“An AI-Enabled World.” Why You Can’t Avoid Building AI Into Your Practice | New Solo

Speaker A: Welcome to the curated Legal Talk Network feed. Each week our team selects three standout episodes from across the network to feature for you smart conversations, timely topics, and voices you need to hear. If you like what you hear, don't forget to subscribe to the show linked in the description. Thanks for listening and let's dive into this week's picks.

Speaker B: Your credibility, your reputation is everything.

Speaker A: What does it really take to thrive as a woman in law? If we're working in workplaces that don't

Speaker B: respect that, I, uh, think that's where

Speaker A: you vote with your feet. Find out from Supreme Court justices, law school deans, coaches, and fellow trial attorneys on heels in the courtroom. The key to good lawyering and good advocacy is knowing what those facts are and being prepared to present them in a way that is honest and puts that fact in full context.

Speaker B: I mean, this is not a hot take, but that cross examination is an

Speaker A: example of what not to do. This production of Simon Law is found on the Legal Talk Network and wherever you get your best podcasts.

Speaker B: Every day we're bombarded with social posts, um, video shorts, ads, uh, headlines, AI slop. The list goes on and on. Everyone calls for your attention and they want it now. Wouldn't you like something different? Lets rediscover the value of slowing down and reading substantial books that really make us think. Join me, Lee Rawls, host of Modern Law Library as we unplug, read a book together and hear from amazing authors in the legal world. Follow Modern Law Library on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform. So if I was starting today as

Speaker A: a new solo, I would entrepreneurial have to change the way they're practicing leader

Speaker B: to help young lawyers starting a small

Speaker A: foot make it easy to work with new approach, new tools, new mindset, new solo. And it's making that leap. Making that leap. Hello everyone. It's time for another episode of New Solo on Legal Talk Network. I'm Adriana Linares. We're going to talk about AI today. Now, you may have noticed that I don't actually cover a lot of AI only because I feel like it's really covered out there. There's so many resources, there's so many good legal specific sources out there for us that I haven't. If you feel like I should because maybe I bring an aspect to it that you think I would somehow be different, please shoot an email over to newsoloegaltalknetwork.com and give me some ideas of what has not been done yet. But today I do have a special episode because as I Talk to lawyers on a regular basis. I'm still amazed at how many attorneys are not using AI not interested in AI. At the same time, I have just as many that are increasingly using it all the time. And I really wanted to bring my friend Craig Ball on to talk about teaching the next generation of lawyers AI. I think this is something that everyone will find interesting. I'm going to ask Craig to introduce himself, but he's a law professor as much as he is well known for being a, uh, forensics and an ediscovery expert. So I want to talk to him about that and teaching and things that AI can't replace. And he has a lot of experience. Um, I mean, is probably more than most of us. Even though it's been a short lived time, we've all been living with AI and sort of get into his head. Hi, Craig. Hi.

Speaker B: How are you, Adriana?

Speaker A: I'm doing great. I, uh, very, very much appreciate your time. You're a world traveler, you're very busy with, um, forensics and ediscovery, but you teach law at ut, so why don't you give us a little bit of background on you. You've been on the show before too, so people can go back and, um, we've probably done an ediscovery episode in the past.

Speaker B: Very likely, but it's probably been seven or eight years at this point.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm going to look while you're talking.

Speaker B: I am a Texas lawyer. I spend a good deal of my time, uh, at my home in New Orleans, Louisiana, where you are on the good days just down the road from me. And I make my living. Much as I'd like to say, I make it teaching, uh, school. Anyone who does that understands it's not enough to maintain most lifestyles. I make my living as a court appointed special master in electronically stored information and digital forensics, as well as a consultant in those areas. In addition to be a Texas licensed lawyer, um, and longtime trial lawyer, I am also a certified computer forensic examiner.

Speaker A: Well, I have some news for both of us, Craig. According to my catalog of past episodes, you've never been on this podcast before. Are you kidding me? Thank you for taking the time. You're very busy and I appreciate it and I always love talking to you. We are very close friends and we see each other regularly, so this is really fun. I get a lot of inside baseball with you because we are good friends and I get to hear about what you're doing as a law professor. But this is really why I wanted you to Come on the show and tell us about what you're teaching specifically. You've spent your career as a forensics purist getting details exactly right, like this is part of your job. And you are definitely very particular about getting things right and making sure that the right evidence is there, the right documents are created, all the dots and the scratching, everything's done. What made you, for those listening, she's

Speaker B: trying to say I'm an anal sob, but because she's being kind. But it's all true.

Speaker A: It is. You are really anal sop. Thank you. What made you decide that AI was going to step foot into your classroom when there are so many professors that are against it?

Speaker B: Oh, well, several reasons. One is I use it and use it, I hope, to very good effect. And I wanted to share, uh, that benefit with my students. But more importantly, looking at all I've done in teaching now, I've taught at University of Texas now pushing 15 years and at, ah, other law schools. Um, before and during that time I decided that the most important capabilities that I could pass on to my students as they go out into this world is to help them know how to use the latest LLM tools effectively and ethically. Because in my view, if you aren't using those tools, you may be able to hang on and compete for a while, maybe in certain disciplines, but the reality is that your days are numbered. And I know people hear that and go, oh, well, not me. He doesn't know me. He doesn't know how my, how much my clients love me and how experienced I am. I get it. Uh, I mean, I'm 68 years old, I've been practicing pushing 45 years. I get it. But the reality is these tools are transformative more than anything we've had that's come before. More than word processing, more than online legal research, more than mobile, more than, more than the Internet itself. These tools are truly transformative. They are the first things that are starting to live up to their hype and doing it much sooner than anything else.

Speaker A: I have some WordPerfect users out there that would beg to differ about something that lives up to its hype. And believe me, they are still out there. Walk us through a couple of specific assignments or exercises where your students actually use AI. And what does that look like in practice?

Speaker B: Well, I have a workbook full of them. I have a 640 odd page workbook and my students go through 25 different exercises over the course of a 14 week course. And so, uh, all kinds of things, um, obviously drafting exercises so I'll have them in the context of ediscovery, draft discovery, uh, draft preservation letters, draft responses, draft notice letters, uh, as well as preservation letters obviously go to the other side and um, legal hold notices, go to your own side. So I'll have them do all of these, uh, drafting exercise, legal memos to senior partners, going to issues, um, based around scenarios. And then I will have them hone in on using these tools to refine keyword search and ultimately uh, do a review of large document volumes. I mean there is, is no limit to the sorts of things that these tools can do and do quite well and obviously with enormous uh, speed. But in order to get those achievements, you have to know something about prompting and bring the proper level of skepticism to avoid the scourge of hallucination.

Speaker A: And you teach them the prompting as much as being able to judge what is right, wrong, what might need a little more refining.

Speaker B: Well, the more I teach them of the former, the less they need to be concerned about the latter. And yes, um, I have an article I wrote several years ago early in the experience called the Leary Lawyer's Guide to AI and LLMs in Trial Practice. Try to say that three times fast. Anyway, it was my first foray into trying to provide a practical primer for practicing trial lawyers who were afraid to try these tools or who, whose early forays into the field using the free tools that came out say three, four years ago, uh, produce something that was less than satisfactory. And so I try to help lawyers deal with security concerns, build solid prompting skills and also I give them a variety of different specialized prompts to do the kinds of things that trial lawyers do in drafting and in discovery.

Speaker A: So I had asked you, ah, what does that look like in practice? What are the assignments or exercises? But literally everything you rattled off is what it looks like in practice. So everything is obviously very practical in real life.

Speaker B: I don't have them use it for day to day communications. As a lawyer and special master, I won't send anything of any consequence out until I have had it vetted and proofread and checked for accuracy and um, all of that. And I fancy myself a pretty good writer. I've been a writer all my life, but nothing I do alone is as good as what I can achieve. When I work hand in hand with a high quality LLM that is a

Speaker A: very powerful and compelling statement. What do you consider a high quality LLM versus a shitty one?

Speaker B: First of all, the most important thing is that nothing you get for free in the way of these Large language models and AI tools are really good enough. I don't want to say that you can't get, you know, the right answer using a free chatgpt or something or one of the, one of those things. But the reality is you're not going to be able to do quality legal work using those tools. You're not going to have the context window, the storage, the operating memory, uh, the ability to recall what it is you do and how you do it and what your preferences are and how to be secure. And your voice, I mean I have I don't know how many more than 100,000 pages certainly of published materials over the course of many years. And I have trained the tools I use on my voice so they know how I say things. They, they know, you know, my, my bad dad joke kind of wit and so forth. They know how I say things and they know what I won't say. And so hopefully, um, they bring the best of me and they sand off my worst rough edges.

Speaker A: When you say you train them, did you do that by uploading a lot of those hundred thousand pages or did you send them out into the Internet and say go find everything that's out there in public, including my long standing blog? Or did you upload stuff? Or was it a combination of both and other things?

Speaker B: All of the above. Yes, indeed. I mean I'm lucky in that so much of what I've written over 30 plus years and published in the CLE environment is public facing. Um, I've tried to keep everything available and, and so it is something that I can say to an A.I. sound like me. And as long as it picks the right me and not the guy with the same name. Who's the, who's the impersonator? Voice impersonator in, in England, uh, chances are they're going to get things I've written in the past and so they have kind of the canon of what I've said about the topics about which I write over many years.

Speaker A: Do you have your students say, well, I'm still a law student. Or maybe attorneys that you talk to because I know you talk to attorneys all the time too that say, well, my stuff isn't out there in public. What do I do? Just upload it all? Do I let it loose on my OneDrive, my Dropbox?

Speaker B: You could certainly. I think people want to make reason choices about the level to which they want to expose their information to these tools. I am a bit more open. I've lived my life on the net for so long that I'M not as fearful as many are of such things and I'm those things that are highly confidential client information or information gained. As a special master, I'm very, very unlikely to put that out even in the secured areas where I work. Um, and by I. So what I do is I remind anyone using these tools is they need to assign the tool an identity. If it's going to be writing and speaking for you, drafting for you, tell it what its identity is. Do you want it to have the voice of a judge, of a law student, of an experienced practitioner, of an experienced practitioner in the field of X? You don't have to give it a huge amount of your prior briefs and drafting and communications and so forth before it begins to get you so you don't have to give it hundreds of thousands of pages as uh, as I have over time, a very much small, smaller sample is going to give a good idea of how you approach things.

Speaker A: Has your syllabus changed a lot over the last year or two because of how fast the tools are moving? Like what's the difference between upcoming year and 18 months ago or two years ago?

Speaker B: Radically, I mean, you know, radically. I mean, let's face it, in the first year of the public exposure of what the first one I think most everybody saw was, uh, OpenAI's ChatGPT there were just so many situations where I would give it a question, an area I knew well and I could recognize that much of what I was getting back was either slop or was just flat out hallucination. And so I didn't build it in to my teaching in any meaningful way in the first year or more. Uh, but then I began to realize again, um, if I'm going to send these young people out with skills that will allow them to compete in a world where I genuinely believe that many of their roles will disappear, um, in the next five years, that, that the thing that will make them the last to make the cut is going to be their demonstrated capability and in fact their gifts, their, their, their high skills in the world of LLMs and the law.

Speaker A: Amazing. Let's take a quick break, listen to some messages from some sponsors and when we come back, I'm going to ask you about the judgment gap. Like what AI can't replace will make some people feel a little bit better. Today's solo law firm runs on technology, cloud tools, online payments, client portals, AI and non stop communication. But even smart systems create risk. Risk. That's why solo attorneys trust ALPS insurance for legal malpractice and law Firm coverage built for the modern firm with an easy online application, customized coverage and support that makes sense. ALPS helps protect your practice so you can keep building with confidence. Alpsinsurance.com. Solo and small firms are finding real efficiencies in AI. One place to keep human though the call Nearly nine in ten clients want a real person and a third will hang up on a bot and call the next firm. Lex Reception answers with legal literate receptionists never AI day and night so callers reach someone who listens. Find out more@LexReception.com mention new solo to their team for $250 off your first month. Again, that's LexReception.com well, we're back. I'm here with my dear friend Craig Ball to talk about good old AI. What those law students are learning. They're going to come out of there rip roaring ready to go with AI it's going to be part of their normal life. And we still have attorneys out here who are uh, I just talked to one today, said I'm an old guy, I'm not using it. And I said oh boy, hopefully you're an old guy looking to retirement because you're not going to last much longer if we just. Anyway, uh, I encouraged him to use a couple of the basic tools that he, I mean his firm was already paying for copilot for him. I thought well it's not the best but it's an okay place to start, especially in outlook but, and I want

Speaker B: to push back on the old guy thing. Uh, I don't like to think of myself as an old guy but I can count to 100 and I'm uh, more than 2/3 of the way there. My point being is that although you might be a few years older than I this old guy, uh, the point of it is that you want to take on these tools more now than ever before. They are enabling. And as an old guy, old person who brings experience, you are more capable at assessing and detecting the errors that AI can make. And so I feel empowered. I feel re enabled by AI in a way that none of the other tools have done. So old guy, if you're listening, use these tools. I just got back from I don't know how many weeks, uh, and everywhere I would go to a museum traveling I would just tell Claude, ah, say here's where I am, here's the time of day, what's interesting around me Or I'm going to this museum. What is it that I shouldn't miss before I go and where Is it? And plan a route. So, old guy, as. As our abilities become perhaps slightly less and less over time, these tools are going to help you feel capable again. So you should be embracing them heartily now, because it's going to make your life better.

Speaker A: I told him, I said, I will tell you that if you learn how to use these tools right, it will breathe new life into your love for the practice of law.

Speaker B: It's your love for a lot of things. I agree with you. But certainly for the practice of law, it takes much of the grunt work off our plate. It really does. You know, we've always heard this, oh, it's going to make your life better because you'll be able to do the thinking parts of law while somebody else takes care of the drudgery. This really does do that.

Speaker A: It's finally true. And look, my husband is 62 years old, and he has completely embraced all the robots, pays for all of them, loves using them. Aside from the practice of law and all the other interests he has, they have a little training plan together for him to learn Spanish. Like, it's amazing. Okay, let me ask you just a couple more questions on the loss on law school. And it's, you know, we know that some law professors are banning AI, or maybe they've gotten better by now, but maybe just not encouraging it, maybe because they think they haven't earned the judgment yet to know if the output is any good. Back to what you were just saying to the old guy, which is, you're the one who would know if the output is any good. So back to the law students. Like, where do you draw the line with them? How do you guide them into figuring out if the output is any good? But at the same time, you know, speaking to attorneys that are listening or paralegals that also listen to this podcast, where do you draw the line? How do you figure out what the good output is versus the bad? And how do you not be afraid

Speaker B: to even try it in the academic setting? This is a fraught, an emotional topic. There are a number of studies and certainly a lot of anecdotal reports of a big slip and slide in critical thinking experienced by students and law students who rely upon these tools rather than synthesize analysis by going through the motions of more traditional legal, um, legal research, drafting exercises, blue pencil editing by a more experienced editor, and so forth. And so how do we balance the circumstance we see now? And let's. Here's what's happening in many law schools, and I would assume my own as well. Which is that we are using, we, the professors are using these tools to assist us in creating tests and in grading written materials. I certainly appreciate the insightful comments that the AI tools add to my own. Look, when I say eliminate some of the drudgery, they do a brilliant job of pointing me to the strengths and weaknesses of my students work. So there's that. And the students we know, wherever they can, are using these tools to give the answers. Hopefully not on assessments like exams and quizzes, but certainly in their written submissions, uh, we are seeing stuff that is almost completely regurgitated by AI. And so the fear is that we are getting to a position where your AI is teaching my AI, my AI is grading your AI and nobody's really getting that much out of the process. That's a genuine concern.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: It looks like a New Yorker cartoon, but it's, it's happening in a way that m, my fellow, uh, professors on, um, the faculty worry about. So quite a number of faculty members, at least until recently, have had a no AI rule. Not just you can use it with disclosure, but we don't want you using it at all. And that puts students uh, on a, um in a difficult situation. There's a lot of fear among students that whatever, whenever they play by the rules that they're getting, they're getting their grades reduced by other students who they assume are not playing by the rules in the honor code. So people are going to use it. Even if they're going to write something original, they're going to put it through an LLM to polish. And I personally want them to. I want to see their best work, but I want to see their work. So I've built my course around. Absolutely, you can use AI. You can use AI and anything. For about three years now I've been doing this. Um, but the understanding is that you live or die by what you submit. You don't get to say it was AI that did this. You obviously have to disclose your usage. And I require that they give me their prompts, that they walk me through their process. Because if their process gets them to something that they're willing to put their names on and live or die by in court, then I want to see how they get there. I want to critique their process, see if they're taking appropriate precautions, see if they have an iterative process, see if they're cross checking against reliable resources or if they're just throwing the dice every time. So there's, right now we're at the cusp. Most recently at my Law school. And, um, I'm a little limited, obviously. I don't know how much of what we hear from the dean we're supposed to put out there to the general public, but suffice to say that the dean and University of Texas, by the way, ut, University of Texas, not Tennessee, is doing a wonderful job of getting resources available. My students all this past semester have had an unlimited access to Harvey, a legal centric tool that would be priced out of sight, uh, for anyone to use. But for the largesse of the people making it available to law students, I think they understand that much, uh, like Lexis and Westlaw did when I was at the early days. Um, you get somebody hooked on one or the other, and that's what they want. So, um, my students have unlimited use of Harvey simply. And I'm glad for that because I don't want to ask them to Pay as I do, $110 a month for Claude Max or $22 a month for ChatGPT. Again, recognizing that if you're not paying for it and not paying for a good version of it, you haven't seen what AI is truly capable of. So it's changing. We're going to have AI enabled courses largely across the board, except for those purists who are going to, you know, they're going to try to hold everyone's feet to the fire for a while and then just find that it's not going to work. It's an AI enabled world, so let's help enable it ethically and effectively.

Speaker A: Brilliant. Let's take a quick break, listen to some last messages from our sponsors, and we'll be right back. More cases should mean more revenue. If it doesn't, the problem isn't your caseload, it's your capacity. Wiser staffing solves that. Wiser connects law firms like yours with global virtual legal talent. It's how their founder, a, uh, practicing immigration attorney, built his practice. Go to wiserstaffing.com to let them know about what your firm needs. That's W y z e r-taffing.com link in the show notes. Hire Wiser with Wiser.

Speaker B: Did you know that at any time it is estimated that a staggering 5% of all prisoners are wrongfully incarcerated? I'm Michael Semanchik, executive director of the Innocence center and host of the podcast for the Innocent. We tell the stories of those who have been unjustly imprisoned and the tireless efforts required to bring them home. Check out season three of for the Innocent to hear our latest Episode with Amanda Knox and more exoneree stories follow for the innocent on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever podcasts are found.

Speaker A: All right, Craig, we're back. Me and Craig Ball talking AI law students. So your students are entering practice, hopefully already fluent in these tools. What do you think that means for the solo small firm or even large firm attorneys competing against them, that next generation?

Speaker B: I think it means that if the incoming classes of new associates aren't entering a law firm that has made these resources available and enabled them across the board and been willing to invest in the training, uh, and the tools and the agentic sources that are going to be necessary, then students, young lawyers will arrive and, um, feel betrayed.

Speaker A: I hope they feel betrayed. But you know, that comment is really timeless because how many times has there been a student, a law student, or even a new solo or a solo. Sorry. Or a new attorney that left a firm that was completely enabled with technology to go to a firm that had no technology? I mean, this happens today. Right now, the law firms I talk to are still using, again, Word Perfect. It's still out there. Believe me, it is. They're using case management systems that are outdated, that are sitting on a server, that aren't cloud enabled, that don't integrate with, with Outlook or Gmail. So it's the same conversation, it's just a different tool.

Speaker B: You know, in isolation, Word Perfect is a terrific tool, but we don't work and live in isolation. We work in infrastructures.

Speaker A: And I don't mean to disparage Word Perfect as a tool. It's still a good tool. As a matter of fact, it's as good as Word. The thing is, it's not practical because people aren't using it. So when you take, uh, an associate that was at a large law firm who decides that they want to go back to their hometown and work and live in a rural area where they can afford a bigger house and raise their family in a nice area. But now they're thrown at a law firm that is using no practice management system. I still see it every day. I mean, you're not doing anybody a favor. And what they're gonna do is say, well, I'm out here in this rural area and I'm technology enabled. I'll just start my own firm. Old guy, just kidding. Or old gal. Cause they're out there too. Not only are they gonna bring it, but if they don't get it, if they don't get to bring it because you're stubborn, they're just going to open up the firm across the street that is using these tools and running a more efficient and effective law firm. I mean, that's just what's going to happen.

Speaker B: So let me ask you a question, because you think about these questions quite a bit and you speak to a lot of people about them. How are we going to cope with the diminution, the eradication of critical thinking that is likely to follow widespread use of these tools? I mean, are we experiencing, working into a world like the cartoon Wall E, where basically people get so sedentary and fat and stupid that they become extinct?

Speaker A: Well, no, of course not. I believe what you believe, which is these tools are going to empower the lawyers who are using them, just like the calculate. I mean, we can say the same shit all the time that everybody likes to say on LinkedIn, that these are just the modern versions of those old tools. But for me, I just think you are absolutely killing yourself and wasting and still struggling to search for information, to copy and paste all the things that you do on a regular basis, which comes down to using Outlook and Microsoft Word or Gmail and Microsoft Word. Those are your two most critical tools that help you create products that you sell and you want people to buy. Well, if you aren't enhancing the use of those tools with these other tools and then still using your brain to make sure that whatever they're outputting is helpful, useful and true, then you know you're just gonna lose.

Speaker B: I would say they're more than that. They're. They are so much more than the other tools we've come to use. I mean, I remember an Internet before Google, uh, when we literally had to drill down through a series of menus to try to find something because the Internet was so finite at that time. Uh, now, I mean, how many people are like me? Google is their homepage. We even. We don't even think about the fact that we're at a site when we open our browsers and we only go to another site through that Google interaction. This is not like that. These are not like Google. They are so far ahead, they're far smarter than I am. And that may not set the bar high, but in my mind, uh, it is something that says something. It's more than Gmail, it's more than Internet search. It is the closest thing to actual deep human thinking that has ever existed. And we have to be ready for the fact that a multiplicity of jobs will go away. We'll simply be eliminated by this. And we need to be preparing for that. I'm Preparing my students, I think we need to be preparing, um, understand. I also teach at the Graduate School of Computer Science at the University of Texas where most of my students are coders. And how do you tell people who have just invested in my case it's on the order of five to six years into a discipline. No one's going to need you to do this anymore. You're simply going to be telling a tool to do it. And, uh, one of you will be able to do the work of 10 or 20, meaning those other people are going to need to find something else to do. That's going to be true in many areas of the law and we must prepare our populace for that.

Speaker A: So you've got a book behind you. Well, you mentioned it earlier, but, uh, the guide, I want you to mention out loud the guide and where people can find it. The Leary Lawyer's Guide to AI and LLMs in Trial Practice, as well as your blog. That is where you put a lot of this information. Don't let me forget to make sure you do that. But I wanna ask you about the other book that you have in your background, which is Forensic the Litigator's Guide to Detecting Deep Fakes and Authenticating Digital Evidence. Obviously that's a whole other podcast we could do and it's probably gonna be amazing. But give us a little sort of teaser on that and why it's so important and maybe like one or two little. I mean you've got the image there kind of showing the guy with six fingers.

Speaker B: As a forensic examiner, I've been dealing with false evidence for many, many years, obviously. But the new generation of, uh, synthetic evidence, so called deepfakes, is a concern for reasons that have not as much to do with how good the deepfakes are, although they're very good. Um, when I teach how to use meta information, how to push back and discovery to get to the sources, uh, said to be the creators of these deepfakes, to be able to, uh, prove that they're fake. But more importantly, there's something that my boss, the dean of the UT Law School, Bobby Chesney, uh, coined a phrase and that's called the liar's dividend. And AI has created the liar's dividend, the ability for liars to guilty people to say, uh, that recording you have of me on the wiretap or that picture you have of me selling the drugs or taking the bribe, that's been deep faked. And to create doubt by the simple existence of these technologies in the wider world. And so we need, as litigators, not only the skill to identify the fake evidence and demonstrate its falsity, but perhaps even more importantly, to be able to, to deflect the charges of deepfakes leveled against our genuine evidence so that we aren't having to fight harder to get, uh, things into evidence and authenticate them. And so this rather long publication, but it's free, so there's that. And, uh, you could always have AI summarize it for you. Um, Adriana was the first person who, who exposed me to the term tldr, responding to my emails with too long. Didn't read, thank you very much. Anyway, going back to forensic tells, the paper is there, and if you, if you want to delve into this because you're facing, um, false evidence or you're trying to prove evidence in the, in the face of people trying to say it's false or cast doubt on it because of technology, this is, uh, another primer about how to. To get there.

Speaker A: What do you say to the lawyer who goes, uh, I don't really need to read that book or know much about it. I'll just hire an expert. Can we just turn to the experts anymore and say, I feel like it went from I don't even know how to do that, I've got a secretary to I don't need to understand how that works. I'm going to hire an expert because we're allowed to do that.

Speaker B: You know, I was having a pretty good day till you started depressing me. I've been in an area as an expert, a testifier, and a teacher for decades, and I can't tell you how many times I've said to a client, you know, if you'll just give me 30 minutes and listen really hard, you'll never have to hire me for this task again because I can tell you how to understand it, how to do it. And Nana, we want to hire you anyway, which is a mixed blessing, you know, in a sense, when you. When, uh, we have a world with little access to justice and it's expensive. So when lawyers just say, I'll just hire an expert for something I could do myself, that troubled me. So what do I say to a lawyer? It just says, I'll hire an expert. I don't know if you've ever tried to do a good direct examination, let alone a cross examination of an expert on a topic you know absolutely nothing about, but it's wasting your money. You have to present an expert on direct with the right questions, and you have to be able to ask the right follow up question. And so you can't be a, uh, total ignoramus about these things. You have to understand the parameters, the general idea, so that you can elicit what you need from experts.

Speaker A: Yes. And if I may bring it back to a very basic and just completely basic comparison. When attorneys would say to me, I don't need to know how to do that in Word, I have a secretary that does that. That I remind them of this story where an assistant once told her attorney that he would not be able to file his appeal with a table of contents because Microsoft Word doesn't do that. And then when I came to training, he walked in and said, does Microsoft, and this was a firm going from Word perfect to Word, of course. Does Microsoft Word help you create an automated table of contents? Or uh, actually it was the table of citations. It wasn't even the table of contents, it was the table of citations. And I said, of course it does. Well, didn't she look like a lying asshole? And she was. Because he didn't know that she. So anyway, the point is you don't know what you don't know. And this is the exact same example, but a much more serious level than.

Speaker B: And for those listening, you won't be able to win any of your cases without hiring me.

Speaker A: Um.

Speaker B: No, no, I'm kidding.

Speaker A: Oh God. Well, Craig, this has been awesome and hopefully eye opening and ear opening for some listeners. Tell us about all these wonderful free resources that you so generously put out into the world.

Speaker B: Well, thank you. If you'll go to craigball.com, c R-A-I g b a double l all one word dot com. I have countless publications over many years in areas of, uh, forensic technology and in particular electronics discovery and digital forensics. You'll see my 2026 publications and then it breaks it down by year after year until I. They're too old. I don't even put them up there anymore. And if you are interested in my periodic musings about electronic evidence and electronic discovery, um, I also blog with some regularity@ballinyourcourt.com or craigball.net.

Speaker A: thank you so much for your time and your generous information and of course all those wonderful resources that I know you're probably gonna get a bunch of hits on your website now, all three of m my listeners, Ernie, my mom and my husband are gonna definitely run to that pot. To those resources. All right, everyone, thank you so much for spending another episode with us on the new solo podcast. If you have enjoyed what you've heard today, make sure to share this episode with your colleagues, friends, law students, and anyone who would benefit from it. And we will see you next time on New Solo. I've been running from 9 to 5

Speaker B: been biting my tongue for all this time Won't let anyone clock me short

Speaker A: I was thinking this was the way

Speaker B: to go and you put up your puppet show I say cheers to life just leave me alone I'm on your

Speaker A: show oh I'm telling you it's my

Speaker B: time to rise up Live your life I'm proud of you better go I'm telling you it's my time to rise up Live the life I'm loud.

Speaker A: M the views expressed by participants and sponsors of this program are their own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of their employers, Legal Talk Network Infotrack, or their respective employees or associates. Content provided in this podcast is for general informational and educational purposes only and may not be accurate, complete or up to date. This program does not constitute legal, financial or tax advice. Do not act or refrain from acting upon this information without first consulting a licensed attorney or other qualified professional.