Naming Unnamed Fornicating Judges: How ATL used AI to unmask a judge anonymously disciplined, and more

Bob Ambrosi: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Legal Tech Week, the show where we talk about the week's top news in legal tech and legal innovation. It is May 29, 2026. I'm Bob Ambrosi, and, uh, got some interesting stuff to talk about today, I think. So it should be a good show. And, uh, here to talk about it all are our regular panelists. Uh, let's go around and do some introduct. Stephanie, you want to kick it off?

Victor Lee: Sure.

Stephanie Wilkins: Sorry. As an alarm starts going off. Just kidding. Hi, I am Stephanie, telling you it's

Bob Ambrosi: time to be on the show.

Stephanie Wilkins: I know I was a couple minutes late. Sorry, everyone. I'm Stephanie Wilkins. I'm the director of content at Legal Tech Hub.

Bob Ambrosi: All right. And Victor.

Victor Lee: Hi, everyone. Uh, my name is Victor Lee. I'm assistant managing editor for the ABA Journal, um, covering business of law and technology. You might hear my dog start barking at some points because, I don't know, she's talking to other dogs in the neighborhood.

Steve Embry: Uh, gossiping dog gossip.

Victor Lee: You're talking about AI, Probably.

Bob Ambrosi: All right. And Steve.

Steve Embry: Hey, Steve Embry. I write the blog Tech Law Crossroads, and I also write for above the Law.

Bob Ambrosi: And last but not least, Joe.

Joe Patrice: Hey, everybody. I'm Joe Patrice from Above the Law and I have a podcast called Thinking Like Lawyer in addition to this one. And, uh, yeah, no, I'm here and ready, uh, to talk about, uh, some salacious things.

Bob Ambrosi: Legal Tech is so salacious. This week it is. This week. We've got some salacious legal tech to talk about. That's great. I was worried that chat wasn't working, but I see all of our Fireflies note takers are all arriving on Moss, so I'm glad we are popular with the note taker set. Um, hopefully we have a few humans in the audience as well. So, uh, any humans out there, you can raise your hand and say hello. Um, yeah, so, yeah, so we've got some. We've got. We've got a, ah, juicy little story involving some AI driven, uh, sleuthing, uh, and, uh, goings on in the federal courts. It made me think back to. Wasn't above the Law originally called Underneath their Robes or was.

Joe Patrice: Ah, that was David Lamp's original vlog.

Bob Ambrosi: Was the original thing. And that kind of evolved. Did. Did that. Well, we don't have to go there. Never mind.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, we don't. There were, There were some stops along the way, but. Yeah.

Bob Ambrosi: Yes, but Underneath Their Robes was pertinent, uh, to some extent, but yes. Coming up with this story. So Joe and This is a, this is a double header in a sense, because Joe and Stephanie were both involved in this one. But I don't know. Joe, you want to kick it off or.

Stephanie Wilkins: Uh, I kind of dust off my above the law hat for this too.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. Ah, Stephanie and I, Woodward and Bernstein. This, uh, so we had

Bob Ambrosi: Deep throat being an appropriate analogy.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah.

Bob Ambrosi: So

Joe Patrice: down in, uh, the 11th Circuit, a committee, uh, did a investigation into a judge, uh, having received a complaint from a clerk. Uh, and as part of this investigation, they determined this judge was having sex in their chambers as having an extramarital affair. Sex in their chambers with a, uh, high ranking police officer whose department had cases before the courthouse. Uh, yeah, uh, lots of. There was a couch cushion in the office that got tested. Uh, uh, in addition to all this, there are some allegations that the civil docket had been turned over to the clerks entirely, with the judge not even bothering to pay attention to it. Uh, and when all of these allegations started coming out, the judge lied to investigators about it for a while until eventually coming clean, uh, so to speak. And then the, uh, and then the. So the 11th Circuit looked into this, determined to, uh, to say slap on the wrist is, uh, an insult to slaps on the wrist. Uh, the punishment was, you don't, you never will get to be the chief judge of the district. So, hooray, you know, she can't do it. Well, I guess I didn't. Hold on. I'm getting ahead of myself. They can't do.

Bob Ambrosi: Darn.

Joe Patrice: They can't do more, uh, they can't do more administrative work. Uh, and they decided to keep the identity private and not get it out there. And the judicial conference, uh, who then had to hear this afterwards, uh, agreed with the 11th Circuit. So the 11th Circuit successfully kept this quiet. Indeed, the judge was ordered to apologize to the clerks, but was specifically in the order, given the latitude to write the apology vaguely so that no one could use the letters to prove that it was them who did this. Uh, so that's what's going on. Uh, how is this a legal tech story? Well, that isn't. Uh, what becomes a legal tech story is where Stephanie gets to come in, which is after writing about this, uh, insane decision to not publicly name somebody who committed acts that are probably impeachable, uh, we started the process of trying to figure out who it was. Uh, there were a few details. Even though they tried to anonymize it all over the place, There were a few details. Uh, the judge hires two year clerks which is not common for district courts. There were a few other things and I started trying to dig around in OSCR to see how many judges did that, whatever. Uh, in a side conversation that I have with Stephanie, uh, Stephanie just said, oh, yeah, well, I just plugged it all into two different AIs, and uh, I'll let you know what they come back with. Uh, and what they came back with, probably what, 10 minutes later or something like that, uh, were a couple of reports, lengthy reports, like 20, 30 pages worth. Oh, yeah, uh, yeah. Both coming to the exact same conclusion that it was Judge Eleanor Ross of down in Atlanta. Uh, that has since been confirmed, uh, with Bloomberg Law talking to getting a human to go on record. Uh, we weren't going to publish this without a human, uh, because AI can hallucinate. But where this is a tech story is Stephanie was right. Uh, the AI was able to scour these intentionally anonymized reports and methodically go through and say, well, there's this breadcrumb, there's this two year clerk thing. There's also the fact that the report talks about how they know a DA from their time at a state prosecutor's office. And it searched through all the judges and said the only judge who fits each of these facts that are kind of buried in these reports is this one.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah, so basically what I did is I sent, I first fed the lengthy order or whatever it was in, and I said, identify, uh, tell me every identifying factor you can possibly tell me about the judge. And then it broke down all of the things that you could tell and could not tell. And then I said, well, great, run that against, like do your deep research. I did Claude and I did ChatGPT in deep research mode. Run, um, that against every possible judge it could be because there were certain date ranges implicated by parts of it. Um, that fact that the judge used to work at the former DA's office because there was a political event involved. And like all of this, um, and so literally within 10 minutes, first it, Claude came back. Um, Claude's was far more extensive than ChatGPTs, I will say, but they both came to the same conclusion. First it came back with, it came back with Eleanor Ross. Um, there were a couple things that I was like, well, are you sure about that? Because it had conflated the political person with the cop and named that she was having an affair with this woman. And I'm like, well, are we sure about that? I was like, that woman's not a cop. So I actually within 45 minutes I got so much more. And that was iterating on, um, this multiple times. And it, it had pulled out a thing that. What in Florida they don't call them district attorneys, they call them, oh yeah, state attorneys.

Joe Patrice: That was a huge one.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah. And I, I was like, well, just in case, pretend that's not a thing and run the Florida ones anyway to rule them out. Um, which it did. And it came like with like a maybe possible second choice. And like here are the things that are off on it. But every single thing that had ticked off for Eleanor Ross was like the one political event she went to was off by six months of a date or something like that. They even named who they think the police officer is and who the politic. What the political event was. And um, yeah, it was it. It. Yeah. I combined the two reports and dumped it in the Google Doc to Joe and it's like 30 pages of analysis. And that was, you know, us just chatting over text. And it turned out to be totally right. And Joe can get into why this is, you know, a big implication for maybe people don't aren't aware of exactly what AI can do. But it was just like, I love this kind of stuff. I love research. I was a PI for a year and now I kind of feel like I should have a PI, a cloud based PI business on the side. But, um, yeah, it was like I just did it because I'm a nerd and I thought that sounded fun. And yeah, it was spot on without. I mean, it's like, I can't guarantee this, but this is the highest likelihood. Here are all the reasons. And it was right.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, no, uh, as Magnum AI there was explaining, uh,

Bob Ambrosi: I thought I was Magnum AI.

Stephanie Wilkins: Oh, that's right.

Joe Patrice: You are definitely the Magnum story. Uh, but yeah, no, so it goes through, uh, each of these points. Uh, it is super compelling. Uh, well, I mean, we know it's true now, but its reasoning was very compelling. And my takeaway, uh, that I talk about in the article is you can tell that the judges really intended this to be quiet and never to see the light of day who this person was. And they included details because transparency requires, uh, them to have some, you know, they have to have some details to explain the disciplinary action. Right. Uh, but that's too much. Uh, and what they thought, historically, what they would have thought was enough to keep this quote, fight is clearly not enough in the age of AI. And yes, a human probably could have worked this out over enough time, but it would have been a grueling effort and one that a lot of people probably would have given up on. Uh, we were able to do it in, well, Stephanie was able to do it in 20 minutes, uh, or at worst, uh, and it struck me one that judges are not prepared for what AI is capable of doing. Uh, they are hearing a lot about how it hallucinates cases. They are not hearing a lot about how it basically has destroyed the confidentiality that they want to have. Uh, lawyers need to understand this happens because if you are trying to keep something confidential or trying to suss out something that's confidential in a due diligence set or something that you have, you uh, probably need to understand that AI can do this, uh, because that will save you a lot of time long term. Uh, the scary implication of course is that anonymizing things is basically impossible. But uh, putting that aside, uh, just for the legal side of it, you better get on the fact that this can perform all of these tasks.

Stephanie Wilkins: Well, yeah, sorry, one more point. I could have manually or over the Internet done somehow, but it looked at every potential judge and narrowed it down by criteria and then then within dates and then I even had it look at every potential high ranking police officer in every level that were close enough in a certain distance to where the courthouse, because they used to come by on their lunch breaks and have their little afternoon delight. And then like, and like, and then like who had the clerks and like the clerks started reporting this from like 2000 or 2020 on. So it had to be somebody who was a, at a certain level of a judge from that point and then who was a former, you know, DA and so then would have attended a political event. And they actually found a record of the political event which is pretty likely which one it was. And so it's like all things that you could have murder boarded out with the red yarn, but it did it in literally 20, 25 minutes.

Steve Embry: I was, as you were talking, Joe, I was thinking about state bar associations and their disciplinary proceedings because they often, you know, enter an order applying, you know, various penalties and discipline without identifying the lawyer. But I suspect that there, in most cases, there's enough there to figure it out or for AI to figure it out.

Joe Patrice: And we have a real issue here because some of those details, uh, you know, a prudent disciplinary system needs to identify, even if you're trying to keep things private, certain details of the behavior, uh, because, you know, not being transparent about it would be worse. Uh, and so we now going to enter a hard policy question of what level of transparency. Are we willing to trade to maintain anonymity? If that's what you want to do. If you think that's a countervailing policy interest. Uh, because if you try to be transparent without, uh, without trading some of that off, you're. It's not going to work.

Stephanie Wilkins: And I would have to say too that, I mean, I rightfully get slammed for bias and things all the time, but it did not do that here. I mean, I think we all, maybe not the same ones, but we all made certain assumptions about what genders the cop and the judge would be based on, you know, who gets to be high ranking cops and who gets to be high ranking judges or whatever. But like it looked at every judge and every cop and every whatever and didn't account for which was which or whether they were even different genders or was it, you know, what was the affair. And it just treated all of it as data points, which was great.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, yeah.

Bob Ambrosi: I initially assumed it was the judge doling out the stiff sentence in this case, but

Joe Patrice: no, it was the judge who declared all rise. And.

Bob Ambrosi: Uh, it is, I mean it is, you know, it is scary. I think Horace pointed out like, like if, if not to in any way minimize you, which was what you, what you did, Stavnik, which is really clever and I would never want to do that. But, but it's.

Stephanie Wilkins: I'd say clever, but it wasn't special. Like I'll.

Bob Ambrosi: You can look at like what palette? Like this horse. Like what does, what does Palander know about us? I mean, what was that? There was like a saying at some point about like give me three pieces of information, like your email address, your something, and I can tell you your life story basically. And uh, I've been kind of writing a bit about the whole Thomson Reuters stuff and uh, uh, what's going on with their support of. They're providing data to ICE enforcement. Uh, and they keep saying, well, we're not providing surveillance data. We're just providing sort of personal data that's available, uh, out there in public records and whatever. But you take all this stuff together and you give it to, and you give it to an organization like ICE that's also has relationships with Palantir and other sophisticated intelligence and surveillance and software providers. And it's just scary what they know about you. And it's not just, you, uh, know, it's not just bad people or criminals or something. It's all of us. They've got it on all of us. Yeah. Every red light we've ever run they know.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah, I was.

Victor Lee: Not that I've ever run a red light.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah. Aside from now, having said it was me and, you know, all the fireflies recording that, Joe just identified me as, you know, former, uh, above the law columnist or whatever. I was curious to see if that would be, like, who do you think that might be? And see if it could work its way back to potentially being me. But.

Joe Patrice: Good question.

Stephanie Wilkins: But, no, it was like. It was fun. And I mean, I, you know, happy. I thought, um, to immediately do it, but, like, it was zero. Like, I was literally sitting on my couch, and we were on a text chain with some other friends, and I was like. Like 20, like, 15 minutes after I saw it. I was like, they. Claude thinks it's Eleanor Ross. And everyone's like, no, surely it's not her. Whatever, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, um, nope, here's 30 pages on why it's Eleanor.

Joe Patrice: That's a great point. You were on the. On a text chain with another. Another lawyer and two other legal reporters. And all of us were speculating, and none of us had the idea of going to AI. All of us were playing around with like, well, what about this? What about that? And then you're like, um, I got it.

Stephanie Wilkins: Well, that's because you're also. You're all such political wonks in your own way that I was like, I think I have a quicker way to do this.

Joe Patrice: I mean, we're old. You, uh, know, we're. We're old enough that our first instinct was, this is something that. This is something that we got a murder board, uh, to use Stephanie's term, and it isn't. And I think that's going to be the real hurdle for lawyer adoption is just. Even though intellectually I knew AI is capable of stuff kind of like this, at no point did it cross my mind to do it. Stephanie had to do it.

Stephanie Wilkins: My mind. But did anyone else catch that? Joe seems to imply that I was young.

Joe Patrice: Well, I mean,

Bob Ambrosi: I think. I think that's what he said.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, you were at 2L when I was a 3L. So, yeah, you're. You're really young. And.

Stephanie Wilkins: And I love a murder board more than all of you. Yeah.

Bob Ambrosi: It's also just the whole policy side here that apart from. Again, apart from the sleuthing and. And the identity, it's like, why. Why not reveal the identity? Why would the court have kept the identity secret in the first place? That's. That. That's troubling to me. I mean, if a federal judge commits Misconduct in his or her role as a federal judge. I think the public has a right to know about that. Why keep a secret?

Victor Lee: I think go to the whole kind of like, I mean, federal judges, like, you know, I mean. I mean, I know Supreme Court justices, but like, you know, are different. Are different category, but they can pretty much define what counts as unethical and what counts as, like, you know, conflicts of interest and whatnot. And I mean, she could all. She. I mean, any judge could always say, oh, well, it didn't. It did not compromise my ability to be a objective, you know, impartial judge. And here's. Here are the opinions where I followed the law and blah, blah, blah. You know, I mean, anybody can. Anybody can just. Just like. Just like with this, anybody can use the data to like, to. To try to, um. Um, you know, make their case. But I do wonder sort of like, yeah, like if this. I mean, obviously we're still in the early stages. I mean, this is, you know, there's no. I mean, this. Well, this isn't. This isn't a proof of concept thing yet, but like, at some point, you know, other people are going to start doing this, other organizations are doing this and whatnot. And I do wonder like, I mean, someone brought up sort of like the harmony, but I also wonder then if that'll cause, you know, people to. Then. To then rethink sort of like, okay, well, how much information we even disclose about. About people. We really want to keep it anonymous. M. I mean, like, you know, for a judge, you know, who. A judge who may. Who may or may not have behaved unethically or whatnot. Okay, but what, what are we talking about? Like, you know, like, like a rape victim or. We're talking about like, you know, uh, kids, you know, uh, kids being trafficked or whatever or stuff like that, you know, then.

Joe Patrice: Then.

Victor Lee: Then. Then things get a little. Things get much dicier. And then. And then. And you know, it does make me wonder sort of like if we. If people will start to rethink sort of like how much stuff they. How much they should even disclose in the first place. But I mean, we're not there yet, obviously, but. But you know, but you never know how. How the technology is going to progress.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah.

Steve Embry: Uh, it could end up having sort of the opposite effect that.

Stephanie Wilkins: I mean, we.

Steve Embry: We want transparency, but it'll. It'll in fact make things less transparent. That's possible. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting point.

Stephanie Wilkins: With great power comes great responsibility thing. Right? Which like, we did it and kept it amongst ourselves. And Joe wasn't going to publish it until somebody. Another, like other outlets had confirmed it. And we. He did nothing with the name of who we're pretty sure the police officer was. And I haven't seen that come up anywhere. Like, it's not.

Joe Patrice: I've seen it come up other places and other places have confirmed that it's exactly who our thing said.

Stephanie Wilkins: So.

Bob Ambrosi: Yeah.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah.

Steve Embry: Geez. What a. What an interesting concept. Power with responsibility, huh?

Joe Patrice: In some. Well, right. I actually, the fact that the AI came up with who the affair, uh, partner was, I actually thought was almost more crazy because there's a lot less detail there.

Stephanie Wilkins: Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, and that's the one I had to push it. Uh, I didn't push it to get that name. It just originally conflated the political party candidate or the fundraiser candidate as who the affair was with. And I was like, well, I don't think your analysis is right because that person's not a police officer. And it was like, oh, you're correct. It's not. Let me correct that. And that's when it dove in itself into all the police officer research. I didn't say, find me this name. It just. It did. It, um.

Steve Embry: Uh, that's pretty interesting. Yeah, actually, that's pretty interesting. It did it on its own.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah, that's kind of scary too. Yeah, I was like that. I was. And I didn't even say that. I was like, oh, is that. Is she a police officer? And they're like, no, you're correct. Let me look. Police officers. And then it was like, I look through all these things. If you need me to go more broadly into like, sheriff's departments or whatever, I'm like, no, I think. I mean, I think we're good.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. Um, but yeah, and the New York Post. The New York Post has reported the police officer, and it is the same that we had to.

Stephanie Wilkins: But I think with. In particular. And this is from one order from the court too, that it based. That. Based on. I think that's the big thing here. Like, it's. They. They put so much identifying information in that document, thinking they didn't. That. That is really the. What. I mean, if they, uh. Basically all they did was not give the gender and the name or the specific court. They gave so much. So much date range, so much that, like, I'm confident maybe not the police officer part, but I'm confident we would have gotten to all of this if we had wanted to put in manual work. Mine was just basically a test to See what Claude could do. And it just, it, it A plus plus plus more than I. Better than I expected.

Bob Ambrosi: Yeah. All right, well, I was going to talk about kind of two, two stories this week that are kind of related in the same theme of uh, attempt again uh, trying to grapple with hallucinations, uh, and the use of artificial intelligence, uh, and different ways of trying to approach that. And one is a uh, rule adopted this week by the Florida Supreme Court, um, which I thought I had in front of me here, here I have it, uh, which is basically uh, attempting to tackle the hallucinations issue. Uh, and uh, if Mark Palmer is in the audience, a big thanks to him because he was the one who alerted me to the fact that they passed uh, this rule this week. Um, but basically they've amended the court rule to say that uh, the signer of any document filed in any federal court must represent to the court that quote, the legal authorities identified exist and are accurately cited. Pretty simple change to the rule. Uh, you know, lawyers were already required to sign court documents. And you know, if you ever practice in federal court, we all know like Rule 11 that basically requires you to attest to the, you know, this is all based on good law and good facts and all of that. But this takes it a little bit farther and says basically you've got to attest that the citations are real and uh, accurately cited. And it also extends it to self represented litigants in the Florida court. So they are also going to have to sign this attestation for anything they file. And one other thing the rule does is expressly authorize judges to impose sanctions uh, on anybody who, who uh, you know, fails to uh, who's for whom that representation proves not to be true, uh, and who does in fact file hallucinated or uh, false citations. Um, and uh, the reprimand. You know judges already had sort of an inherent authority to issue sanctions. But uh, they uh, explicitly say here that sanctions can include reprimand, contempt, striking of the document, dismissal of proceedings, costs, attorneys fees or other sanctions. So that was one thing that was Florida and uh, that's one attempt to try and regulate all this. And then the other one was this was actually last week, but I don't think we talked about it was the UC Berkeley uh, School of Law, um, had imposed this new student policy on the use of AI which to me goes way too far, uh, in the wrong direction on this. Uh, they've put out this policy which basically forbids the use of AI for quote, conceptualizing, outlining, drafting Revising, translating or editing any work submitted for credit. It also bars students from uploading any course materials into generative AI systems, uh, and limits permitted research use to the narrow task of identifying sources such as cases, statutes, or secondary materials. Uh, all of this, uh, is done, uh, uh, in the interest, they said, of preserving, uh, the teaching of thinking. The rule says thinking, uh, remains the sine qua non of good lawyering and of quality legal education. And this policy seeks to ensure that our courses focus on requisite cognitive skills by default. So, uh, to me, the Florida policy seems actually fine. Let's make lawyers sign that. Uh, they've checked their citations. Others may disagree. I see Victor shaking his head. Uh, but the Berkeley one to me goes way, way off, uh, in the wrong direction. To me, I think lawyer legal. You know, if law students aren't learning in law school how to use AI, then, uh, when they start representing clients, that's, that's going to be too late.

Victor Lee: I mean, my thing with the Florida thing was that like, I mean, applying for pro se litigants too, it's like,

Steve Embry: well, that's what I, that's my objection supposed to do.

Victor Lee: Like, I mean, and first of all, it's okay, I understand, you know, like, for lawyers, okay, you got to check everything. You got to make sure, uh, it exists and whatnot. But for pro se litigants, like, how are they going to know? And, and secondly, second. And secondly, it's like, look, honestly, like in that case, I mean, even with, even with, I know hallucinations and everything like that, like, I mean, it's, it's. We've talked about a lot of the show, but like, like, what court is going to be swayed by, like, if, if, if I'm a pro se litigant and I write, I write on a brief and I cite this case like Smith vs. Jones to, to, to. To. To be dispositive of my case, and a judge then goes, oh, yeah, you're right. I mean, what, like, so, so like that's not going to happen. And so the idea that like, that they're like a pro se litigant could, could, could, could, could, um, you know, could cause a huge harm to the courts. I just don't buy it. But otherwise, I mean, I mean, I thought, I thought it was a fine, uh, for, I mean, for lawyers, I thought it was a fine rule.

Steve Embry: Yeah, I don't, you know, it's not that I object to the, to the rule. I just think it's more rules that really aren't necessary. When there's, when there's already tools that do the same thing. But it doesn't hurt. But, but the pro se thing bothers me because, you know, the pro se litigants, they have a right to, to, to proceed pro se. That's, that's clear. And if they have that right, then you, you obviously they're going to make mistakes. And it's not, you know, it's one thing to say, okay, you can't cite a, a fictitious case, but then to say, but you have to make sure that you, you cite the case for the proposition, the proposition that you cite it for is accurate. That puts a real burden on pro se litigants because that's, I mean, it's hard enough for us to do sometimes. And uh, you know, I just see it, see that part of it as a way to discourage pro se litigants and, and make it more difficult m. For them. I mean, they don't have access to the tools.

Joe Patrice: They're.

Steve Embry: They're almost always, you know, under underprivileged. They don't have, they don't have resources. It's just like an access to justice kind of thing. So that, that part bothers me more than the, the fact that they're just adding a rule that doesn't really need to. Need to be there anyway. But so what? A lot of rules are like that.

Bob Ambrosi: Yeah. I don't know. On the pro se side, it didn't, it doesn't bother me so much. I mean, again, I think it's going to maybe at least, you know, I understand it's going to be harder for them to understand, I guess what's required of that. But I think, my guess is that judges would just take that into account if it ever came to a request for sanctions and those kinds of things. I can't imagine judges would. Are going to be all that tough on pro se litigants, uh, where there is some mistake. Yeah.

Joe Patrice: All right.

Steve Embry: I can, I mean it's, you know, it's the underprivileged class and they're. You're gumming up my courtroom anyway and get the hell out of here. That's kind of thing I can, that's, that's what I think is the, is the danger of it, especially if you

Joe Patrice: have a judge who doesn't even care about their civil docket. Baby. Uh, but I gotta, I'm just gonna jump in on the Berkeley thing for a second. I was really shocked by the Berkeley thing. It's so, so over the top. Uh, and in Particular so over the top in. And I mean, I don't want to sound like I, you know, have a prejudice here, but so over the top for San Francisco. I understand they hate Stanford, but like, guys, you can admit that AI exists, uh, without like, giving in to the fact that Stanford has all this, uh, all this AI credibility behind it.

Stephanie Wilkins: Also, like, I, I sort of understand what m. Time making your students completely unprepared for the way the world working world works. Like, you can't touch it for like, proofreading or brainstorming or anything. Like, come on, it's sort of, it's

Steve Embry: sort of like, you know, prohibition. You really think they're not going to use it? I mean, really.

Stephanie Wilkins: Right.

Steve Embry: They're going to go to the speakeasy and turn it on. I mean, it's, I understand what they're trying to do. I mean, you know, they, they, they, they want to, to try to force students to think critically and, and not just blindly rely upon AI. Uh, uh, that, that, that's. Maybe that's a worthwhile goal, but it's not going away and it's, I mean, they're going to use it anyway. So I mean, it's also sort of a lazy school way out. Instead of thinking of ways how can we teach with, with students that are going to use AI they so just ban AI. Like, you know, okay, you're going to be an accountant, so we're going to ban calculator. So you have to do it by hand, you know.

Victor Lee: I mean, come on.

Joe Patrice: Okay.

Victor Lee: Uh, I mean, well, I, I had a couple. First of all, I don't know how they would even enforce this. Like, I mean, um, I mean, unless someone's gonna like, volunteer that they, that they used it, then.

Stephanie Wilkins: It's the student code of conduct, is my understanding. It's like what is binding people.

Victor Lee: Yeah, but like, but looking at it sort of like on the extreme side, I mean, we, we, you know, we talk about hallucinations and whatnot. Okay, look, if anything's going to make people like, you know, double check all the citations, you know, to make sure that everything is, is kosher, you know, on their, on their, on their writing set, on their legal research and writing samples, uh, or whatnot or, you know, for, or, or for, you know, whatever, then hey, maybe, maybe this is the way to go. I, I mean, scary, like, like scaring them into, into, into possibly, you know, violating ethics rules for, for, for, uh, law school. Maybe, Maybe that's the way to go. I don't know.

Joe Patrice: I mean, I mean, oh, go ahead, Joe. I'm sorry. Oh no, I was just going to say I had two concerns where I think Berkeley might end up being right. Uh, and I, I like to think that the world is going to evolve in a way where they aren't. But the two concerns I have where I think they may have a case, so I'll just throw them out as devil advocate one is if, if these AI companies start actually charging us what we uh, are actually consuming, uh, and the price of AI becomes something of a prohibitive, uh, the rich get richer and poor or don't have access, that could be a concern. And the other aspect that I think where they could be right maybe is there are these arguments that AI is increasingly homogenizing ideas because people don't fine tune it. Uh, most people don't fine tune it the way they need to and it, you know, defaults to a mean and the creativity starts defaulting to a mean. And that could be a problem if people aren't doing that. Now that said, I think that the answer to that is you train people how to inject personality into it. But uh, those are the two issues that I think could be problematic. And I'd like to think AI will be ahead of those two issues, uh, and that will resolve them before they become a problem. But I could see those two arguments, but that's the only.

Victor Lee: But even if you want to teach

Bob Ambrosi: some kind of skills like that, why not make it just the first year and then open it up beyond that? I mean there's some, I think there's some legitimacy to saying for one L's we're going to really, we're going to restrict the use of, use of AI in some of these, in some of these tasks. But once you're past that year, then you need to start learning how to use this stuff in practice again. I got to make the point in my, in my write up on it is just that you don't, you don't want to walk out of law school and have these people start representing clients who've never used AI before. That's, that's not doing them any service or their future firms or their future clients. Any service.

Stephanie Wilkins: That's ah, exactly what I was going to say. And it's like, sure, it's great, idealistic, whatever, and even the extra points Joe made. But the reality is that at the same time you have these other law schools that are being really innovative and actively teaching AI as part of the curriculum. And if I'm sitting there hiring my next year or my next one associate if I'm a small firm, or my next whatever. And I have somebody who was, I, ah, know was banned from touching AI for three years or somebody who can show me all the classes they took and learned how to use it in legal work. I know who I want to pick. It's like it's doing the students a disservice.

Steve Embry: Right. Well, and I, I wonder too if it, you know, does, does the same prohibition apply to law school professors there? I mean, are they forbidden

Stephanie Wilkins: with red pen?

Steve Embry: Right.

Joe Patrice: That's the thing. That's, that's clearly what this is, right? They, the, the professors want to use it. The only way they could get away with it is if the students aren't allowed to use it that way. The, that way the, the, the feedback loop doesn't catch them.

Steve Embry: I wonder too, what impact it'll have on um, on um recruiting, on students. Whether, whether the application to go to that school will go down or at least the applications of highly, you know, skilled students and how, the kind of students you really want will. If I were applying for law school, that would be something I would take into account. I would see. Wait a minute, you're not, you're not even a, you're not, not even gonna, you're not going to help me learn how to use it? You're not even going to let me use it. I'm not sure that that's the place I want to go. But, you know,

Bob Ambrosi: partnering with Harvey, right? They've got some kind of a deal.

Joe Patrice: Well, of course they are.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah.

Joe Patrice: Of course Stanford's doing something like that. Stanford probably has money in it. I will say. Uh, and that, that is the, that's the thing with Berkeley. I, I don't think Berkeley's applications will go down because it's Berkeley. But if you're the kind of person who gets into Berkeley, you probably got into at least one of the other ones, uh, in that, in that tier and. Yeah. Is it, is it going to lead to somebody going, you know what, M, I'm fine with UCLA or something like that? I don't know.

Steve Embry: Yeah, that's, that's better said than the way I said. That's what I point. I was trying to make or force

Victor Lee: the students there to like get, you know, get clever about how they, how they cover. Because look, they're not going to, they're not going to just not use it. Right? I mean, and uh, as I've said it before is like the definition of AI is so broad now, it could be Anything. It could be like spell check on your.

Stephanie Wilkins: On Microsoft Word isn't one of the things they specifically say is prohibited is using it for like proofreading and things. I was like, that's just baked into word processing.

Bob Ambrosi: Yeah, you know, translating, editing.

Steve Embry: Yeah, I did it. I did an article on this some time ago because there was some, an economist in, I want to say, NYU or someplace like that, he did some work on this and, you know, his theory was it. It really is, um, the professors taking the easy way out because if they really wanted to force students to think critically, then they need to do exercises in the classroom where they have to think critically and can't work with AI because it's not there. And I was thinking when I wrote the article when I was in law school, the Socratic method was pretty heavily applied. I mean, every class. That's the way it worked. And that is where you, you know, that does help you. I mean, it scares the shit out of you, particularly when you're a 1L.

Stephanie Wilkins: But it does.

Steve Embry: Yeah, but it does force you to think critically. But that requires more work on the part of the professor to, to apply that method and apply it correctly. And so, you know, this guy's theory, and I can't remember his name. I see if I can find the link was that what's going on here is academia is essentially taking the easy way out. They don't want to work hard enough to, to get the students to, to do what they want them to do critically in different ways than they ever had before. They just want to say, okay, we're going to always. We're going to do things exactly like we've always done. And you can't use a. Ah, yeah, that's it.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah, it's just not realistic from so many, uh, avenues in my mind. Just. And it's, yeah, it's just, it's. I feel like we're back three years ago when ChatGPT came out and high schools were like, no, we're going to ban it. And now we're up to law schools banning it. And I'm like, haven't we learned in three years that we can't ban it? It just physically doesn't work.

Bob Ambrosi: Yeah, I still, I think I put

Steve Embry: the link in the show notes, by the way.

Bob Ambrosi: Yeah, sorry. I mean, I think I'm not, I'm not, I'm not an academic. But, uh, I certainly think that there are ways to effectively combine the teaching of AI, uh, and analytical skills in the same exercises where you're maybe even Using AI Produced, uh, briefs or something and asking students to critically analyze them and correct them and find out what's wrong or what's right about them and that sort of thing. Um, I think that the whole first half hour of today's show was an exercise in why learning these skills can be so critical. Uh, seriously. Yeah, you know, it was really clever, and, uh, that's something could. If you don't have those skills, you're not. You're not going to be able to do. Um, so.

Victor Lee: Well.

Joe Patrice: All right.

Bob Ambrosi: Uh, all right. Should we go to the WWE and the. That's. Yeah, and a little bit of spoliation going on here.

Victor Lee: Well, see, I thought you were going to segue to WWE after the sex scandal. Um, there is. There is that aspect of it that

Bob Ambrosi: would have been the right time.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah.

Victor Lee: Because it's a boring e. Discovery dispute, but the details underneath it are much more salacious. Um, so. Yeah, so, you know, uh, for those of us who watch professional wrestling, because, you know, we never. We never grew up from being six years old, um, then, you know, I, I'm one of them. So, you know, I don't. I don't judge, um, this. Yeah. So what happens, you know, Vince McMahon has been in charge of the. Has been in charge of the WWE for a long time. For a long time he owned the wwe, um, and whatnot. It was back when it was still wwf, and then they lost a, uh, they lost a trademark dispute with the World Wildlife Federation. Um, but, um, so he. He had a. He had a misconduct, uh, and sex scandal where, you know, they were like. He and some others were accused of doing some pretty. Pretty awful things. Um, um, you know, and whatnot with, uh, with. With women who worked. Who worked in the wwe. And then, uh, and whatnot. And so, um, um, he got. So at the same time that was happening, he was also looking for a buyer for. For the wwe. And then ultimately they. They made a deal with the, uh, UFC's parent company, um, which seems like a perfect merger of. Of. Of, um, you know, fan bases and. And, uh, and styles and whatnot. Um, but what happened was, you know, they're. They're. They got sued by some shareholders because, um, supposedly they. They overlooked some other offers that. That. That might have been worth. That might have been more lucrative. Uh, and so, you know, the. The theory of the case was that the reason why they did it was because Vince, uh, got assurances from the. From the. From the prosecutor buyers that they, uh, would indemnify him and they would protect him from um. His. His ongoing lawsuits. And they would give him a job, um. Uh. As they'll keep him in charge of WWE for as long as he lived or until he decided to step down. And so, uh. But you know, he. And He. And some people. Some executives of WWE were using signal to um. To communicate. And they. They said. They said their um. Messages on auto delete to um. Um. And they would change settings every few days based on, like. Based on conversations they had in volume and whatnot. And then, um. But even after they got hit with um. A uh. Demand from general. From general counsel to preserve evidence, they um. You know, the message was still being deleted. So basically this is spoliation issue. Like, um. The judge issued. The judge sanctioned them and. And um. Gave the adverse inference, um, against them, saying that, you know, certain facts will be presumed, uh, for the case going forward. So. So, um. At the end of the day, you know, this is ediscovery. It's an ediscovery thing. Um, you know, it talks about like, you know, I mean, auto deletion policies and things like that and litigation holds and stuff like that. But you know, underneath. Underneath all that, there's also like this, you know, um.

Bob Ambrosi: Um.

Victor Lee: Salacious.

Joe Patrice: Salacious.

Victor Lee: Uh, subtext to all of it. So again, you know, don't delete your messages. Don't. Don't delete evidence. You know, follow gc. Especially when they tell you to. To. To um. To um.

Stephanie Wilkins: Uh.

Victor Lee: Hold on to evidence, uh, in anticipation of. Of litigation. Otherwise you get hit with this inference. And now it's like. I think they have, um. There are a couple. There are a couple inferences that. That could be potentially harmful to them. Um, should, uh, the case go forward? Like, I think one of them is that, um. Um. You know, they're presumed that um. I gotta look it up. But they're presumed that like, uh. Um.

Bob Ambrosi: Um.

Victor Lee: They took the offer because of. Because of. Because of Vince's personal reasons and whatnot.

Joe Patrice: Can you smell what Vince is deleting? I don't know. I'm trying to come up with.

Victor Lee: Well, I was hoping that like his defense would be that like someone. That. It wasn't him. It was a masked man. Um.

Joe Patrice: Um. Triple H did it to him.

Victor Lee: Yeah, well, Triple H was named in this thing too. So, um. There's.

Joe Patrice: That I do not understand. My understanding of the world of wrestling ended well when all of those characters were at their height. Uh, probably like. Like late law school, baby. So it's been a while. But I. It is kind of crazy that the same people that I knew, uh, the. The last crop of people I knew of are all, like, running the WWE now, which is weird.

Victor Lee: Well, well, uh, Triple H married, um, married Vince's Stephanie.

Joe Patrice: Right.

Victor Lee: Yeah, that was. That's probably the biggest reason.

Bob Ambrosi: Ah, good sanction stories. Always good. Uh, all right, uh, I think the only other story we have to talk about this week is Kirkland. I don't think anybody wrote about it, but the. Kirkland announced that it's going to spend $500 million to build its own internal AI platform. Uh, money well spent,

Steve Embry: I guess.

Joe Patrice: If you got interesting.

Bob Ambrosi: The.

Joe Patrice: The information had an article about this, like, does this signal that Big Law itself is the biggest threat to Harvey and Lagora? And I was like, um, seems like that seems like wild clawed erasure. But okay, uh, I. Yeah, maybe, maybe Kirkland can build its own thing, but not all the rest of the amla, ah, 200 can. And also from my perspective, it seems like Kirkland's just going down and repeating the same. If you think Harvey and Lagora are vulnerable, which. That's a whole different discussion. If you think they're vulnerable at all, Kirkland's just entering itself as another. Another player to get beaten by the two. Beaten. Because it seems to me as though the only threat to those models in a serious way is a foundational model coming and drinking their milkshake, as one would say.

Victor Lee: I didn't understand. Yeah, sorry.

Bob Ambrosi: That's what I was wondering.

Victor Lee: Someone was able to do like, like an open source version of Harvey Mic. So why wouldn't this. Why wouldn't they just take that code and then just build on that? And that would be like, you know, maybe add a few. Add a few things, maybe change some of the graphics and whatnot. There you go. Like, how's that? How's that? 500 million.

Bob Ambrosi: There's a bunch of them out there right now. There's a whole bunch of people like, vibe coding these, like, imitations of Harvey and Lagora. I'm sure they're not straight line by line, uh, apples to apples imitations. But 500 million, it just seems like

Joe Patrice: that's a lot of money, the 500 million. But you need the 500 million to pay McKinsey to create a slide deck to go. I think you should do this. What a brilliant idea. Has anybody thought about the fact that the AI is functionally like, we took McKinsey and made it. Made it real. Like it's just a thing that takes your dumb idea and goes, that's a Brilliant idea. Did you realize you could make more money? Uh, we think you're very smart, which is all McKinsey has done for years as a business model.

Steve Embry: But the thing I wonder about is I was talking to somebody at Clock who was, who was opining that some large corporations are going to do something very similar to this and so that they can reduce the, the amount of time that, that the C C suite has to depend on in house counsel and in house counsel has to depend on outside counsel. And so you know, if, if Kirkland can spend $500 million and pull this off, so could what General Motors, Chase Morgan, you know, you name it. Um, so it's, it's uh, kind of an interesting, interesting um, situation.

Bob Ambrosi: I mean are they going to build it on one of the frontier models or are they going to somehow try and build their own model or. I haven't seen really any details about it.

Victor Lee: When you're spending that much money you can do whatever you want, right?

Bob Ambrosi: Yeah, I ah, guess I don't know,

Steve Embry: maybe they're going to sell it, build it and sell it and, and uh, rake in millions of dollars like all

Stephanie Wilkins: right,

Joe Patrice: yeah, I just like they could. You know a question that was just an issue just raised uh, to me on the side was what about confidential stuff? Like does it protect them on that? And like it's sort of like how I have a local small model on my computer for when I get embargoed stuff and I'm worried about putting it into an AI that is consumer facing. I just throw it into my little local one and see what it does. Uh, it seems like yeah, you could probably do some stuff with confidential materials better that way. But that's not $500 million worth. That's running a mid sized model on your intranet.

Stephanie Wilkins: You know my guess, my just based on nothing would be that they do plan to build their own model. Yeah, that kind of investment. But I obviously, I do not know

Steve Embry: the really interesting thing.

Victor Lee: It raises all the, all the, all the, all the, all the buyouts, all that stuff. I mean they probably do, they probably do have a lot of like confidential information that they're paranoid about. Um, you know, so if they can build a more like, like a more secure version of, of you know, I guess Harvey or M. Not, you know, not, not casting any exposure but like just like a more secure version of any of these, any of the, any of these commercially available models and you know, maybe, maybe that, maybe that's more for their own peace of mind. But I uh, don't know, I mean,

Steve Embry: the real interesting thing about it, though, is that, I mean, law firms, even large law firms, typically don't invest money like this to do things. I mean, they distribute money like this to partners at the end of the year. And so, you know, it of unusual that. That Kirkland could pull this off because I'm got to be a lot of partners in the firm going, whoa, whoa, uh, wait a minute. I feel like $500 million of my money and do this.

Joe Patrice: What I mean, I feel like in the like 12 billion or whatever they're sitting on, those partners are going to be fine. Like, what is Kirkland this year? It's something like that.

Steve Embry: Compared to our universe. Those partners will be fined compared to their universe. What the are you doing?

Joe Patrice: Yeah, 10, 10, 10.6 billion, uh, that they brought in. I feel like they're gonna be just fine.

Bob Ambrosi: All right, all right. Any else. Anything else we should talk about?

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah, well, I.

Steve Embry: Now that every dropped the F bomb, it's time to quit.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah, I would. I forgot to put anything in the log. I thought it. I figured it was okay because know we talked about our experiment, but the I. I would have put in this, um, prompt injection story from Rule on Friday. Um, the South America, where the lawyers actually literally put white text in a court document to their opposing council to try to trick. I mean, like, I thought we were going to get prompt injection as a cyber security threat or hack or something at some point, but I was not. My money was not on lawyers using it in a court filing. Wild.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, so wild it's sort of clever.

Stephanie Wilkins: I mean is. It's evil genius, but like, way to risk your law license.

Bob Ambrosi: Yeah, I, uh, guess. But yeah.

Steve Embry: Yeah.

Bob Ambrosi: So Chuck had put it in the chat earlier also.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, no, I'd seen it. I'd seen it last week because roll on Friday. I. I don't understand their schedule over there. It's like they publish a bunch of stories that I don't see them for a month and then they're back, whatever. But that one from last week, I always check them every Friday to see if they have new stuff. And that one, I just jaw on floor. I can't believe they tried that because again, I had heard about the threat happening, uh, in big discoveries, uh, as a shady thing people are going to do in discovery for a while. I did not ever think you were going to try to defraud the court.

Stephanie Wilkins: No.

Joe Patrice: Well, but I mean, in America, that would be. That would go over just fine because clearly the judges don't understand AI. So they're not using it enough.

Stephanie Wilkins: Um, maybe they just identified the judge in that long thing we saw White.

Joe Patrice: We've all been misled.

Victor Lee: Yeah, well, maybe that's the next thing. They take all the redactive files that you get, and it's like, all right, figure out who's. Who's in the redactions.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bob Ambrosi: I mean, I'm sure Joe and Stephanie were on signal all week, exchanging confidential. Confidential communications about the identity of the judge.

Joe Patrice: Ah.

Bob Ambrosi: Uh, all right, well, I think that's it then. Unless we want to just hang out for another five minutes.

Steve Embry: Whatever. Hey.

Bob Ambrosi: Wanting to do that.

Joe Patrice: Oh, no, I.

Stephanie Wilkins: Any. If anyone needs any crimes solved, I might open. You know, I might open this,

Victor Lee: take all the old, like, Washington Post stories from Watergate and put them in and just see a CF they could have identified, uh, Deep Throat from any of the. Any. Any of them.

Stephanie Wilkins: But I totally do get now. I mean, not that I didn't get it before, but, you know, part of Everlaw for good, one of the. One of the cohorts they offered it. Offer it to is investigative, uh, journalists, and I. It always made sense, but until I did this, I didn't really have a real idea of, like, how awesome it could be. So. Yeah, I get it.

Bob Ambrosi: Who's Deep Mark? What was his name?

Joe Patrice: Mark. Uh, Mark Fell.

Bob Ambrosi: Mark Fell, Yeah.

Victor Lee: Got passed over for, um, uh, for. For, uh, head of the FBI after. After Hoover died.

Bob Ambrosi: Right, right. He was.

Joe Patrice: You know, he was no angel in his day, but he. He probably wasn't. He probably didn't live up to the level of grand competence, uh, for an FBI director that we currently have. Like, he didn't. You mean he didn't drink enough with Cash Patel.

Victor Lee: He didn't have his own skull emblem.

Stephanie Wilkins: I almost gave a different answer when you said what. What was the actual name of Deep Throat? I'm like, oh, no, the real person, not the movie.

Joe Patrice: Right, right, right, right. The. The. The Aziz Ansari, uh, impersonation of Kash Patel on snl, uh, when they did the one about his own bourbon, which, for those who don't know, he has his own branded version of bourbon. Uh, when they did that, uh, and Patel basically break. And. Well, I'm sorry, playing Patel basically breaks. The fourth wall is like, this is a real thing. This is an actual thing that is real. Uh, is really the problem. SNL is starting to reach what we used to call the Onion effect, where, like, this is not the onion.

Stephanie Wilkins: Yeah, well, I mean, the US Has News has kind of just reached the Onion effect in general.

Victor Lee: Yeah, well, I think. Well, I think. Didn't they buy or they bought Infowars like Alex?

Stephanie Wilkins: Oh, that was so brilliant.

Victor Lee: I'm just like. Well, I'm not going to be able to tell which one is like.

Joe Patrice: Heidecker is doing a good job with that.

Bob Ambrosi: Yeah, I was. I've been listening to this, um, on a podcast called, um. What's it called? It's, um. It's all about Weather Underground, um, Mother Mother Country Radicals or something like that. I think it's called all about Bernadine Dorn and, like, the 60s, Weather Underground, SDS and all. That's a great podcast. There's a new book out, too, but Mark Phelps is a prominent reminder in that book of just how sleazy, uh, the FBI, uh, long was in the tactics, blatantly illegal tactics it would use, uh, to, uh, target those that it did not like. All right, well, uh, off the legal tech angle, but we will, uh. I think that does it for today, and we can be back next week and see what happens then. See you all then along.

Victor Lee: Everyone have a good weekend, everyone.

Stephanie Wilkins: Have a good weekend.