Episode 029 AI and the Rise of the Superpowered Solo

Welcome to AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers. Practical, no-nonsense guidance to help attorneys put AI power to work in their practice right now. When personal computers first hit the scene, users were told, see this blinking thing? That's where you type.

Then Apple gave us a mouse. Click here. Now you can type, draw, and move things around. Then came the internet.

Type the address here, or just go to this thing called Google and search for it. And now in the AI revolution, we're being told, go into this chat box and ask AI anything you want. Except lately there's been a new instruction, or build whatever you want. And suddenly the line between users and builders has never seemed further apart.

And at the same time, never closer together. Our guest today, Tara Salinas, has taken the builder side of AI to a place we really haven't seen before. She didn't buy the practice system she wanted, she built it. And the remarkable thing is, she thinks you probably can too.

Welcome to another episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers. I'm Ron Drescher. I'm Heather Gardner. And our guest today is Tara Salinas, a consumer bankruptcy lawyer from Denver, Colorado.

Tara kicked off NACPA's recent Me, Myself, and AI webinar with an enticing promise to help Flintstone-level lawyers overcome their fears and join the AI revolution. Her brand of AI evangelism is straightforward yet creative, to the point, yet clever. We've already had all of the other panelists from that world-class CLE on the show, so I'm excited to finally fill out the bill and welcome Taris Alinas to the show. Oh, thank you, Ron.

I'm so happy to be here. Heather, great to see you as well. So, you know, you had a really interesting set of materials that I have to get at least ask NACPA if they'll let me reproduce them on the show website. But you wrote about an annoying Tuesday afternoon.

You say the barrier was never the technology. You didn't start with an AI strategy. You started with a folder full of sideways phone photos and PDFs called scan 001 through scan 006. What happened that afternoon that made you realize that this was actually useful?

So I had been to AI webinars, right? They've been going on for a while, and I thought, eh, whatever. Um, and then I thought, you know what, I gotta give this a try. I had spent so many hours trying to decipher what this was.

We'd put rules in place in our firm about we don't take images. Well, that doesn't work for our clients. We've all had this experience where we get this, you know, dump of documents that you have no way to make heads or tails of. I was out of time.

I needed to get this case filed, but we needed to get a review of these. So I thought, you know what? I'm gonna give it a shot. I threw it into at that point, it was Chat GPT, and I gave it a shot.

And it was remarkably good at identifying not only what it was, but giving it a decent name. And I thought, you know what? Like, wow, this just saved me at least an hour of opening up each one of these. And it was a lot more than a few sideways photos and and six PDFs unnamed.

It was, you know, a file full of documents. And within about 15 minutes, it had taken what was garbage and turned it into something that I could actually use, that I could decipher what it was, I could identify what I needed immediately. Um, that would have taken me or a paralegal two, three hours to get done. And it was done in 15 minutes.

So that for me was the light bulb mode. All right, we're about to ask the same thing. How did it take 15 minutes? The AI would have never taken that long.

What happened there? Were you going back and forth? I'm just curious. Just curious.

You know what? I think it was honestly had through like about 150 documents. Okay. It it went through it, it not only identified what it was, but then renamed it and then categorized it into the case.

Oh, it cleaned up every little bit more than just rename. Did it turn your pages for you? Did it straighten your pages, create PDFs like everything that you needed? Yeah, took like 15 images of a tax return and made it into a single PDF of a tax return.

That's amazing. Nice. All right. So that was your revolutionary Tuesday afternoon.

What did Wednesday look like? Well, then the kind of sky opens, right? And you start to look around and you're like, oh my God, what else can I do with this? This is so amazing.

Um, and I got excited and I started to play. And then I started to realize that the way that I was playing was not very organized. And so I started to make um a list of what else do I want? And I when I talk to people about AI, one of the things that I say is, you know, the sky's really the limit.

Um, that was probably almost a year ago when this my aha moment happened. Um, and you know, AI is doubling its capacity every seven months. Um, so you can imagine in almost two cycles of that how far we've come. And so you really can create whatever it is you want.

So I just started. I started to build. Um, I started to figure out what would be the things that I'd like to use. Um, in probably February of 2026, I moved away from Chat GPT into Claude and I had my mind blown again.

I started creating um skills, I started creating projects, I started um building with Claude Code. So now the end result for me now is that we have a portal that we use exclusively for our clients to upload documents to us. Um, it runs an API in the background on every document that gets uploaded, identifies what it is, does it match the category we've asked for, um, gives me a confidence score on that, um, notifies my staff when we've got new documents in. If it can identify it, it puts it into a needs a human eye folder.

Uh, we use it for our daily brief. We use it to do a lot of our means test analysis, our student loan analysis. Um, it's been revolutionary for my when you move those documents through the portal and then you have that API that looks at all of them. Is that like a one-shot deal?

Or are you are you going to have to go back and look at those documents again to run, let's say, a tax analyzer or a pay stub analyzer or a bank statement analyzer? Or is everything done for you at that initial ingestion moment? All right. So how does it be a good thing?

So right now this is the client's school. What you're describing. So you were talking about. I think there's a lot of references.

I think um I'm very season three, which is builders and users. All right. So what's your advice for users who say, you know what, I I just don't want to spend hours in front of a screen ever. You probably are in the wrong business if you're a bankruptcy lawyer and you don't want to spend time.

Well, I'm talking about I'm talking about building in front of a screen. In front of an AI screen. And dealing with AI. Yeah.

A lot of attorneys don't really want to build their own tools with AI, is is is absolutely or at all. Yeah. Or at all. Or at all.

Right. And that's totally understandable. You know, we're working, um, I'm about to take over as the education chair for NACPA. We're working on the AI Advantage program, expanding that.

So we'll have a prompt library, we'll have a skill library. Um, those are all kind of in the works. So there's an opportunity for lawyers that don't want to build to use some of these tools. We've given away some of our skills in prior um programs as well.

Um, but there are certainly are options if you don't want to do that. You don't have to build a whole portal for your clients. Um, you can use it very simply to do things like analyze bank statements. You can do that with a prompt, you can do that with a skill, which takes about as long as a prompt to develop.

You don't have to build something huge. You can build small things that are super useful for your for your practice. How did you build that portal? What what what are the uh nuts and bolts of it?

So this is a um it is a super base uh database, uh, and then it's built with Vercell onto a next.js uh web interface. About a third of our audience just threw up. I understand.

So I'll give you a little bit of background. Um I left law school um right as the tech bubble was kind of starting to blow up and thought maybe I wanted to be um a patent lawyer. So I, with a history degree, was not eligible to pass the patent bar. So I went back to school after law school and got about three-quarters of an electrical engineering degree.

So you don't have to have those kind of credentials, but it really helped me to understand kind of how some of these systems interact, how they interface. And I will tell you what you don't know, um, AI will teach you. So you don't have to be an expert at any of these things. You can say, even as someone who has that background and that expertise, there are some times that Claude spits something back to me and I'm like, what is that?

And I just tell it, I'm gonna need you to slow down and go through that as if I have no clue what you're talking about because I don't. And it kind of says, fair, got it, okay. And then it walks me step by step through. So you don't have to have an engineering background, you don't have to have any programming experience.

That's what the AI tools do for you. They will help to take care of it. All right, I have a personal question that maybe you can help me with. All right.

So my hard drive is inundated with screenshots that I have fed into uh my AI tools to help them understand where I am and where I'm going. What should I do with those screenshots? Is there an AI solution to that problem? I think you could ask AI to go through your hard drive and wipe those if you don't want them, segregate them into a single folder for your review.

I keep all those screenshots on my desktop, and once a week I just look at those and say, okay, all of those I've already used, don't need them, and I delete them. So that's to me, that's courageous. I, you know, I I'm like a digital hoarder. I I just don't like to throw stuff away.

If it's AI tooltip screenshots, you could start your own folder or project in any of your AI platforms and title it AI tooltip screenshots and just drop them all in there as a source. Love it. When I was watching the Me Myself and I webinar, uh you you kicked it off, and it seemed to me that you drew the short straw because the first part was AI evangelism, where you were trying to explain to everybody why they really need to use AI and how it's going to improve their lives. And the other three panelists got to show off their fancy toys.

So here's really my question: when are we going to get to the point where nobody on these AI panels is going to say, we we need to be able to hold the hand of the Flintstones lawyers and bring them into the AI fold? When are we no longer going to be having that as a primary topic on these AI CLEs? I think that's a great question. And I think, again, as someone who's passionate about education, as someone who's webinars and helping to organize conference materials, webinars, trying to direct people on how to do this.

I'm focused on not just the lowest common denominator, but offering something for everyone. I want the people who are already building their own portal like me to have content that speaks to them. But if I only run programs like that, then it limits who else can get in. It feels scary, it feels uncomfortable for a lot of our colleagues.

And so the more we can say, look, this is easy and you must get on board or you're going to be left behind, the evangelism, if you will, um, the more people that we can, you know, hopefully appeal to and help. Because at the end of the day, my goal as someone who focuses on education is to help people. Um and if I jump in, I mean, my very first program was in April in uh Boston at NACPAS conference. And, you know, I had three people come up to the desk and they're like, why didn't you talk about?

I'm like, dude, code with a group of lawyers who barely know what Claude is or barely know what ChatGPT is. Like I have to meet the audience where they are. And so I think for a while longer, our audience is still gonna be at that point where they're not sure. They're concerned, they're worried, they're fearful.

Um, and if we can allay those fears, then we can get into the meat of it, which will be fine. All right. So he so here's my next question. What aren't these lawyers afraid of that they should be afraid of?

I think that's a great question. I think the things that lawyers are not afraid of that they should be is access. Um, you know, we've talked a lot about you must have a paid subscription. I I just recently did a deep dive on, I was working on another program.

Is it enough to have a pro or a max subscription to Claude or do you need a team subscription? And I surfaced some really interesting things you need. You probably need a team subscription if you're any more than one. If you are gonna have one individual who is the only person that accesses it and you can lock it down, you could probably get away with a consumer subscription.

If not, you're probably gonna need a team subscription or some sort of business subscription, regardless of what platform you use. Um, you know, I think that's the thing that people should be afraid of. I think the thing that they should be afraid of is an employee who doesn't understand how to audit what's being produced. AI slop is a real thing.

And if you put out AI slop, you're gonna get slopped. So here's here's the question. There's an ABA opinion from 2024. What is that?

512, is that it? 512. I mean, to me, in the world of AI, 2024 is ancient history. So but it but it's what we got.

And it suggests that if you're using self-learning tools, then you really need consent. You need disclosure and consent. But it suggests that if you're not using self-learning tools, maybe you don't need disclosure and consent. It doesn't say it, but it doesn't require it.

So here's the first question: what's a self-learning tool? This is a great question. Um, you know, I think a self-learning tool is one that helps kind of helps itself to the data, if you will. It's not somewhere where you're actively feeding things in, you're giving it access to something that's um much broader.

And I I think the best way that I can describe it would be giving Claude co-work access to your entire SharePoint drive or one one drive, um, and just letting it loose to run around and find whatever it wants. Um that's what I do. And so I mean, I don't let it run around and do whatever it wants. You know, um I'm I'm giving it pretty broad access.

And so for me, the consent is critical. I have to let clients know that we're using it, I have to get their consent, and I do that over and over again. I do it before a consultation, I do it before at the time they sign with us, um, and it's on our website as well. So for me, that's a big one.

See, I I respect that, but I don't think that's what self-learning was intended to mean back in 2024. I think I think it was intended just to mean uh apps that train on your data. That's what that's what I think because you know, back in 2024, we didn't really have agentic type activities. You know, I was just building, I'm I'm building like kind of like everybody else in the entire United States.

I'm building a bankruptcy AI app and I was working on it, and uh I use ChatGPT and Codex, and it started doing stuff on my Chrome app. And I said, this is cool. Stop doing that. All right, because that was scary.

I mean, what if that little tiny AI cursor found its way to a place where I really don't want it to be? And I think, you know, I don't know if you listened to the episode we did last week uh about Council Commons and Yvonne Nath talking about how she thought that skills really could get you where agents would go. Uh do you have any comment or thought about that? I mean, at the end of the day skills can get you where agents go kind of.

I mean, it's a long chain of events to make that happen. So, I mean, could you, yes. I think that's where a lot of us started, but to where it can be self-executing maybe as scheduled. I mean, I think it's certainly possible.

I don't think that that's practical for most people right now. I don't know. Heather, what do you think about that? I think that it depends on the task.

I think it depends on what you're trying to do for sure. But I understand what Ivan meant, that there are some skills that are as effective as an agent. Um, and I understand that for the work that she was discussing doing, agents just may not be a requirement. I think that bankruptcy gets into so much more deep dive that you might need to build out with agents in order to complete the entire process for those sort of cases.

By the way, if anybody is thinking, well, what's really the difference between skills and agents? I direct you to an episode of Family Guy, where Peter lost his arms and he had to grow his arms back, and he had really little tiny arms for a while. To me, that's skills. When you don't when you have real long arms, when the AI has the really long arms and can reach out from beyond its little chat box environment, that's agency.

You know, you can go, oh, let's, for example, let's say you want to have an engagement agreement signed with DocuSign. That's really uh that's like an you could use an API or an MCP connector, but that's really a form of agency. Am I right or am I kind of off the wall here? No, I think that's right.

I think that um I think that what we see as agency now is going to continue to expand. And that's where I've seen develop over the past couple of months, even in how things are starting to expand. I mean, now there's, you know, um memory that's that continues in even if you don't ask it to, other than in close certain closed environments. I mean, all of the developments as we go are are allowing what we thought were not agents to become agents, even if we're not intending them to.

So, Heather, you had a question that you wanted to ask. I I did want to get into this. So bankruptcy as an area of law specifically looks and feels so automatable. And we know that a lot of it is because there are a lot of standardized forms, a lot of recurring deadlines, a lot of the same financial documents we have to gather, et cetera, et cetera.

Can AI really make bankruptcy representation more efficient without removing that human touch that we know the financially distressed clients need on the other side of that case? Like, what are your thoughts on that? One conversation that's been happening in our industry and in a lot of legal industries is not removing that human touch, the humanity from the profession. I absolutely think it can.

And I actually think that's exactly what we should be using AI for. I will tell you, as a bankruptcy lawyer, my phone does not stop ringing. It's I can feel it coming from the moment I wake up in the morning until I put my my head back on the pillow at night. It's coming.

The wave that we thought was coming in 2020 is about to slam into all of us. Um yet, just like give it five minutes. It's coming. You know what?

I feel like I think I retired at exactly the right time or exactly the wrong time. I'm gonna ask you to re enlist Ron because we're gonna need I need you back, yeah. Um, and and here's here's I want to kind of just walk through this a little bit. I think the dilemma for bankruptcy attorneys specifically is that for over 15 years, it's been quite Quiet.

It's been slow. I mean, BAPSIKA worked to the extent that it was supposed to slow down filings. It has. What that did was create a gap.

And so we have almost a full generation of attorneys that have not chosen consumer bankruptcy as their practice area. That's right. Because there wasn't business. I'm 50 and I'm probably one of the youngest people in the room most of the time when I'm at conferences.

That's kind of scary. That means we have a really short bench right now. Can we train more bankruptcy lawyers? Sure.

But right now we're so inundated with new business that it's hard to take the moment to say, I'm going to train you in how to how to do this work. And so from my perspective, AI is not about replacing staff or replacing attorneys. It's about making your firm more efficient so that the time you have available each day, your, you know, your minutes that you've got every day, 1440 minutes in a day, right? In order for you to use those effectively, I don't want to be renaming photos and figuring out what that scan 001 PDF is.

My time is absolutely needed to counsel, comfort, and educate my clients. If I can do that with my time every day, it means that something else or someone else has to be doing all of that work. And if I don't have trained people to do it, having an AI system that can effectively and efficiently do that for me frees up my time to be human instead of not. Yeah.

All right. So you brought up a great point, which is how there is a like bench in the consumer bankruptcy world. So fearing a little bit off the AI path, you're going to become the education director at NACPA. Are you doing that now or is that starting in 2027?

I've been on the education committee since I joined the board in April of 25. Um, so I will be the chair of the Education and Membership Development Committee beginning in January of 27. What's the top item on your education agenda? Bring Andy Banker.

Is that a surprise? Is it a draw? Is that to draw new younger bankruptcy attorneys? Yes.

Two education goals for us this year. One is to launch AI Advantage as a more deliberate program, not a once-in-a-while webinar. Um, so that's number one. Number two, because I think it is critical for bankruptcy attorneys to be using AI so that we can handle the wave that's coming.

Because it's not that those per people who we can't serve are gonna go to a competitor. There aren't any competitors. Like we're out of people. Um they're gonna try to file by themselves, and that's detrimental to consumers.

Um, the second piece is we got to try more bankruptcy lawyers. So the second piece that we're hoping to launch in 2027 is a micro learning program on how to start and run a bankruptcy practice, how to be a bankruptcy lawyer. Oh, cool. So that we can recruit and bring people in.

Um and the idea is don't make it a once-in-a-while webinar or even a series or a conference program. All of those need to be incorporated, but we need to make it available 24-7 in in bite-sized chunks, because that's how people who are gonna be joining us for the most part are gonna learn. This is a TikTok world and we need to be ready to teach them in that in that format. So wow, that opens up so many questions that I have for you.

All right. So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go to the to the easy one, which is clients using AI, right? Clients want to use AI. Do you have a policy on that?

Of course I do. What's your what's your policy? My policy with clients is to one, educate them about what the danger of you putting anything I give them into AI, which is some courts are viewing AI systems as third parties. And so they use information that I've given them and run it through a third party, that makes that information lose its privilege.

For most clients, they don't really understand that, but it feels scary, so they don't do it. Um, the other thing that I've started to do is to say to clients that, you know what, I understand AI, I love it. We use it all the time. If you want to run things through, be sure that you're not giving away your personal information, have a paid subscription.

And if you send me AI slot, I will charge you after a certain period to process and review that because it takes time. And I'm very clear and upfront about it. Um, I don't beat around the bush. I know there's a lot of complaints out there about, oh, there's clients in there.

It's a tool we're all having fun with. I'm not gonna tell you you can't have fun with it. I'm gonna warn you about what the risks are, and I'm gonna tell you that if you use up my time with garbage, I'm gonna charge you for it. You know, I was uh I was on a CLE panel uh about AI back in the spring, and the issue of clients using AI came up.

And everybody, all of course it was a room full of lawyers. Everybody wanted to say, no, no, no, don't let your clients use AI. And I said, no, that's not the answer. The answer is encourage your clients to use AI correctly.

So I'm actually working on um a white paper where I'm going to advise lawyers how to help their clients best utilize AI during the engagement. Give them sample prompts, uh, give them follow-up prompts, you know, almost like little homework assignments that you give them to keep them engaged and hopefully to keep them safe. Does that have a shot at working? Again, I think that it's unrealistic to say you can't use it.

Really? Well, you use it. You say on your website you use it. I can tell you use it because I use it.

It doesn't make sense. I mean, it's like trying just let them use it, but tell them how to do it the right way. Tell them how to do it to protect that. Have you seen clients from AI on bankruptcy?

You have. You have to daily, I bet. Yeah. You know, and and again, because AI just spits back what it what it finds, right?

And so I don't know that we have a ton of bankruptcy specific material out there. I think the one thing, and this is a colleague of ours, um Adrian Hines, who is phenomenal, really brought up um, and I think it's huge. AI is telling consumers to do debt settlement, not bankruptcy. Why?

It's talking badly about bankruptcy. Yeah, this is interesting. If you go into like an incognito session on your AI and start asking, you know, I've got these financial difficulties and I'm not sure what to do, or I'm thinking about bankruptcy, it will push you away from bankruptcy. And I think that is dangerous because it's not like, but what's out there, right?

What are the commercials that are running at midnight and 1 a.m. when people are stressed about debt? It's not bankruptcy commercials, it's debt management, debt settlement companies.

And that really is something that we've got to focus on. How do we educate consumers when AI is telling them bankruptcy should be your last choice or it's not a good option? Um, that's not good advice. And so we've got to figure out how to counter that.

You mentioned that we're in the TikTok world and that we should use the that technology, that that media to reach out to people. Do you have any ideas or thoughts or plans on how to TikTokify the NACA message? Well, I think um that's really what our microlearning program is gonna aim to do, which is to record 10 to 15 minute sessions about topics. Maybe we string them together into series, maybe we, you know, have a whole section on practice management, a whole section on this, a whole section on that.

But for me, the goal is twofold. One, get more voices into the education programming. Um, we all have great ideas as lawyers. We all have tips and tricks that would be great to share with others.

I may not have time to mentor someone one-on-one, but I can spend 30 minutes or an hour recording short sessions about things that work for me and we can edit those together and create a program where people can learn a little bit about a lot of topics really easily. So that's the idea on the microlearning because it needs to be consumable quick. Nobody can sit down for eight hours anymore and listen to a CLE or attend a CLE in person that way. So, you know, when I look at webinars like me, myself, and AI, one of my first questions always is are they preaching to the choir?

Are these people already converted in the audience? Or do they legitimately have Flintstone's lawyers that are ready to take the leap out of bedrock? Well, what what what do you perceive? Yeah, I think that's a great question.

And um when I did the first program on AI for NACPA in April at Boston's convention, I had multiple lawyers approach me at that session. Just, I mean, I feel like we kind of blew the doors off that room because everybody was like, oh, there was this buzz about it. Um, and so I said to Jenny, Jenny and I did that panel together, and I said to Jenny, we gotta do, we gotta capitalize on this and really give people more. We gotta go longer than an hour.

So that's when we did the two 90 minutes, Matt and I and Jenny and I in May. Um, and there were quite a few lawyers in those sessions, again, who reached out privately and were like, I didn't think I was ever gonna want to do this, but you convinced me to try it. Um, I went home and I just tried to file because that's always been what I preach, right? Just try it on one thing and see if you like the results.

And it speaks for itself, right? I mean, it's the biggest no-brainer. This is awesome. And they start and then you can feel it.

Like the energy in the email is like, oh my gosh, this is so exciting. I'm I'm doing it. And it's like they're riding a bike for the first time. Um, they're excited.

So yeah, I think we're converting even Flintstone lawyers. So, Karen, do you still manage your listserv in Colorado? You were I I have turned over the the management of that listserv to another one of my colleagues. AI related to that, because I thought you might still be managing it.

So a lawyer listserv like that contains years of practical questions, peer knowledge. Should that material be used to create an internal AI knowledge base for your state's bankruptcy attorneys? I I think it would be fantastic. And funny enough, um, the colleague of mine who has taken over the day-to-day running of our listserv um actually brought that up to me.

Could we create a yeah, could we create like a um LLM notebook or something like that where it interfaces an obsidian um, you know, interface so that we could use that as a tool? So certainly like that. All right, cool. So let's get back to your NACVA materials, uh where you basically offer a 30-day premise.

You know, it's like it's not it's not 30 days to lose 10 pounds, it's 30 days to learn AI. Do you know, did anybody or did you get feedback from anybody that they actually did it and what their life looked like before and after? From the Me Myself and AI program, I have not received any feedback yet. Um, in part because we're not really, I think we're just maybe barely 30 days from that program.

Uh from the May sessions, which again, I my message is always kind of the same. Try it, make it small, start small. You don't have to start by building the world, right? You start one skill at a time.

Um, and I have received feedback from I think three different attorneys who said, I took this back, my parallel and I have been messing around with it, and oh my goodness, like let me tell you. And there's everyone's so excited to tell you about what they built and how it's working, and occasionally then a question of like, okay, this isn't working. What do I do next? Right.

And so I love that. And it's part of what I'm trying to launch with AI Advantage through NAPPA is not just education on how to do this, but those conversations. And so one of the goals is to have kind of a practice group happy hour. So we can all hop on a Zoom and we can chat with each other about what are you building?

How's it working? Because every time I get together with other practitioners who are doing this, a new idea comes into my head. And I'm like, oh, that's a great idea. I was just on a board retreat with Jenny.

I know she's been on the show, but she had a great idea. She wants to see in her calendar um which paralegal is assigned to the case that she's got a to-do for. And so she had her AI add just a little stripe of color down one edge of the calendar item that tells her by a glance who is who's responsible for that matter. Mind blown, right?

I was like, I gotta do that. Right, I'm writing down my ideas. And I told her something, she's like, oh, love that. And having that discourse, having that interaction is what really allows this to get exciting and to build larger.

So you guys are super Jetsons lawyers, right? I mean, we we had Jenny on the show, the show went six or seven hours long, and every minute of it was really fascinating. And so the question is is there always going to be this divide between the Jetsons lawyers and and and the lawyers that are not Jetsons lawyers that that are they just want to be users. How do you how do you reach those people?

You know what? I think that even if you just want to be a user, you've got to learn how to use it, right? And so even if you're not gonna go and build it yourself, understanding how it works is helpful because it helps you to figure out how could I implement something like this in my practice, even if I don't have to build it myself. Because you know, there's tons of AI products out there that you can buy that you can slap onto your firm.

All of the major case management softwares are using some sort of AI tool. Um, you know, co-pilots right there available in your email, in your Word documents. It's there. Knowing how to use it is is the critical piece.

I was having uh a long uh drifting conversation with Chat GPT not long ago. And Chat GPT explained to me that at a certain point, AI is going to become, and I love this phrase, durable infrastructure. Kind of like the internet or even the electrical grid. Well what do you think about that?

I think that's true, and I think that's part of this, I mean, revolution, if you if you want to say one of the slides pieces that I put in the Me, Myself, and I is like, look, you've done this. One of the things that you you don't need to be afraid of it. You used to have to take a stack of eight petitions to the courthouse and hand them to the clerk, and now you use ECF. You used to have to type everything on your Selectric IBM, you know, typewriter if you were lucky, and now you've got Word or Google Docs or whatever it is, right?

So we've been through these transitions. This one feels different, but they all feel different. Remember when we were afraid that Y2K was going to wipe out all of our computers? It's the same thing, it's just a different flavor.

And so those those when you say Flintstone's lawyers, I don't know anybody who's still typing petitions on their selectric typewriter. Those would be Flintstone's lawyers. So behind the Jetsons lawyers, but it doesn't mean they're not gonna at some point be a Jetsons lawyer. So how many times a day do you get people to ask you, what do you think of Glade?

Glade a lot. I was probably um one of their early adopters, um, and I loved what they did. Um, I found myself, I I outgrew what they were doing, um, in part because I want it my way. I don't know many lawyers that don't want it exactly the way they want it.

Um, and after 25 years of fitting my practice into somebody else's product, I love the fact that I don't have to do that anymore. But if I want to build it, but you're not going to create your own word processor. You're gonna use the Microsoft Word off the shelf. What's what's different about AI?

Yeah, I think for me, the difference is um I have I have a specific way I interact with my clients that I think is my special sauce. You know what? It's not. I know we all have our special sauce, it's our fee agreement that we like, it's the way that we handle intakes.

It's my way. And part of the reason I'm a solar practitioner, why I own my own firm is because I want it my way. And it's hard when you can't do that. I mean, I started, you're you'll probably relate, Ron.

I started back in the 90s using ACT, um, which was a contact management software years ago. And you could build your own kind of customized modules there to customize data. It was kind of an early predecessor of Clio. I loved that because I could build it the way I wanted it.

Um, this is just an extension of that, and it's just easier, which I love. You know what always amazed me? I I've I've done CLE on tech for decades. And one of my earliest things was email parsing so that when an email message comes in, especially from you know, an ECF message comes in, you could automatically route it through a web hook uh that will pick up your, you know, your email or your message that you could send to the client.

You know, I found out that nobody was sending anything to their clients when the trustee issued a no distribution report. Nobody was, nobody was sending an email out back in the 15 years ago, 10 years ago. And I had it set up uh with a with a webhook to to infusion soft so they would go out automatically. I said, why wouldn't you why wouldn't you give this?

This you just hit a home run. Your clients can now keep all their assets in bankruptcy. Why wouldn't you want to tell them about that? Because they got a copy of it mailed to their house too.

No, not the no not the no distribution report. That just goes on the docket. Oh, it's not a mailing, I see. So what's the equivalent today of something like that?

What are what besides the fact that people aren't using AI, what's like the big obvious thing that people are missing? You know, I think that I think the constant touch with the client. I mean, Heather brought up the fact that, you know, this is a humanized business. Um, our clients need their hands held, and you can do that without being present with them in every moment.

I mean, you can automate an email that says, hey, guess what? You just got your no distribution report. Hey, you know what? You're 30 days from discharge.

I mean, there's so many ways to do that. There are so many ways to touch a client without having to have your hands on it. Um, that if you're not utilizing AI to do that, you're a fool. Um, I think the second piece, and this is more bankruptcy specific, um, we've all used and again had our own intake forms that gather the data that we need.

Um, if you're not using a dynamic form, one that that molds itself to that client, I don't want to ask a client about business debt if they don't own a business. And so having a system that helps to customize their experience is another way that we humanize that process without having to be sitting across the desk with them and their bag full of unopened bills, right? Like there are ways to make that happen without having to do it the way we used to. So Luke Skywalker comes to you, or lawyer Luke Skyworker comes to you and says, Yoda Salinas, teach me, let me be an AI Jedi.

Would you do that? Would you would you give them your tech or sell them your tech? How would you uh uh approach that kind of interaction? You know, here's what I'll tell you.

Um, could I sell the tech? Of course. Do I want to do that? I mean, my husband says we're selling it.

Everyone's husband or wife is saying we're selling it. Um, I at the end of the day, I'm not sure that makes sense. I think the beautiful thing about this is that you can customize it. Now, could we set up, as we're hoping to do, a library of skills, a library of um maybe even like a GitHub library where people can download certain parts of a system?

Sure, we could do that. Um at this point, the sky's the limit, right? We could do whatever we wanted. Would I personally do that right now?

I don't, I'm not as confident that I'd want to sell what I have because I'm still building it, I'm still perfecting it. And so I'm not there yet. But so is every AI vendor in the world. You know, Steve Jobs used to say great artist ship.

And what that said to me is Steve Jobs was willing to accept bugs. Yeah. But all right, so Tara, we could go on and on about all this, but as you know, it is time for our practice signal section, where we think about how lawyers in the wild are dealing with their problems, and and we try to solve them. And sometimes maybe AI helps, and sometimes AI won't help.

So this, and they all come from Reddit, and this one is a seventh year attorney says everything at his mid sized firm is going well. He He's rebuilt his confidence after getting fired from an earlier job. He's doing great work, likes his boss and his developing clients. Last year he billed 2,300 hours, originated about $50,000 of his own business, and collected more than $650,000.

I mean, this guy's a star. But he sacrificed his health, relationships, and virtually all of his free time. He was making $140,000. His review brought a raise to $167,000, and he got a $9,000 bonus.

He's doing okay. Now he can't stop thinking that wasn't worth it. He likes the job, but he can't do another year like what he just went through. So his alternatives are go solo or quit practicing law and sell AI software to lawyers.

What's your advice to this lawyer? Go solo, become a bankruptcy lawyer. All right. Really, you're your own boss.

It's one of the best decision that I made. I left a mid-sized law firm knowing that my future would be billable hours because I had a young family and my health was not great. Having the ability to flex my business grow or my business shrink as I need it to, as my life dictates, has been the best gift I've ever had. What do you think?

What do you think, Heather? Any advice for this seventh-year attorney? You know, I think what really jumps out to me about that whole scenario is he has these two options and he only would have had one a few years ago. So AI has just given him more opportunity.

You know, it's kind of interesting. Uh Tara, you bring up a really interesting point. And Heather, you've been saying this for months now. Consumer bankruptcy is a growth field for young people to get into.

Um so how do you do it? Do you just contact Jen Grandal Lee and ask, can you get me uh into the bankruptcy practice? How would you use AI? How would this seventh-year lawyer use AI to transition from that mid-sized firm where he's he's really hitting it out of the park into his own solo practice?

What are the prompts? Yeah, I look, I think the way I got into bankruptcy was I took some volunteer cases. Um, it helps you're covered by malpractice, right? Usually with most of the volunteer programs, they've got some kind of coverage.

You can learn a little bit. And then I did my 10,000 hours, right? I mean, I read the NCLC manual, I went to the programs, I attended the webinars, I joined the trade organization. Um, you can get started pretty easily.

We've got great software to help. We've got amazing resources in a lot of our vendors who are saying, hey, I mean, Heather, hello, can help from the paralegal side, and you can get into this business fairly easily. I think the other thing that's unique about bankruptcy is it's not cutthroat. It's not like you're trying to break into a personal injury business.

Like these are, for whatever reason, we are all social workers and we're like, you need help? Sure, I'll put down everything I have to help lift you up. That has been my experience of almost every bankruptcy lawyer I've ever met. You need help?

Absolutely. I'll give you my forms, I'll give you my whatever it is, and I'll walk you through it. Um it's not, it wouldn't be difficult to start a bankruptcy law firm. What do you think, Heather?

Can you start a law firm on a shoestring these days? Uh, I'm not sure about that from a financial standpoint, but uh, what I will say is uh, you know, everything Tara said is correct. The the bankruptcy industry is very gracious. The attorneys and trustees and and the professionals that are already there would be very helpful to an attorney.

I I don't know if there is a prompt. I think you could definitely start talking to your AI if you're a seven-year associate, um, whatever your favorite platform is. And maybe I would try a couple of them and and just find out what it what it's telling you. But joining your local bankruptcy bar if you're part of the Maryland State Bar, like you and I always were.

We have the bankruptcy section, which is where our list serve lives in Maryland. So those are all good ways to get headway, if you will, or get started. But yeah, joining something like Complete Bankruptcy or Jen Rondell Lee's um, you know, program, uh, I would say there are so many things that you can do by and and in many states, like for instance, in Tennessee, one beautiful thing, the trustees uh there, they let the attorneys that are new come in on Friday just to learn about yeah, it's it's like a really I I don't know if other states have that.

I only know because every time I have a really new to bankruptcy attorney that's a client and they're worried because it's their first 341 or their first something, I always tell them that. You know, the the trustees, the people at the court, they're very gracious. They want to help you, they want your cases to succeed. You know, they just ask questions, they will help.

You know what? I'll never forget uh when I went into solo practice, I got my LLM in tax because I was concerned I would never like have a client. So I wanted to be able to offer as much as I could. And, you know, I'd been going to the uh lunch and uh lunch and learns in the bankruptcy bar, and it's loud and it's raucous, and everybody knows each other.

He's oh, what about this case? What about that case? I I did this, I went to the same thing on the estate planning uh and the estate uh bar association. I went to a lunch and learn, and it was dead silence, which is which is appropriate because we're talking about estates, you know.

But the lawyers, they don't know each other, they had nothing to say to each other. It was a completely different kind of bar. And it it did. It made me miss, it made me miss the bankruptcy bar events, and it made me happy that I was a bankruptcy lawyer.

And I'm gonna now use that to transition to our final segment, which is the users and builders segment. And uh, you know what, Tara? Uh I usually have something prepared for this. But I said, you know what?

I don't have to prepare anything. I want to ask Tara to give us a user versus a builder. I mean, the whole episode has been this, but can you think of a specific uh situation where you would advise a user how to approach that solution as opposed to a builder? Whew.

Put me on the spot. Totally put you on the spot. I'll do the uh, I'll do the first, I'll go first to give Tara. So let's just take that scenario we were just talking about, that seven-year associate, right?

They could use their their AI user skills to try to break into the bankruptcy field, to try to get, you know, into what they need. They don't have to necessarily build anything just yet, but they might want to later. Sure. You could say, give me five ways that I could break into the consumer bankruptcy field.

What are five steps that I can take over the next 30 days? That's a user. You're not building anything there. Right.

They don't even know what to build yet, but they'll get it eventually. All right. What about it? What if you're a builder?

What's good advice there? Yes, it may still. I'll jump in on that. You know what?

I think if you're a builder and you're trying to solve that same problem, you're gonna say, hey, you know what? Build me a complete strategy of how I'm gonna market my bankruptcy law firm, my practice management style or you know, structure. Um, and then let's come up with a way that I'm gonna handle the intake and uh processing of my clients. So build an intake tool.

You don't have to have any bankruptcy knowledge to build all of that. That's true. Well, and you know what? On that note, Tara, I think we're going to bid our listeners adieu.

This has been a great episode. I'm so glad we were able to finally have you on the show. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Tara.

Thanks. Blessing, appreciate it. This has been AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers. We'll see you next time.

That's it for today's episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.