Episode 017 Training AI to Think Like Your Practice

SPEAKER_01: Welcome to AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers. Practical, no-nonsense guidance to help attorneys put AI power to work in their practice right now. SPEAKER_02: AI seems to have taken over everybody's life. Everybody has gotten something they're doing with AI.

They're implementing a new tool, they're learning about a new system or a new process. And Heather and I are no different. We're both very heavily involved in learning and developing within the AI world. And today we're going to talk about some of the things we're working on.

I'm Ron Drescher. And I'm Heather Gardner. And this is AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers. And Heather, you were just at the Maryland Legal Summit, and I looked at the agenda and it was very AI intensive.

What's your takeaway from what you learned? SPEAKER_00: So I think the the biggest surprise to me, which probably shouldn't have been, was the beginning of the panel when we asked how many of you are using AI in your own practice. Last year we had just a few hands, not many. It was less, you know, the room was very full.

Last year we had a very full room and not that many hands go up. This year, almost everyone in that room raised their hand that they are using it in some form or fashion. And it was an AI heavy program uh for the for the classes. SPEAKER_02: It was.

Almost every ep, almost every panel seemed to have some sort of AI focus on it. Yes. All right. So when you did you get a chance to talk to a bunch of the lawyers while you were there?

How are they using it? SPEAKER_00: I I mean, everyone is using it in different ways and a lot of the same ways, of course. We heard a lot of use with drafting, which, you know, our panel was based around AI and legal drafting. So a lot of people approached me to talk to me about how they're using it in that way.

Many attorneys are using it for email communication drafting, which we talk about a lot being an easy, quick, low-risk, time-saving way to start using AI. And many were using it in their business content. I just spoke with one the other day after the summit who told me that they were updating a lot of their business content, you know, employee handbooks, policies, adding an AI policy. I recommend everyone add an AI policy and make their employees all read it and sign that they have read it.

It is, it's being used in so many ways. Some have built their own AI bots to do, you know, specific tasks for their firm. It was, I was really impressed with how, to me, how far the legal field has come just in one year. SPEAKER_02: Did you get the feeling that most of the lawyers are still using, you know, the frontier models, uh, you know, Claude and ChatGPT, et cetera?

Or do you feel like there's a little bit more movement towards verticals like Glade or Harvey or Lagora? SPEAKER_00: I did. We did hear quite a few people using Harvey. Of course, the bigger law firms, you know, have access to Harvey and Lagora, but the majority are utilizing uh the frontier tools still.

SPEAKER_02: Let's step back for a second and give our listeners an opportunity to kind of get an idea of the scope of the conference. But how many lawyers were at that conference? I have no idea. Did it seem like did it seem huge?

SPEAKER_00: It does seem really big, but it's it's not as it's probably around the same size as a NACPA attendance. So a few hundred, maybe I I would guess three to five hundred. I could definitely ask the MSBA. I'm sure they could give me a better idea.

Right. SPEAKER_02: And this is the Maryland Legal Summit. This used to be called the annual meeting. SPEAKER_00: But it's the Maryland State Bar Association Legal Summit.

Right. SPEAKER_02: So you'll have all lawyers from solos to big law and everything in between. All right. And what's what was the most interesting thing you learned about AI at the legal summit?

SPEAKER_00: So I think a really interesting thing that I learned is there is there's still a lot of fear, but the fear seems to be uh intensified. You know, I had attorneys asking questions about, you know, AI going rogue and you know, putting information out that it shouldn't be. And there were there's just a lot still of fear, but it seems like the fear is is more advanced and specific. So that was surprising to me because everything, when it starts, of course, has issues, right?

We we use new software when the internet was new, when email was new, you know, all of these things had issues in the beginning. But I think the fear around AI seems far greater, and probably with good reason, because we've been told since when did the Terminator come out that this would happen, that AI would take over the world. Right. During my own panel at one point I said, you know, we are almost at Terminator level.

I was telling people that as a joke, but also it's not really a joke. AI is really becoming that advanced. You know, of course, I don't hope that it doesn't, you know, take over the world and kill us all. SPEAKER_02: Well, let's just like everyone else.

Like let's talk about some of the things that are maybe legitimate or not causes of fear about AI, right? There's hallucinations, yeah, which could which range from embarrassing to costly, depending upon the you know how they they arise. Uh then there's the whole problem with confidentiality. Do you find was there any discussion about the tiers of the AI tools that you were involved in?

And and how did those discussions go? SPEAKER_00: People seemed very familiar with the different tiers. That was something that also was surprising is people are much more educated around AI. Attorneys and support staff seem to, I I think they've just kind of, I hate to say had no choice, but they've accepted that it's here finally, and they're using them.

So we had I had a whole section. In fact, it was my one of my slides that I spoke about about the tiers and how you do need to ensure that you're using a business or enterprise level tier that has SOC2 certification. And that if you are in a firm that uses any sort of medical, like a medmal or a PI firm, et cetera, HIPAA certification, you know, is important to know that it has as well. And I did ask the room, does everyone know what we talk about we're talking about?

And almost everyone there did know what we were talking about and about the different tiers of tools. SPEAKER_02: I and do you think that that knowledge has driven purchasing decisions within the firms? Do you get a sense of that? SPEAKER_00: Yes.

Yes. I heard, you know, m multiple attorneys say that they are not permitted to put any, you know, legal or client or work information or work product into an open source tool. So I feel like that is going much better. Hallucinations are still a discussion being had a lot.

But, you know, just like five years ago, you might have a brilliant new associate file uh a motion or a pleading with the court without you reviewing it very well that maybe had incorrect citations, right? It's just such a story because it is a machine doing it, not a human. SPEAKER_02: Uh is there anything that people are afraid of that really hasn't been ballyhooed in the tech press? SPEAKER_00: I was.

I I like I said, I was a little surprised to hear attorneys asking questions about the machines going rogue and you that that was something that I have not really heard discussed in the press as much. I I think that it's valid, especially because as we've talked about before, in our industry, it is the abundance of caution is warranted. So always, always you have to be. You you don't want uh any clients being harmed, right?

We don't ever want consumers to be harmed by anything that we're that an attorney or support staff are using or doing, or you know, how their information is being used or stored, et cetera. So I think that the caution is something that's still good, but I think as the technology continues to advance, it will be needed less. SPEAKER_02: You know, I don't think that we've gotten to the point where AI can prevent a human being from turning off the computer. Right.

Right? Because that's the ultimate power to defeat that fear. It's just, you know, don't use it or or be more careful. SPEAKER_00: And and the hallucinations, you know, the the it's such a simple answer.

It's it's human oversight. If you checked them, you would know. If if you even asked the AI to check itself, you could get the answer really quickly. I'm really just not taking these very simple steps.

SPEAKER_02: See, I don't think it's that simple because I did a field note 21 ways that AI can hallucinate in your legal brief. You know, the a made-up citation is only one of the 21. You've got much, much deeper problems with hallucinations because they can hallucinate a legal element. They can say they can change preponderance of the evidence to clear and convincing evidence.

SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, that will misquote, right? SPEAKER_00: Right. That's right. Yeah, absolutely.

But that's what I mean. It's still human oversight, right? If you're the attorney filing that motion, I hope that any attorney using AI at this point in time knows that they need to look up the citation and not just make sure it's real, but read the part that is being quoted and ensure that it matches what is really in that law or statute. That's what, to me, it is a simple human oversight thing that people are just skipping because the AI sounds so confident, right?

SPEAKER_03: Yes. SPEAKER_00: It doesn't give you something and say, oh, by the way, check this. What's funny is mine does because I've trained it to. Mine reminds me all the time that it makes mistakes and that I need to fact-check everything it gives me because I have just beaten that into it, so to speak, over and over.

And it's in my rules and my guardrails. SPEAKER_02: A factor of legal writing has long been string citations, either in a boilerplate part of a brief or a real part of a brief that's a lawyer is trying to write persuasively. And once upon a time, judges and opposing counsel could pretty much gloss over those string sites and move on to the to the meat of the brief. But now opposing counsel who don't even use hallucinated citations are being called on the carpet by judges for not catching hallucinated citations.

SPEAKER_00: But most often it is OC catching hallucinated citations. That's you know, that the the recent really big case that we saw with the Cromwell. OC caught that immediately. Yeah.

They're the ones that picked it up. And I don't think that it should be on OC to catch the hallucinated citations, quite honestly. I don't think they should be being called out for not catching them. I I do feel like though, if I were on an opposing counsel side right now for a case being filed, that'd be the first thing I'd be looking up on everything filed.

Right. SPEAKER_02: But but think about it, it just adds a whole additional labor level to the engagement. If a citation that in 2019 you could just blow by because it's really not core to what's going on now in 2026, you have to read it, you have to read the case, and you have to identify if it's an hallucinated case or hallucinated reasoning. SPEAKER_00: You you only really have to read the portion that's that's cited or quoted.

But the the thing is, you should have always been doing that. How do you how could you just really gloss over it or look over it if you if you don't open those citations and read, you don't know how relevant that they are to this case. SPEAKER_02: If if I'm reading a brief about Maryland's application of the tenants by the entireties exemption, that's a pretty hardcore basic thing that bankruptcy lawyers in Maryland need to know. I'm not gonna read that citation if they're quoting a principle of the law that I know is correct.

SPEAKER_00: But if you know it's correct, you would recognize if it was incorrect. I would. I would. But I wouldn't necessarily like if they're gonna catch a wrong word.

I know what you mean. You may not catch a wrong quotation inside of it, right? SPEAKER_02: Maryland recognizes classic, you know, common law tenants by the entireties. Period.

Three cases cited. I'm not gonna read those three cases. But because I know that that's that is a true statement, right? If I'm not reading them and they're hallucinated cases, the judge may say, Mr.

Dresher, why didn't you uh alert the court that these were hallucinated cases? SPEAKER_00: And you could easily just answer, well, Your Honor, I hadn't gotten a chance to read it yet. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. SPEAKER_02: I would say maybe maybe, but I I do think and we didn't really want to spend too much time talking about hallucinations, right?

But it's it's a thing that's understandable why lawyers might have fear. SPEAKER_00: What might be a really great option for attorneys to really just avoid this altogether is have the AI do everything except insert your citations. Right? Then it can give you everything you need, and it can even tell you insert your relevant citations, X, Y, and Z spots within this free for this motion, right?

That is what I think would be a really smart, just personal guardrail for people to do. And you know what? It keeps your brain working for critical thinking to look these things up yourself. I think that's the best practice.

I think it's a great idea. SPEAKER_02: Personally, and I did read that Reddit thread that I wrote a field note about how big law associates are using AI to draft, and it was pretty well established that these associates are not allowing hallucinated cases to get into their briefs as they write in incremental pieces. But let's move off, let's move off hallucinations. Sure.

Heather, I know you're working on on some really interesting projects. I'd love to hear about them. SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think we're both working on a lot of different AI projects. And that's a really an interesting way, I think, in a very beneficial way to utilize AI is say you've been wanting like myself or you, before you retired last year, you didn't have time, right?

Spare time to work on side projects. Someone that's running a even a small business like mine, it's very hard to set aside or find time to build something that's such as a course. And I have built a bankruptcy paralegal course for paralegals or support staff that want to learn how to incorporate that knowledge into their skill set, or if they are already a bankruptcy paralegal and they just want to sharpen or, you know, update their skills. You we both know in our industry during COVID, a lot of people left bankruptcy work to go do something else because it was down so much.

So I've in fact, you know, talked to a lot of uh staff who left during that time that want to come back because now it's going up again. They need just a refresher course. So I built out a 11-module bankruptcy paralegal course and had Claude build a floaty, little floating chat bot with me in it that answers, it has the course all uploaded into it so it can answer people's, you know, QAs. Just kind of has most answers in there.

And then they can reach out, of course, if it's something that the chat bot can't handle. SPEAKER_02: Now, this is a course for people who want to become bankruptcy paralegals. SPEAKER_00: Well, or if you're a bankruptcy paralegal that needs, you know, maybe you're a newer bankruptcy paralegal. I mean, we all remember when it's it's you and I know it's a it's a field of law that takes a lot of years to become very proficient in, but most people do not know that or understand that at all.

Both attorneys and support staff have the idea that bankruptcy is simple. I could just start doing that, right? I have uh paralegals come to me very often saying, you know, just like right now, I'm in a hiring phase and I've been looking at resumes and cover letters. And they often really believe, oh, I could learn this really quickly.

I'm sure I'm a fast learner. And, you know, I have to explain to them that, you know, unless you've been doing this day in and day out for several years, I can't hire you, unfortunately. But I encourage them to go work in a bankruptcy law firm and learn that way to get those years that they need to get that foundation. SPEAKER_02: In the bankruptcy practice, especially the consumer bankruptcy practice, the paralegal is the heart and soul of the law firm client relationship.

Almost all meaningful information passes through the paralegal, either to the client or from the client. Right. And it is really a very sophisticated position. SPEAKER_00: It is.

There is a there are a few areas of law like that where your support staff, if you have, you know, a very senior paralegal, they can do and and are able to do so much of that process. Bankruptcy is a very forum and procedure-driven process. But as we both know, and a lot of you know people in our industry now don't, it's got so much nuance that you really there's no, there's no replacement for just years and years of doing it, you know, of of working in it and seeing all of those different situations.

SPEAKER_02: Now, of the modules that that you've developed, could you tell us one or two that you think is going to have the most impact on a paralegal's journey towards expertise? SPEAKER_00: I feel like I do, I believe that learning a really excellent bankruptcy workflow for a paralegal is such a huge piece. And I I didn't understand how important that was before I ran a virtual bankruptcy paralegal business, of course. But now that I do, I understand it.

And so I think that is gonna be a big part, a big module that's gonna be very valuable to people. Not, you know, learning about learning about bankruptcy, of course, and understanding the bankruptcy code, all of those things are extremely important, but understanding the life cycle of a case from intake through discharge, I think, is probably gonna be one of the most valuable pieces. SPEAKER_02: It's really important to know where you're going when you make a a decision on a on a case.

Right. What's the AI angle to your course? SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, I largely built the course with AI. I used my business GPT as well as Claude Max to help me build the course.

There's the AI chatbot that can answer questions. It also has a lot of tips and tricks in the workflows about how to utilize AI, even your AI tools in Google or Microsoft, such as Copilot and Gemini, to make your paralegal life so much easier, save so much time, things like that. We use it every Friday, for instance, every attorney that is working with our company gets a weekly status report. You probably remember these you used to get them.

And it's just a little outline of every case that you know the paralegal is working on right at that time, what the status is, what's expected, you know, next, etc. The paralegals all use Google Sheets. We use Google Business for everything. So we use Google Sheets, Google Drive, Google Docs in our, you know, systems.

So they keep a spreadsheet with each law firm has a tab and it has everything, the date assigned, you know, the date they sent their welcome email, the date uh as they do follow-ups with the clients, their notes on the case, what's going on, the data was sent to attorney for review, et cetera, et cetera. Now every Thursday, when they update those sheets, they click the Gemini tab up on the right-hand corner and it builds the ED. And I have a pre, you know, pasted prompt for all of them for each tab for each attorney.

They have Gemini is now writing those status reports based on their spreadsheet. So instead of updating their spreadsheet and then doing their status report emails now, all they have to do is update their spreadsheet and then do their emails with Gemini and schedule them to go out the next morning at eight o'clock. And that's what they're doing now. How much time does that save?

Well, it saves however long it took them to put together that email every week. But as you know, and and I always told them, you know, copy paste your notes. So it's it's keeping them from doing all of this, open another window, copy paste. For them, it it builds that email and it schedules it for them, and it's in their drafts folder and it's saved.

They don't have to do anything else. They don't have to send it anything. SPEAKER_02: You said something, you said you had a chat bot as part. You is that going to be part of your course where people who are taking it can talk to an AI chatbot?

Yes. For more information. How are you? How do you how did you build that?

SPEAKER_00: So Claude built it. Claude Code built that chatbot for me. And it basically took the whole course and uploaded it into the chat bot and put a little headshot of me as a little floating head at the bottom. And it says ask Heather.

So if you have any questions on the course at any point while you're working in it, you can open that. And it has a lot of little preset questions, or you can type your own question in. And then it will pull open the course and try to answer your question. If it can't, it will tell you to contact me directly.

When do you expect to ship? I I believe it will go live in the next six weeks. It's it's ready. I just don't have the videos ready.

So and then those are in progress now. SPEAKER_02: That's fantastic. That's fantastic. So I have my own side project.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let's hear about I want to hear about this a lot because it is a bankruptcy tool. So I'm thrilled. SPEAKER_02: First of all, I well, I I came upon it by accident. I was in Claude, I was asking about agents and persistent workflows, and we started talking about markdown workflows.

So I said, all right, let's build one for my podcast. And Claude and I spent a couple of hours just talking about everything that I need after I stop clicking record and after I'm we're done with the podcast. I need show notes, I need emails to you, I need emails to our guests. Uh there's a I need emails to my list, there's LinkedIn clips, a whole bunch of things that follow from a recording.

And I wanted to uh abbreviate that process. So Claude helped me put this workflow together. And because it's a markdown workflow, it can execute in any AI environment where anything where you can upload instructions to the AI, this'll work. So it worked.

I I tested it in Gemini, I tested it in Copilot, I tested it, of course, in Claude, I tested it in Chat GPT, and I created a project in Claude, and that's where it sits. And I just discovered that I kind of like Claude's outputs better than the other tools. So I continue to run it in Claude, but I could run it in any of them. And then I thought, wow, this is great because you don't need to buy any special tool.

You don't need a vertical, it'll work on what whatever you got. So then I decided to try uh something else. I created a motion to extend time because I thought that would be the simplest thing that I could do to really test this concept. And it turned out to be nowhere near that simple.

And that took me 15 hours to create this because I wanted it to be a motion, motion to extend time for schedules and a motion to extend time for a court order deadline, or a motion to extend time in uh like a consent order, just anything that would require more time. And each of those variants required a whole subset of considerations of decision trees that had to be made by the AI. And eventually we made it, and then I created a light version that anybody can download and test and use tomorrow if they needed to extend time to file schedules.

And I had a little episode on that, I called that an AI build episode. And this is and I'll put the link for that down in these show notes. And then I said, you know what? There there are more of these because I want I don't want lawyers to have to add their like the last five years of all of their filings into a vertical solution, which is really what you have to do in a lot of these vertical solutions so that they can learn your firm.

I didn't want I didn't want my lawyers to have to do that, although they can. You can edit these workflows to customize it for your firm if you want to. So the the one I'm working on now, and it's taking a very long time, is called a case assessment pack. These are what I call workflow packs.

This will be a valuable one. This is this is one that the lawyer is going to run after they have heard all of the facts from the client in an initial consult. You're gonna run it, you're going to, you know, my hot take, which is you should record everything. Uh they're gonna take the recording, uh, presuming they've got the the consents required by the jurisdiction.

They'll upload the recording, it'll become a transcript, it'll produce a summary. If the client has brought documents to you, you're gonna scan them, upload them into this workflow. The workflow is gonna turn out a preliminary liquidation analysis. It's going to tell you what questions you forgot to ask.

It's going to come up with a preliminary assessment of the case. It'll recommend, it'll say, well, because if you can verify all of these facts, then you should be able to do a chapter seven. It's going to know the exemptions of your jurisdiction. It's going to know the venue rules.

So it'll it'll it'll know the rules regarding the discharge of taxes. So right then and there, you'll be able to have a meaningful assessment of the case. You're going to have a deliverable that you can send to the client in lay terms that the client will then be able to understand and have as a take-home so they can continue to study and understand their options. It's going to have you have a dashboard for the lawyer that's going to be a page summary.

And then it's going to have like a 20-page detailed analysis of all the information you've gotten so far that's going to sit in the file, be uh that's going to be able to be used for subsequent workflow packs at different milestones of the engagement. I could go on and on, but this is what I'm working with. It will hopefully be something that lawyers will be able to use in their practices. And I hope to have at least the assessment pack done in the next two to three weeks.

SPEAKER_00: That is fascinating. And it to me, you what you're building is sort of like otter AI, only in a much more advanced, robust, of course, platform because it's going to have all of that information. But when I do client consults, otter AI has the, you know, it has a transcript, it has your summary, your bullet points, it gives you your action items to follow with the client. It will write your follow-up emails to the client based on all of those things.

And then it, you know, for me, it spits out a list for my assistant. Here's all of the things that you need to now go and do for this client to be added to our system, etc. SPEAKER_02: Otter is a fantastic tool. I strongly endorse otter and and its ilk.

I mean, there's a lot of tools out there. SPEAKER_00: And they all do basically the same thing. SPEAKER_02: So if you could engraft upon otter a lifetime's worth of bankruptcy knowledge and state law property information that's relevant to your particular case, you would have something like that I'm building. SPEAKER_00: Right.

The tool you're building does the recording and everything, correct? Or are you having some no, okay? So it couldn't be a part of this process. You could use it as your recording for your meetings and then upload that transcript into your tool.

That's right. SPEAKER_02: Very cool. Yeah. I mean, I by the way, I just downloaded a tool called OWL, O W L.

I've heard of Owl. I've looked at OWL. And what I love about Owl, I'm not saying it's the only one that does this, but it does do this. It's on your phone.

And I have a nice big widget on my home screen. And when I want to record seeing something, I press that. When I'm done recording, it will do its otter thing. It will give me a transcript, it will give me action ideas.

I don't know that it will draft the email to the client. I'm sure it will if you tell it. Right. But for if you ask it too much, it will be gonna ask it nicely.

SPEAKER_00: Please draft the follow-up email. SPEAKER_02: So that's what I'm recommending. I uh I like I said, I feel very strongly that lawyers should record everything. Yes.

Because because here's where we're going in AI. It used to be like firm knowledge, I've got this great form file, I I I have these wonderful relationships. What's happening in the AI world is that data is becoming paramount. And you've got to be able to retain data, you've got to know how to retrieve data, and you've got to know how to analyze and process data.

And that's where AI came. AI knows how to manage data. So if you've got a law office and you've got a conversation with somebody that you're talking about a brilliant idea or a great piece of information, and you lose that, you've lost data. So I think you need to do whatever you have to contain data.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's an amazing data tool and storage. I did another small side project with AI recently. The AI it's uh the AI tool starter kit for legal professionals. It's actually been going really well.

SPEAKER_02: I want to hear more about that. SPEAKER_00: I did a little kit. Uh it's it was just a really simple and and it's it's very basic. It's like five tools that you can start utilizing in your if you're a legal entrepreneur to help, you know, to start build and you know, to build and scale and run your operation.

How can we get that tool? It's uh well, I don't have the website. You know, it's I'll tell you what, let me know the website. Yeah, it's that's all right we'll put we'll just put it in the side.

But yeah, it's uh it's a great little starter kit. Several some people have already purchased. It's$27, and I've been getting really good feedback from it. SPEAKER_02: I'm really uh interested to look at it.

So look, we can go on and on and on talking about our side projects and how we're using AI, but I think it might be a good time to take a look at this week's practice signal. Okay. All right. So this week's practice signal comes from Reddit, and it's a ninth-year big law associate posting that they're getting ready to make partner, which is which is a huge milestone in their lives.

Yeah, congratulations. But he's terrified. He's not terrified of of litigation or judges or opposing counsel or the politics of the firm or anything like that. He's terrified because he doesn't think he it could be a she.

It could be a she. I don't know, I don't have a gender, but I'm gonna use he and please forgive me for that. He's going to uh he's concerned that he's not gonna be able to satisfy his business development requirements. He needs to figure out how to make rain.

And this is something that really concerns lots and lots and lots of lawyers. How am I gonna find clients? So the question is what what information do we have for this lawyer using AI? SPEAKER_00: Any any ideas?

I mean, he could go ask the AI. No, I I can't. Of course, I've never been in a position of being in big law or being, you know, potential partner. But what I for his business development requirements, I am sure that multiple AI platforms would be extremely helpful with telling him how to meet those, how you know it could help offer what resources it could offer or point him toward.

Yeah, but but no, I I don't have any really good answers other than talk to your AI, it will tell you what you need to do. SPEAKER_02: Well, I I have answers, and it it it relates back to the concept of data. First of all, you've been doing this for nine years. You've got a great list of contacts.

Me, I would dump all those contacts into AI. Everyone with some sort of description about how you interacted with this person. Uh, were they a client, were they opposing counsel? Were they another lawyer in the firm?

Is it somebody you went to law school with? This is going to be the basis of your rainmaking. All right. That's that's that item one.

Then let's talk about all the engagements you've done. You know, all the trials you've won, the briefs you've written, uh, the legal issues that you've analyzed and and are probably an expert at by now. Load all of those in. All right.

Then, you know, a wish list. Come up with a wish list of the kind of work you want to do, the kind of cases that really interest you that you think could either fascinate you on an ongoing basis or elevate your status within the firm. Put that all in and talk to AI. Then we talk about, you know, how can I use this data?

Give me, give me a thousand-day process for becoming the top rainmaker in my firm. And then let the AI do its thing and then do what the AI says. SPEAKER_00: Right. Give it your goals, your context, collaborate.

You know, that is that's that's what I think that a lot of people still are using AI as a Google machine. And they're just really missing the boat, so to speak. You know, they're they're missing the the utilization or how to get the best result from it. SPEAKER_02: And so again, it goes down to AI will optimize based upon your inputs.

And the better your inputs, the more data you can give to it, the better it can dig into what you're looking for and give you the outputs that you want. SPEAKER_00: And I mean, just like we we we talked about on our last episode with the attorney who has built the AI simulation training, right? Bench Sanders. Right.

Chris Ryan, Bench Simmons. It is such an amazing tool to use to help improve your own skills and to help you think better. And that's a perfect example. This Reddit attorney that's asking this question and your answer, it's a perfect example.

It's gonna help them have better ideas of how to do that. SPEAKER_02: I felt bad for that lawyer because the lawyer said, Maybe what I'll do is after I become partner, I'll leave the firm and I'll go in-house somewhere. And I thought, geez, why surrender before you've even tried? Yeah, after you've worked so hard to get to partner.

Right, nine years. And and that could make such a huge impact on their career. And that brings me to our Flintstone Simpsons Jetsons segment. And I thought that what would be interesting.

I have a I have a Flintstone Simpsons Jetsons for this for this week. And it has to do with capturing firm information because that's what you really need to do to get the most out of this agentic AI phase that we are now heavily into, because the AI needs to know what's important to you, needs to know what kind of work you've done so that it can help you do that work better, quicker, smarter next time. So if you're on the Flintstones level, I think you need to document your practice.

You start recording your procedures. Like, you know, they're stuck in that first year, Heather, that you were talking about when you're in your first year when you weren't really recording things, right? And you were just kind of like managing your days to get to the next day. Right.

And I think that's what a lot of Flintstone's lawyers do. So it's time to start recording what you do, you know, create the checklists, uh, standardize your forms, capture the firm knowledge. Just if you start doing that, you'll start to see patterns in your firm that uh that can help you better utilize AI. If you're on the Simpsons level, organize your practice, consolidate the knowledge, create taxonomies of the important documents that your clients need to deliver to you in order to be able to make sure they're getting the best use out of your firm and its services.

Standardize the naming of files, right? That's a really important thing that I learned at another demo with Foundation AI. How you name files is so critical because it makes it so much easier to find something later. Start defining your workflows.

What do we have in firm meetings? What do we do? What is it that our firm really does? Well, I'm an estate planner.

That doesn't say what you do. What you do is you know collect information from clients, you put them into wills, you analyze your tax consequences for wealthy clients. This is these are the tasks you do. You're not an estate planning lawyer, you're really a tax lawyer, and you're a succession planning lawyer.

So, so drill down on that. So, because your AI is only as smart as your filing cabinet. All right, now on the Jetsons level, you need to systematize your practice, define the decision points, build repositories of information, connect the systems. You know, well, I've got the legal research system and I've got the intake system, and then I've got the drafting system.

It's time to start connecting those so that data can be retained and can flow from one to the next efficiently without undue friction. You know, and finally, you know, create governance understands where your risk points are in using AI, because the future does belong to firms that treat knowledge or data as infrastructure. Flintstone lawyers document, systems lawyers organize, Jetsons lawyers systematize. Heather, what do you think?

SPEAKER_00: I I think those are those are great, uh, great starting points. I think if you're a Flintstones lawyer and you want to start using AI, take your advice. Start using a meeting recorder, whether it's consults with a new client, whether it's meetings with other attorneys with OC, whether it's a staff meeting in your firm, and what better way to build to let AI help you build processes and SOPs than to start recording all of your staff meetings where you're discussing what you need to add to the firm.

So start recording, I think Simpsons level, don't just do the recording and have the transcript. Take it and let the AI do the next steps with it. Take these notes, do the draft me the follow-up emails that are necessary. Uh, you know, depending on if you have them connected to your Gmail like I do, you could either send it right from there or it'll put it in its your drafts folder for you to send at your you know discretion, or take these notes and build this new SOP that we need for the firm, or update this this process that we were discussing, you need a change or improvement.

And if you're Jetsons, start collaborating, start every month or every week, or however often you might need to get the AI to take all of those things you've been doing and give you a report, what you've done, what you might still, what, what might still need to be done, have it give you suggestions. What else could you do to better your operations, your marketing, your internal processes? SPEAKER_02: Exactly. Because AI doesn't magically understand your practice, it inherits whatever knowledge you've ingested into it.

unknown: Yep. SPEAKER_02: This has been another episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers. Heather, thank you so much. This was really great.

And we'll see you all next time. SPEAKER_01: Bye. That's it for today's episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers. Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next time.