among lawyers, offices, law firms, clients across the state and across the country. And with that introduction, Rich, welcome to the show.

Rich Dukes:

Thank you, Christopher. Glad to be here.

Christopher T. Anderson:

It is absolutely our pleasure. So that was my typical way too brief and not enough detail introduction. So if you don’t mind, can you just kind of expand on that a little bit as to why do you like talking about technology? Why do you want to be on a show like this? Talking to listeners who are law firm owners and law firm practitioners like yourself about implementing technology in their businesses, what floats your boat?

Rich Dukes:

I think the key is all lawyers, and I’m a defense lawyer, but all we have is our time. That’s our capital. And if I can do something that makes my work more efficient or better, then that’s an effective use of my time. And so I look to technology as how can I do my job better and how can I achieve my client’s results more efficiently? And technology helps me do that.

Christopher T. Anderson:

How do you answer to the criticism that when, because I know that a lot of technology vendors get this in a business that charges their clients by the hour. How is efficiency a good thing?

Rich Dukes:

Clients are always looking at whether you are more or less efficient than one of your competitors, especially big corporate entities and insurance carriers have metrics that they measure one firm against another. How can you get to the end result settlement of the case or trial of the case in fewer hours? And they’re measuring defense lawyers by those metrics and comparing them. And so if you were less efficient and not getting to the end of the case as quickly or expeditiously as possible, then the clients aren’t going to send you any business anymore.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Well, that’s definitely a good reason and for those who aren’t on the defense side, if you don’t think your clients are measuring you in that way, I think that’s folly. I think you would agree with me, rich, that the key to good business, the key to growth, the key to being successful is to help more people more efficiently, more thoroughly, and that they will continue to do business with you whether defense or not. So I think that’s a great answer. Thank you. So let’s talk about your personal journey then. You have incorporated technology into your business. You believe in technology as a tool for your own efficiency, but can you tell a little bit about, give us some examples. How has this manifested itself? How have you grown into this and into becoming someone who likes to help others on this journey?

Rich Dukes:

Years ago, probably more than 20 years ago, I was involved in defending a class action over a Ponzi scheme. We acquired about 4 million pages of actual documents, and this was back in the day where nothing was digitized. And so we had to send those documents to the Philippines to have them coded and then the database created for us to be able to review it. The whole case was hinged on finding one check made out to a rogue employee of my client, and I saw the check and then I had to find it again because the producing party wouldn’t let me copy it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Oh my.

Rich Dukes:

And I knew that the rogue employee had deposited the check in his personal checking account because I knew where my client did its banking and it was a different bank, so I had to find this needle in a haystack. And in using technology, we were able to find it and the whole case went from there. And we used technology to unravel how this Ponzi scheme worked. And that’s when I became a zealot about using technology and how to use it more effectively to manage my caseload because going through millions and millions of pages of documents page by page is impossible. I know we used to do it, but that’s an inefficient use of your time.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Well, and I think it’s arguable that the volume in any given case has increased quite a number of fold since then.

Rich Dukes:

Oh yeah. I mean, we weren’t hardly using emails back when I started my career and now email is the bane of my existence. But you go and capture someone’s email account and you’re going to have millions of electronic pages and you got to search through it and keyword searches and it’ll be, I know we’re going to talk about AI later, but using AI to search through your document database, it’s going to be a game changer, I think.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, the volume’s increased to going through it and I think not, you said you can’t go through it, but I think also to your earlier point, if you were able to, that would make the cost of litigating the cost of having you and your team go through those documents to your clients, be prohibitive and would make the cases impossible to prosecute or defend.

Rich Dukes:

That’s right. The one thing clients don’t want to pay for is document review. And if you can do it without spending overly aggressive amounts of time doing it, that’s a benefit to the client and you find the needle in the haystack more efficiently and more effectively.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Sure. And obviously what you’re talking about there is, or eDiscovery techniques, which is a huge, one huge tool that a lot of law firms and law firm practitioners use. Are there other technologies that have transformed or really helped you to be the more efficient lawyer that you describe?

Rich Dukes:

Yes. I’ve gone paperless. I’ve been paperless for a decade now, and I use my iPad for virtually everything, virtually every day. One of the apps that I use almost all the time is an app called Notability. I haven’t used a legal pad in years and I’m able to keep all of my cases, all the notes from my cases together using notability. I can forward my notes to my assistant to put in the storage file and our document management system. I can keep my to-do list for each case all together, so I know where I am within my preparation of the defense of the case, I can keep all my witness contact information together. I never lose anything because it’s all right within the Notability app.

Christopher T. Anderson:

You can’t even spill your coffee on it.

Rich Dukes:

That’s right. And I also can use notability if one of the other lawyers in my firm emails me a draft of a document, I can break out the red pen on my iPad and annotate changes to the document, email it back to ’em. So it is relatively seamless and that has made my practice both more efficient, but has relieved one of the stressors of forgetting where you left something.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Sure. I mean, yeah, that also goes to I think an important concept, which is not only more efficient now, but you’ve actually touched on some things that you couldn’t really have done before. So just being able to electronically receive a document and mark it up and send it back, it’s not just more efficient, but it is being done in a way that wasn’t really possible.

But so listen, as a lawyer, especially someone who’s tech savvy, once you get tech savvy and you start to use some technology tools, we are often rewarded then by being inundated with brand new whizzbang technology from every vendor on the planet who wants to get your attention and suggest that your whole life would be completely altered if you would only use widget number X five nine. So in your practice, as you’re confronted with all these opportunities, how do you and tell you what we’re going to do? I’m going to ask the question and then we’re going to go to a break, but how do you evaluate, how do you decide whether it’s worth your time to even consider a technology, and then how do you evaluate whether it’ll actually work in your practice? I’m going to leave that question hanging while we get a word from our sponsors and we’ll be back here with Richard Dukes. I’m the shareholder at Turner Paget talking about implementing technology in his business right after these words. Alright, we are back with Richard Dukes shareholder of Turner Paget and Technology Aficionado Gourmet Gour in his business. And the question that we left before the break hanging out there was how do you evaluate, how do you cull and evaluate new technologies, new opportunities to become more efficient or to do new things that you couldn’t do before to ensure that they’re right for your practice? What process do you go through?

Rich Dukes:

I try the product out, or at least I try to and

Christopher T. Anderson:

Well, but even before you do that, Richard, I mean obviously you can’t even try everything that’s put in front of you. So what do you do? First

Rich Dukes:

I listen to the sales pitch from the vendor and decide whether it’s worth my time. Is this something that is demonstrably different than something I’m already using? And we get bombarded by document review platforms wanting you to use their service, and I’ve got one that my firm has bought into that I’m using. And every software program has positives and negatives and the key is, are the pluses more than the minuses? And if somebody can come to me with a new product that is basically the same, I’m not going to waste my time trying it. If it is something sells me on, yeah, I can do what I do more efficiently by using this product, I’ll give it a shot. The question always is, is it worth my time to try this out? And then if it is, I’ll try it. There are some products, especially the evolving artificial intelligence environment, some closed AI systems that I really want to try, especially one of the major publishers of case law. I won’t say what the company is, but everybody will know what it is. They have an AI platform that I think is really, really cool, but they haven’t yet let me use it. I haven’t put it through its chops, so I’m not going to.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So you evaluate whether it’s new and different and then you give it a try. And then so as you’re giving it a try, obviously you haven’t already decided to pull it in. What are you looking for as you’re trying it out? What are your criteria so that what the listeners are going to be like they’re listening for? What criteria should they be thinking about as you’re trying out whether you’re going to roll this out to more of your team, whether this is success or a failure,

Rich Dukes:

Is it easy to use? It’s a key because you’ve got people with different technological capabilities on a given team, is it going to be something that everybody can use and adopt or is it something that everybody on your team is going to have to go through countless training and they’re going to screw things up or not use the technology correctly? That’s the key. I mean, is it something that everybody can use and will they use it? A lot of people are resistant to changes in technology and they like what they like. We’ve still got people out there who think that word perfect is the be all and end all of word processing software. And there are things about Word perfect that I miss being able to reveal code at the bottom if you remember those days. But they will not go to Microsoft Word with a gun put to their head. So when you adopt a new technology, you have to analyze, is this something that you can convince everybody to use and actually use it

Christopher T. Anderson:

In that analysis? Do you also look at everybody on your team? People on your team don’t use anything in isolation. Everybody on your team has a daily workflow and a process workflow to do process one, they have a workflow to do process two, they’ve have a workflow and then it fits into their daily workflow, which incorporates email, telephone, photocopying whatever else into how they get their job done. How do you think about when you’re thinking about a product, how do you think about whether it fits into the bigger picture as well?

Rich Dukes:

Well, I’ll give you an example. My firm is statewide in South Carolina. We have offices in all the major cities in South Carolina and one office in Georgia. We have a wide variety of practices and a wide variety of technological facility. We have recently to cut storage costs. We have forced everybody to go paperless,

Announcer:

Something

Rich Dukes:

I’ve been doing for years. But a lot of other people have their boxes of documents and they do not want to rely on cloud storage. Sometimes you have to just say by dictum, this is what we’re going to do and this is why, and we’re going to save this much money in storage costs if we don’t have to go to Iron Mountain storage with all of our boxes of documents. It’s not so easy with other technologies, you have to just get buy-in from people. You have to show them that this works and that it’s a good product. For example, I tried a case a few years ago in federal court and I had been part of a program through the Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel, of which I’m a member as the technology committee. Essentially, we as a group evaluate new technologies and then tell others about it. One thing they had done is promoted trial pad for iPad

And we put together a little course on how to use it. I said, this sounds great. I’m going to try it. And what I did was I had all my documents for the case, all my exhibits on my iPad. I created a private wifi network in the federal court by plugging an Apple TV box into the video system of the court, and I could put on the fly any document I needed up on the screens first to the judge once it got admitted into evidence to the jury. And when I tell you, people tell us that we have become a more visual society, that we’re more visual learners, when I put documents up on the screen in front of the jurors and they’re able to look at it on their own TV screen, they were wrapped. I had their attention. And as I’m walking to the lectern with my iPad and clicking on the documents to display, I wasn’t turning to a legal assistant and asked, would you put exhibit one up or show the call up? I was able to do call outs highlighting all the whizzbang stuff that jurors are looking for to get their attention. And that sold me on trying a case, just using an iPad

And controlling the information myself. That case was amusing because opposing counsel was not a tech guy,

And later in the trial he was messing around with the Elmo, if you remember what the Elmo is, and he couldn’t get it to work, and the judge in front of the jury said, Mr. Dukes, could you help us out? Could you display the document that opposing counsel wants to show? And I was able to put it up on the screen in half a second. The jury is looking at me like I walk on water because I’ve saved them time. I show that I’m the master of the technology, that I’m the one telling them the story, and I thought that went a long way. I got a defense verdict in that case. When I tell my team about using technology and trial presentation that sells them, that’s how to do it and you can explain why it’s a good thing.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, that makes total sense. So let’s talk about the flip side then. So I think that’s using it, demonstrating it, showing how it’s making the job better, and like you said, you used it as a communication, you really communicated better with the jury because of it. But let’s talk about the flip side. Let’s talk about challenges you’ve had in integrating technology. So what are some of the pitfalls, challenges, difficulties in bringing new technology? You’ve talked a little bit about resistance to change, but in bringing new technologies and being a tech forward kind of guy, where have you had difficulties

Rich Dukes:

Integrating data from our document management system is Microsoft based and get documents and paper, electronic paper onto an Apple product can be a challenge. I’ve developed several workarounds, either downloading to a thumb drive and I have a USB adapter that plugs into the base of the iPad, so you can load documents that way or upload a document into iCloud and then download it onto the iPad directly, things like that. That’s been a headache, but not a terrible headache. It is not as much of a pain as you think it is

Christopher T. Anderson:

In our conversation earlier. And we said we would talk about it later, and so I want to make sure that we do, you mentioned artificial intelligence, which is of course all the buzz. So after we hear one more time from our sponsors, I’d like to spend the rest of our conversation talking about what you’ve learned about ai, what you’ve learned today, what you are using today, and where do you see this going? Because as somebody who’s had their pulse on technology as it relates to law firms, I’m sure you’ve got a perspective on that, but before we hear from them, we need to hear from the folks that make this show possible. So we’ll do that. We’ll be right back with Richard Dukes shareholder of Turner Pageant. We are back with Richard Duke, shareholder at Turner Pageant. We’ve been talking technology and in the first segment we talked about how we know whether technology is right for our business. And then during the second segment, we talked a little bit about how we implement it into the firm and how we get acceptance of that technology. And before we left the show today, then I wanted to talk about the newest thing. What is working for you right now in ai? And let’s start there. What have you implemented? What are you implementing that has artificial intelligence built in or that’s part of that tool?

Rich Dukes:

AI presents a couple of challenges for us as lawyers because of our duty of confidentiality and attorney-client privilege, most of these open AI systems like Chat GPD, you cannot upload a bunch of depositions and then ask it to summarize those depositions or to find inconsistencies in the testimony of those depositions because you’re putting the testimony out on the internet be closed AI systems, it’s where you’re going to have your intra firm internet with the ability of AI to search a bunch of depositions and summarize them or to find inconsistencies in testimony. That’s going to be really cool. It’s a matter of finding a cost efficient closed AI system that has enough information in it to make it useful.

Christopher T. Anderson:

You said OpenAI, you said it involves uploading the information into the internet, which means that the machines can use what is confidential information for their learning and thereby maybe use them in other people’s results, which would be exposing your client’s confidential information. But what’s a closed system mean? How can it be closed? How does the AI have enough information to close system to do its job?

Rich Dukes:

That’s the problem. I’m not sure that the vendors have developed a really good solution yet. One thing that I’ve heard tell of, although my firm is not using it, is one of the challenges for lawyers who represent insurance companies is making sure your billing entries comply with that carrier’s billing guidelines. And so there are firms who have a closed AI system, it’s only for their firm. They run all of their bills through a proprietary AI platform that knows what the billing guidelines are and can look at every attorney in the firm or every employee in the firm’s time entries to analyze whether they’re going to get approved or not. I think that would be very beneficial for defense lawyers to use. I think everybody would crawl over broken glass to get this technology. For our firm, we have not yet found such a platform that benefits us sufficiently to justify the cost.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Makes sense.

Rich Dukes:

There are some big national firms where you have a lot more timekeepers where it is worth the investment to have an AI analyst regarding your bills. I envision that you could use a closed AI system with a big commercial case to analyze either the documents that are being produced and to find those nuggets or those needles in the haystack or to analyze testimony of hundreds of witnesses. But you have to have a big set for that to work on the open AI systems where you’re not putting your client’s confidential information. I’ve been tinkering around with that, and I think that we’re really, as a practice of law this year is going to be an inflection point in using ai. One thing that I found that’s been interesting at least, is using AI to help you prepare a witness for deposition.

And I have asked in messing around with ai, use several different platforms and compare the results with the same query. So I’ll say, I’m defending such and such a witness with such and such a corporation or this type of corporation in this type of case, all generalities draft me 50 questions that plaintiff’s counsel may ask so that I can prepare my witness. And it comes up, the different platforms come up with kind of standard questions, but then they come up with some that are, I might not have worded it that way or it might not have occurred to me to ask that. And I think that’s a value added and it generates these, you have to train the query a little bit. If you spend 15 minutes doing it and going back and forth with the platform to get your search where you want it, you can get some pretty interesting things out of there. Another thing I’ve done, and I had a witness recently who gave a lot of speeches, has written a lot of papers, has published a lot, and I wanted to know where the pressure points were, where the plaintiff’s lawyer was going to come after him. And so I said, analyze everything. So-and-so has written and tell me where the controversial parts are. That was amazing. What

Christopher T. Anderson:

Really

Rich Dukes:

What the AI platforms were able to come up with, found speeches that this witness had given 30 years ago. Wow. And I told the witness the other side will have watched all of these videos and seen all of your speeches be prepared for that. I thought it was really a really effective way to help prepare a witness for deposition.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool. So those sound like some really good uses that you’re doing today. Let’s put on the crystal ball now. So you said that there’s an inflection point a year from now. Where do you see, because I mean these days a year in this technology is a long time. It’s really evolving very quickly. What are you hoping for? What do you foresee as the effect and the impact of AI on your practice and on the practice in general over the next’s, say, a year to two years from now?

Rich Dukes:

I don’t think AI is going to replace lawyers. I think there are some functions of practicing law that’ll be impacted by ai, especially people who draft very similar contracts, things like that. I don’t think we’re going to see AI replace litigators. I don’t think we’re going to see AI replace us as researchers doing legal research. There are too many hallucinations still out there as some lawyers found out to their horror.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yes,

Rich Dukes:

I think that you can use AI and will be using it more and more to prepare either for oral argument. One thing you might ask is, before such and such a court, what questions might the bench ask me about this brief that would be kind of an interesting use for ai?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Well, I mean, it sounds like mean, the way you describe it is that it is fitting into your overall paradigm that like all the other technologies you’ve talked about, these are tools that make, they don’t replace what you’re doing. They make it more efficient. They make you able again to do more with less and less time and pass that on to your client as a more efficient attorney.

Rich Dukes:

Yeah, it does. And I think that’s only going to get better. I want to see some of the closed systems get cheaper and easier to use. I think the open systems are relatively good. Some do better with some things than others and you have to compare ’em. But I’m looking forward to seeing some closed AI systems and see what we can do with that internally and to make our work more efficient.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Excellent. Well, Richard, that brings us to the end of the segment, the last segment and of the unbillable hour for this month. And I want to thank all of our listeners for sticking with us. But I know that we’ve, we’ve touched on several different topics and I know that some of them have triggered questions among our listeners that I haven’t thought of. So would you mind sharing a way that if they have a follow-up question for you or want to know a little bit more about one of the topics or about how you’re thinking about something, how might they get in touch with you?

Rich Dukes:

Email is the best at R Dukes, at turner patchett.com or LinkedIn, and I look forward to any questions they might have.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Fantastic. Well thank you Richard.

Rich Dukes:

Thank you very much, Christopher.

Christopher T. Anderson:

You bet. Alright. And again, this is Christopher T Anderson, and I look forward to being with all of you next month with another great guest as we learn more about the topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you. And remember, you can subscribe to all the additions of this [email protected] or on iTunes. Thank you for joining us. We will speak again soon. But before I go, let me also remind you that the Community table allows you to participate as a guest here on the Unbillable hour on the third Thursday of every month at 3:00 PM Eastern allows you to call in here on Zoom. So you’re joined by Zoom and participate, ask us anything. And the Community Table’s now hosted also by Clio, and we have our guest, Joshua Lennon, who joins us as well. And so between us and the other guests that we have, join us. We can answer your questions about your law firm business rather than just what we decide to talk about every month here on the unbillable hour. So join us the third Thursday at three on the community table, also here on the Legal Talk network.com. See you next month.

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