Key Takeaways:
1. How to integrate AI and machine learning in legal research, document assembly and contract generation.
2. How small law firms can use AI to streamline internal processes.
3. Ethics of using AI and chat GPT,  and how to use it effectively in day-to-day operations.

Navigating AI for Law Firms with Jared Correia

Welcome to the Optimized Law Firm podcast where we talk about how to run a more profitable and enjoyable legal practice. My name is Patrick Carver and I’m the owner of Constellation Marketing. 

Pleased to be joined by legal marketing influencer Jared Correia. He is the CEO of Red Cave Legal, he’s the COO of Gideon, a chatbot and document automation platform and prolific contributor across the Internet with expert guidance on legal topics.

​​[00:00:02.920] – Patrick Carver

Welcome to the Optimize Law Firm podcast, where we talk about how to run a more profitable and enjoyable legal practice. My name is Patrick Carver, and I am the owner of Constellation Marketing. I am thrilled to be joined today by legal marketing influencer Jared Correia. He is the CEO of Red Cave Legal. He’s also the COO of Gideon. I guess you would call it a chatbot and document automation platform.

[00:00:35.760] – Jared Correia

It’s pretty good. Yeah, I think I’m good with that. That makes sense.

 

[00:00:38.870] – Patrick Carver

And also a prolific contributor across the internet, across a variety of legal topics, and just an all around nice guy. So we’re really appreciative and thanks for joining us.

 

[00:00:54.460] – Jared Correia

You’re too kind. I appreciate that. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I’m excited. I’m ready to roll.

 

[00:00:58.540] – Patrick Carver

It’s awesome. Yeah, we’ve had it in the works for a while. I think what we had penciled in to talk about today is very opportune with what’s going on. Although the more I thought about it, and the topic today is going to be AI and chat GPT. But the more I thought about it after our initial conversation, I was like, You know what? I actually have a little bit of AI fatigue right now, so I don’t know if that’s what you’re feeling.

 

[00:01:24.820] – Jared Correia

We can go in another direction if you want.

 

[00:01:27.150] – Patrick Carver

No, I think it’s a great topic. It’s like, my only point is, and I’m guessing you’re the same way, it feels like the floodgates have opened with regard to people’s interest in AI and chat GPT so far.

 

[00:01:42.480] – Jared Correia

It’s funny. I always judge technology trends on whether or not my mom has heard about it. And my mom was talking about chat GPT the other day, and I was like, Okay, this is officially a thing that’s in the culture. That’s crazy. I would say for the last three weeks or so, it’s all anybody wants to talk about. Attorneys, clients. I’ve been on a few podcasts talking about it. I’m starting to do some continuing legal education programs with bar associations, and they’re all reaching out and being like, Can you do something about this? And the questions have been fast and furious. When I do these CLE programs, which are structured, you have to talk about certain things, usually people are napping while I’m talking. But now with this topic, everybody’s firing off questions right from the jump. We did one the other day where we got 40 questions. It was crazy. I haven’t seen that in years. People are definitely interested in that. But I feel there’s a little bit of a dig here for sure.

 

[00:02:44.450] – Patrick Carver

Well, let’s start with a quick rundown of the landscape currently and how you would summarize AI and chat GPT. I think those are really the two main buzzwords out there right now that are really dominating the news and what’s going on. How would you wrap that up into a summary of what it’s all about?

 

[00:03:10.750] – Jared Correia

I’ll start with chat GPT, which is more of a specific thing. It’s a type of AI. It’s called generative AI. And the way that works is effectively you prompt that system with a question and it provides you an answer. And it’s just that broad. It could be any type of question you want. It could be any type of task you want it to do. Obviously, it’s not going to be able to go to the grocery store and get milk for you. But if you wanted to draft something for you… Yeah, but that’ll happen here. We can talk about robots too. But that’s effectively what it is, inputs and outputs. And so you want to craft these prompts to deliver the results you want. And what’s really cool is you may be thinking like, Yeah, I could do that through Google, right? I could ask a query of Google and it would provide me some response. Sure, but with a tool like this, it’s an intelligent AI so it’s able to converse effectively back and forth with you. So you can say now do this, now tweak this in this way. And I think it’s super helpful for a lot of things and it’s only going to get better.

 

[00:04:07.010] – Jared Correia

But AI more generally is artificial intelligence, meaning that it’s a product, non-human software, could be hardware as well, that can effectively think on its own to a certain level. So it doesn’t need to be programmed with its responses. Its responses can be built on its own. This is the stuff you see in movies, for example. If you watch Avengers, Age of Ultra, that’s an AI gone rogue. We’re not at the gone rogue stage yet, but effectively, it is a system nonhuman that can act with intelligence and in quotes now think on its own. And that’s a broad category. There’s a ton of different things that could fall into that.

 

[00:04:54.290] – Patrick Carver

Yeah, that’s helpful. I think what it seems to me is that it’s really captured the attention of everyone and interest is really focused around chat GPT as opposed to AI more generally because I feel like AI has been around for a while. You hear about it percolating, but I just feel like when chat GPT came out, it was like an atomic bomb went off and really captivated everybody and people are seeing all these different ways that they can utilize it now.

 

[00:05:30.860] – Jared Correia

For whatever reason, this thing has captured the sight gist in a way that AI has never done before. You see all these Boston dynamics dogs roaming around like these machine dogs. And then there’s companies in England building artificial humans effectively, these robots are going to help you run the house. And for some reason, Chapp, GPT is what put it over the top. Maybe because it’s super simple and easy to use and it’s free. I don’t know. But yeah, it’s having a moment right now without a doubt. We’ll see how it goes.

 

[00:06:01.830] – Patrick Carver

Well, it’s also more, I think, tangible. It’s approachable to a degree. But it’s really easy to open up my browser and type, “Give me the last 20 World Series champions”, and it’s going to pop it out immediately, which is crazy.

 

[00:06:32.230] – Jared Correia

It’s wild.

 

[00:06:34.370] – Patrick Carver

What questions are you seeing most from lawyers about AI and chat GPT? I’m just going to use them super fluently for the rest of today because I think most people, it’s largely one knowledge set.

 

[00:06:53.170] – Jared Correia

Different categories. What about the ethics of using something like this? What about ownership of information and data, which is the question lawyers ask about everything? And then how do I use it effectively? It’s funny, with all the bar associations I talk to, they’re like, Hey, do you have somebody in the legal space who’s an expert on this topic that you could get us to talk with? And I’m like, I don’t know if anybody is an expert in it yet. I’m sure there are people out there. I haven’t really heard of them, at least in this space. But I do think there’s a lot of questions around usability and ethics. Those are probably the two biggest I’ve seen so far.

 

[00:07:37.830] – Patrick Carver

Mostly, do you feel like these questions are coming from more on the operational side of the coin versus… Because my perspective on a lot of this coming out is there’s these commercial applications for it with SEO or social media, different things like that, or document automation, things like that. Do you think the first way lawyers are more interested in how they use it in their day to day as opposed to maybe how they promote their business?

 

[00:08:12.100] – Jared Correia

Yeah. I don’t think you’ve got a lot of lawyers using chat GPT to perform legal tasks, and it’s not really ready. So if you ask it to perform a legal task, like, Write me an eviction notice, if you’re a landlord or something like that, or even if you were an attorney and you said, Hey, draft me this contract type, it’ll do it. But then it will have a little clause at the end that says, By the way, I’m not an attorney. And if you want legal advice, you should seek an attorney to get that from. So I think that’s probably encouraging for a lot of lawyers to know. And the other thing is that sometimes it just makes stuff up. So I have a friend of mine who’s in the Ethics Council, and he asked Chachki PT to write him a brief on an ethics issue. And because it’s a generative AI, it is going to populate certain things into the AI. And if there’s no source for that, it’s going to make up a source. So this is one of the reasons why you don’t do this for legal work necessarily. So it had three or four citations in that brief, and they were completely made up because the system is like, there should be a site here, so we’re going to put one in place.

 

[00:09:20.690] – Jared Correia

So what I see a lot of attorneys doing is that if they’re trying to use this to get an early draft of a position statement or a settlement letter or something like that, they will say, Okay, thanks for writing that. Now, provide me with your sources. And chatGPT will provide sources as well. And in some cases, those items won’t be sourced. So the use cases, that’s a roundabout way to say, I don’t see lawyers using it for substantive legal stuff right now, at least as providing an end result. That’s something you have to finagle and tweak before you get it to an end result. As far as the stuff you’re talking about, yeah. I see lawyers using it for business processes, and I see lawyers using it for marketing. So I’ve got a consulting client that I just started working with who loves chat GPT. She’s on there all the time. And every time we have a conversation, she’s like, okay, I’m going to ask chat GPT what my pricing model should be for my law firm. Then we’re going to work on the prompts and then I want you to refine it. And I’m like, okay, this is entirely new thing for me, but I’m game.

 

[00:10:23.960] – Jared Correia

We can do that. So pricing models, I see law firms using this to develop processes like, Hey, I need a workflow for a particular case type, or I need a workflow for this administrative task. We do it constantly. And chatGPT is pretty good for that actually. And also that’s not something you’re publishing necessarily or producing for a client. So that back office stuff, there’s a little less risk involved in that. And then the other thing I’ve seen, as you alluded to before, is business applications for marketing, for SEO. I see people start to develop content on chat GPT. 

 

I had a friend of mine who was a legal tech executive who left his company and started his own business, and he wanted to start a consulting company to begin with. So he had chat GPT write his entire website for the consulting company. He’s like, all right, I’m a consultant with this level of experience. These are the types of organizations I want to work with. I need you to spit out a site map for me, and then I need you to write content for each of the pages. And it did it, and he published the site with very few edits on it, and it’s actually pretty good.

 

[00:11:30.430] – Jared Correia

Those are the two, I think, most primary use cases. Back office stuff, marketing content is what lawyers are using it for right now, as far as I’ve seen.

 

[00:11:43.290] – Patrick Carver

What are some of the tools that you’ve identified or you’ve seen out there that are showing promise so far for those types of applications, whether it’s on the operational or back end versus other business functions like that or really anything?

 

[00:12:03.700] – Jared Correia

I think it’s still pretty early days for this stuff, but you’ve got a couple of companies I can think of off the top of my head. One thing I didn’t mention is legal research, but there are clear applications for AI and machine learning and legal research. You’ve got some of that that’s been built out already. Like Lexus and West, for example, for a long time have had this ability for lawyers to drop a draft motion in their system, and it’ll say, Okay, here are some cases you forgot, or you could put your opponent’s motion into there and they could be like, Okay, here’s what you can use to argue against this, which is really helpful. But there’s something called case text that recently came out with something called co counsel, which is an AI aided research tool effectively. You can use chat GPT style prompts to do research and it will assist you on your research. And that could be done automatically without an attorney’s involvement. And I think there’s a lot of potential for that for sure. There’s a company called Spellbook, which is on a business offshoot of this company called Rally. And they do contract generation using AI.

 

[00:13:11.170] – Jared Correia

And I think that’s another place where document assembly, contract generation, where AI could be really useful because all that stuff, despite the fact that lawyers think they have the magic wand and all their contracts are very special little snowflakes, that’s susceptible to logic. And taking that to the next level, it’s also susceptible to AI. So I think there’s a lot of promise in a couple of tools like that. But those are the tools I’ve seen most primary right now. But I do think that now that companies are going to start to aggressively integrate with tools like chat GPT, you’re going to see more and more of that coming out in the legal space, probably in the short term, too. I guarantee you that as we’re talking about this, there’s hundreds of companies working on this legally.

 

[00:13:57.960] – Patrick Carver

Almost daily, I see just truckload drops of new AI tools. I think for the vast majority of them, they’re basically rappers, skins on top of the chat GPT interface and doing some specific functionality with it.

 

[00:14:19.740] – Jared Correia

I think that’s right.

 

[00:14:20.910] – Patrick Carver

It’s like every day when you don’t… We have such a powerful API, I think, and there’s a wild variety of variations that you can do. It’s creating all this innovation, but it’s definitely interesting.

 

[00:14:36.410] – Jared Correia

I think the legal space is a little bit late to adopt a lot of this stuff, frankly. And so I think you’re going to see more innovation moving quicker in other industries. And that’s just a natural consequence, both of the fact that lawyers are late adopters of technology, so it’s hard to get market share, and also the fact that there’s ethics components related to this that attorneys are worried about. So I get both those things.

 

[00:14:58.540] – Patrick Carver

You think that there’s a difference in how the big law firms will utilize this technology as opposed to your smaller law firms who are maybe doing more other types of law, say family and criminal, things like that, versus big law, do you think they’ll utilize different parts of the AI technology?

 

[00:15:23.270] – Jared Correia

Yeah. I would assume that the answer is probably going to be yes. And it’s funny, I talk to a lot of smaller firms, so I haven’t really seen a dichotomy yet in how either is using it. But I think that right now, big firms are more aggressive about using AI tools, and I think that will continue. So for example, you see way more big firms using discovery, which has a lot of machine learning and AI components. You see a lot more big firms investing more in legal research, which already has those AI and machine learning components. So I think, A, they probably understand it better, and B would more rapidly adopt it. And I guess if I’m thinking of how they would use it differently, one thing I could see is for the smaller consumer facing firms, my suspicion is that a lot of it will be process driven back office use of AI. And that would be comfortable for them because their clients probably won’t understand it anyway. But looking at the big firms, my suspicion is that some of that will be more visible and transparent to clients. Like, if you’re working with big companies, for example, that are invested in AI or AI based companies, you could potentially do more with using that tool in a way that is more transparent for them.

 

[00:16:39.270] – Jared Correia

Now, do I have a great example off the top of my head? Not necessarily, but I’ll come up with one the next time we talk. But I would say that I could see bigger law firms making that more visible and applicable to their clients and smaller law firms would be my guess. The other frank piece of this, sorry, is that big law firms just have more money to spend on this type of technology, and they’re also willing to part with that money. So I could also see big firms going in the route of, hey, let’s buy this off the shelf software that contains some AI features, or going the route of, Hey, we get these tools that we can build on our own, we may have a technology department, so we’re going to build out our own internal AI tools that are going to be client facing or not. I could see that happening as well. And generally speaking, smaller firms don’t have the ability or bandwidth to do that. Sorry to interrupt that.

 

[00:17:30.330] – Patrick Carver

No, you’re fine. The only thing I was going to add on top of that is I think there’s a cost component to it as well, that there’s a clear advantage to being able to plug in a software system to do what previously could only be done by a junior associate or somebody who’s going to go in and.

 

[00:17:51.810] – Jared Correia

Outsource.

 

[00:17:52.730] – Patrick Carver

That to a human-centered or powered department somewhere else who’s going to be doing those supplementary parts of the research that go into it that can basically be automated. Yes.

 

[00:18:09.840] – Jared Correia

I think that’s a good way to look at it. I view it right now as an assistive technology that in some cases would take the place of a part of the work that a legal assistant or a paralegal would do. I don’t know that AI right now is capable of performing in a way that an associate attorney would, but that’s certainly possible in the future and probably likely, honestly.

 

[00:18:34.900] – Patrick Carver

Do you think it could give an advantage to, say, criminal lawyers who are going to be battling with the government as opposed to a well financed law firm? In terms of, and here’s, I guess, the thinking is that the government may be slow to adopt that type of technology. And so even though they have the human resources to do an enormous amount of discovery and stuff like that, this could potentially give folks like that an advantage or a way to mitigate some of that. Yeah.

 

[00:19:14.650] – Jared Correia

You mean the same government that wants to ban TikTok unfathomably is going to start using AI? Unlikely. I would say that’s definitely true. I guess the way I’d look at it, it used to be that smaller law firms are more agile than bigger law firms or large government entities. And for a long time, there was resistance in big law firms to use new technology. So that was definitely a competitive advantage for small law firms. I think over the last five to 10 years or so, that’s gone away a little bit. Big firms are being much more innovative about using technology, and they’re adopting it much more aggressively. The government, on the other hand, probably not so much. I think you’re right that these departments are still going to throw people at the problem rather than using AI. So if I was a solo criminal attorney or a small firm criminal attorney, I’d be jumping all over this stuff. There’s probably a ton of different applications you can use either directly or software you’re probably using already or familiar with that’s going to be AI enabled moving forward, which is just going to be able to massively streamline what you do.

 

[00:20:27.110] – Jared Correia

The way I think of this, too, is back in the day, every movie you see with lawyers, there’s always that scene where there’s a small law firm fighting against a big law firm. And then they’re like, Okay, we’ve got a UHa worth of documents to review now. We’re totally screwed. That’s every lawyer movie ever. But that doesn’t necessarily happen anymore because now you have tools to manage it. And I think it’s going to level the playing field probably significantly. So I think you’re right.

 

[00:20:54.720] – Patrick Carver

It’s interesting. So let’s maybe dig into the area you mentioned with the business benefits to small firms with AI. You talked about a couple of them, but what are some of the areas that you feel like the one to five partner law firm that AI or other technology can be used in conjunction with to reduce costs, improve operational capacity, different things. What sticks out to you is coming up in the next few months and years that will make a big difference.

 

[00:21:37.020] – Jared Correia

I think I’d be using it to put together business process documents, HR related items and building out that part of my firm. Any internal documentation that you need, which could include a data security program, for example, or a remote work policy, something like that. A lot of law firms struggle drafting those things from scratch, but you could use chat GPT to pump out, or any AI technology that you’re utilizing for that purpose to pump out a document like that and utilize it in the firm with some probably light edits. And I think that could be really helpful. I talked about the research stuff. I think that’s going to become really important where law firms are not necessarily spending as much time doing these thorny research projects, but they’re using AI to get to the point where they have a collection of resources, and then they could leverage an attorney at the point where they’ve got all that research in place to make strategy decisions about a case or about how papers drafted. I absolutely think that’s happening right now, and that’s going to happen even more. Another use case would be marketing. I know of some of these smaller law firms that have trouble producing marketing content.

 

[00:22:52.900] – Jared Correia

You know how it is. Lawyers are like, Oh, I want to do a blog or I want to start a podcast or whatever. But you can never start writing the blog because you don’t have the ability to spend an hour in front of the computer drafting content. So pump that through an AI channel. You got a podcast, but it’s a pain to produce a podcast, right? We’re on a podcast right now. It’s not easy to do this on a weekly basis or on a biweekly basis. So you just put that out and you’re not leveraging it any more than that. Get a transcript for the podcast, drop it into an AI tool, produce seven or eight blog posts about that, and produce a newsletter promotion about that. So many different things you could do in the context of research, marketing, back office processes. And then I think the other thing is I think the document assembly use case is crazy, too, because you could be in a position where you’re building documents from scratch in an intelligent way. And if you unify that with a database of your own or another template database, that can be really powerful and it becomes more accessible to people in your office.

 

[00:23:58.180] – Jared Correia

It could potentially be more accessible to clients. I’m thinking of a use case, for example, where a law firm client is chatting with an AI and being able to produce a tailored legal document for them. I think also in terms of the marketing aspect, so we’ve got a chat company right now, but I think there’s a lot of usefulness in an AI chat as well, which is able to have more or less a conversation with someone outside of a structured arrangement which a chat bot would do. So I’m interested in looking at that for our product even. I think there’s so many different use cases that you could use this law firm. I just dropped six off the top of my head, but there’s probably hundreds.

 

[00:24:42.210] – Patrick Carver

Yeah, absolutely. There’s just an infinite number. I think one opportunity I see with it as well is being able to… Well, are you familiar with the embedded portions of open AI’s API and what people are doing with that?

 

[00:25:10.110] – Jared Correia

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the more people are going to be able to integrate with technology, the more you can layer it into existing tools. And I think honestly, not to change the subject too much, but I feel like that’s the way that this is going to infiltrate legal is that the tools you’re using already, like the productivity software is the case management software, the CRMs, they’re going to start adding AI features at a rapid pace, and then lawyers are just going to start using it as if they didn’t even know. I mean, Microsoft, if you’re drafting an email in Outlook today, it’s finishing your sentences. It’s suggesting language. That’s an AI tool effectively, and that’s only going to get more aggressively used.

 

[00:25:52.400] – Patrick Carver

Yeah.

 

[00:25:52.870] – Jared Correia

Go ahead. No, I.

 

[00:25:54.890] – Patrick Carver

Was just going to… I couldn’t blank for a second, but the thing I was going to add on top of that is in terms of interacting, if you’re interacting with AI as an associate or in a law firm, you can use the embeds to build your own repository of information on any topic. I see applications for even our team as far as writing is that instead of sending them out onto the internet to figure out what’s true or what e what’s really accurate about a particular law, we create our own index, our own repository. Then based on that, you’re able to ask questions and get guided analysis. But you can really verify the validity of the information. I almost see that there’s going to be law firms building their own custom information cells or boxes that then you can take advantage of.

 

[00:26:59.240] – Jared Correia

Yeah. No, I think that’s a great point is that the AI is good in a vacuum, good in the sense that it operates the way you’d expect. You can have an intelligent conversation back and forth with it, but that also depends on the data it has to A, index and B, learn on. So if you’re using your own internal law firm data and you unify that with a broader data set, potentially, that could be really massively impactful for law firms.

 

[00:27:26.040] – Patrick Carver

Are you seeing any tools out there that can bring those two elements together, the skilled knowledge that you’re contributing as an attorney versus the power of machine learning and automation with it?

 

[00:27:44.290] – Jared Correia

I wouldn’t say that I’ve seen anything super impressive as yet outside the two I’ve mentioned, but I think those tools are going to be coming out fast and furious. I think the point that you’re making is well taken, which is at this point in time and probably for the near future, in terms of how lawyers are going to use AI, I think it’s mostly an assistive technology. Get you to a point where a lawyer can come in and make the decisions that lawyers make. So yeah, I think that stuff is going to be coming quickly in the near term. But some of the really massive players in the legal space, at least on the technology side, I guarantee you they’re building stuff out right now, but it’s not out as of yet.

 

[00:28:31.050] – Patrick Carver

Because I imagine somebody like CLIO 100% get it.

 

[00:28:34.000] – Jared Correia

…Lexus Westlaw, Fastcase, and other big legal research companies… I’m sure they’re doing stuff with this. I think over the next year, year and a half, those tools are going to be coming out quickly.

 

[00:28:51.560] – Patrick Carver

Is there any other legal technology that you still really value and recommend to the people that you work with that maybe people are sleeping on because everybody gets that shiny object syndrome with AI, but something like a calendar schedule or something that’s an oldie but something that’s still not.

 

[00:29:16.680] – Jared Correia

Utilized.

 

[00:29:17.690] – Patrick Carver

As well as it should be.

 

[00:29:20.210] – Jared Correia

The vast majority of attorneys are like, they’re interested in this stuff but in a non business way. They’re curious about it. I signed an attorney the other day for this. So chat GPT is also good for like… My daughter makes all these weird recipes around the house, and now I can tell chatGPT, okay, I got a pickle, I’ve got some brown sugar, and I’ve got a chocolate bar. 

 

What can I make out of this? And it’ll give us a recipe, which is the funniest thing in the world. Yeah. I think that the vast majority of law firms are not necessarily thinking about this heavily right now. And there’s a ton of technology they should probably be adopting that they’re not. One of them I talked with the other day with a client of mine is… Well, this is a little bit of machine learning as well, but there are these calendaring tools that schedule for you and try to take advantage of your work schedule to make sure that you are being as productive as possible. The schedule breaks for you. They’ll put in stuff for you, including cascading deadlines. Time hero is one that a lot of folks use.

 

[00:30:31.210] – Jared Correia

Schedpal, S KEDPal is another. And that’s a pretty impactful tool if you’re somebody who’s aggressive about managing your schedule. I have one guy I work with who schedules his year out before it even starts. And he’s like, Okay, I got 80 hours dedicated to this. I got 30 hours dedicated to that, 20 hours dedicated to this. I got this amount of time for vacation. I could never do that. I’d get lost in the sauce really quick. But tools like that are super effective for doing that thing. If we’re talking non AI at all, I get a lot of lawyers who talk to me about text expander, which they love. That’s basically a macro program. You can basically type in a word or say a word and it’ll produce a template email or template document. Lawyers love that. And that’s a really accessible tool if you’re an attorney. Those are just two off the top of my head. But yeah, when we’re talking about a world in which there are still a lot of law firms out there that use exclusively Microsoft 365, including spreadsheets to run their practice, a lot of different places you could go before you even get to AI.

 

[00:31:37.680] – Patrick Carver

So if you were to fast forward five years, what do you think the average small law firm practice looks like with AI, with these changes? Are there any big changes that you see that are going to happen sooner rather than later?

 

[00:31:57.280] – Jared Correia

Five years out, I think that a lot of the tools that lawyers use regularly are going to have those AI embedded features available. I think that it’s going to be just integrated in law firms almost by osmosis. Lawyers are just going to be using it because it’s available to them, and they’re almost not really going to know or care that it’s an AI technology. Particularly with, I think Microsoft is going to go heavy on the AI, and they’re already starting to do it now, how could they not? They’re one of the groups that basically started open AI. I feel like that stuff is going to… Lawyers are so heavy into Microsoft Office. Ninety % of 909 % of them use it. I feel like Microsoft is the gateway drug to all new technology for lawyers. So you’re going to start seeing these AI tools being developed in Microsoft Google Workspace, then the case management softwares, then the CRMs, then the document assembly tools. And within five years, lawyers are going to be using AI regularly in their practice, whether they know it is happening or not. I think that’s what’s going to happen five years from now.

 

[00:33:11.910] – Jared Correia

And then the interesting thing beyond that, not to spin off on an entirely new topic, but if we’re talking 10 years from now, that stuff is going to be happening. And then I also think alternative business structures are going to be allowed in the US where non lawyers can own law firms and invest in law firms and practice in areas outside of law. And it opens up a whole new can of worms because now does that traditional law firm even exist or is it swallowed up by these hybrid entities who are definitely going to be taking advantage of AI more aggressively than a traditional law firm would?

 

[00:33:42.720] – Patrick Carver

Well, part of my question or thinking of it is, are there going to be… I mean, is the brick and mortar or law firm as we know it today going to be the same? Because I’m thinking about systems like companies like boundless or others who are now operating in that space of, well, we’re the Gen X Gen Z. I don’t know.

 

[00:34:10.020] – Jared Correia

What do we call it? Millennial? Post millennial?

 

[00:34:12.660] – Patrick Carver

I have no idea. But point being, we want it all on our phone, the whole process. I’m just curious if it will even look like that in the future, where you have your traditional one person lawyer coming in and they’re handling your case? Will people really even care? And yes, there will be lawyers behind the scenes doing things or orchestrating, but do they really care? I don’t know. I think so.

 

[00:34:43.440] – Jared Correia

I think modern clients don’t care as much. So somebody like me, I’m a lawyer, I’m licensed to practice law, but I don’t, and I use lawyers from time to time. And I only want the lawyer to be accessible to me because lawyers cost money when we’re making a strategic decision or when I have a question, I can’t get the answer to. So I think everything, aside from that strategic position that the lawyers in, is either going to be automated or there’s going to be some technology application that does it, or there’s going to be a non-lawyer, to use the term I hate, that’s going to be managing that. And lawyers are only going to come in when those high level strategic decisions need to be made. I think that’s what’s going to go down, honestly. 

 

[00:35:41.570] – Jared Correia

So that’s where it’s going. I think the challenge of that is that the traditional law firm is going to have a really hard time competing with that. So yeah, I think the notion of what a law firm is going to be very different, and it can mean a number of different things. It can mean a traditional law firm. It can mean a hybrid law firm. It could effectively mean a law firm that’s part of a big box store and nothing like we think of a traditional law firm. So it’s going to be interesting. So if you’re not retiring in the next 10 years, this is stuff you want to be thinking about. It’s good.

 [00:36:15.020] – Patrick Carver

It’s Time to be reading.

[00:36:16.450] – Jared Correia

Yes, absolutely.

[00:36:21.250] – Patrick Carver

Well, I really appreciate your time. This is a fun chat and I feel like we could probably do this in about a week and the entire chat would be 100 % different. But it’s a really cool topic that I think we both obviously agree that it’s going to fundamentally change things, but maybe not just quite yet. But a lot to come and hopefully we can do this again in a few months as some of these things get flushed out and go from there because it’s just all changing so quickly. I find it fascinating. I think what we’re linking on to now is going to be completely different in six months.

[00:37:04.230] – Jared Correia

I know, man. I love talking to you, though. Thanks for having me. 

 

[00:37:07.330] – Patrick Carver

So I know you’ve got Gideon. Tell the people, all of our adoring fans, where they can find you online. 

 

[00:37:19.280] – Jared Correia

Two places, easiest to find me online. My consulting website is redcavelegal.com, and then the software company is Gideonlegal.com That’s it. And if you Google me, you can find some fun stuff. I just had a client of mine generate AI images of me as a superhero and as a guy in Star Wars. So if you dig deep, you can find that stuff. Man, what else is out there?

 

[00:37:46.400] – Jared Correia

I shouldn’t say. Well, thanks so much.

 

[00:37:51.510] – Patrick Carver

And we will look forward to chatting with you again soon. Thank you, sir.

 

[00:37:55.970] – Jared Correia

Take care.