Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast
The Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast covers the startups that develop and sell legal tech products and services. Through interviews with legal tech startup founders, investors, customers and others with an interest in this startup sector, the podcast's host, Charlie Uniman, and his guests will discuss such topics as startup management and startup life, startup investing, marketing and sales, pricing and revenue models and the factors that affect how customers purchase legal tech. In short, the Legal Tech Startup Focus Podcast will focus on just what it takes for legal tech startups to succeed.
Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast
Karl Seelbach on Transforming the Legal Landscape with Tech
Introducing the first in a series of podcast episodes from Legal Tech StartUp Focus that feature legal tech power users.
Discover the transformative power of legal technology with Karl Seelbach, the visionary litigator who co-founded the Austin, Texas-based Doyle Seelbach law firm (https://www.doyleseelbach.com) and Skribe (https://skribe.ai), a legal tech startup committed to revolutionizing depositions and enhancing litigation practice efficiency. Listen as Karl shares his journey from the courtroom to the forefront of legal tech innovation. Learn how Karl's passion for personal injury defense and drive to modernize legal processes sparked the creation of Skribe.
Get ready to witness how a legal tech power user like Karl can unlock the potential of legal tech (especially AI's use in legal settings. This episode unpacks how pushing legal tech to greater limits can transform mundane tasks like invoice appeals and billable hour tracking. See how a power user of AI (and legal tech more generally) can improve financial outcomes and save valuable time. We also delve into the critical balance of privacy and accuracy when integrating AI into legal research and the robust discussions surrounding its capabilities.
As we look to the horizon, the episode imagines a future where technology continuously reshapes the legal landscape (e.g., envision virtual and augmented realities redefining how we conduct negotiations and make courtroom appearances). This discussion emphasizes the importance of embracing technological collaboration within the industry through conferences and community interactions. Join us in this insightful conversation on how legal tech use can assist lawyers in staying competitive and even help lawyers become more inspired by their day-to-day work in a world of ever-evolving legal service delivery methods.
Hello everyone, this is Charlie Uniman, your host of the LegalTech Startup Focus podcast, and today we have as a guest Carl Seelbach, who we will learn a lot more of as we continue during the podcast. But let me say a few preliminary comments and ask Carl to bear with me here. This is the first in a series of what I hope will be several, a good several podcasts that I'm calling the Legal Tech Power Users podcast or series, and the Power Users podcast is borrowed from a podcast that's devoted to Mac computers, where David Sparks talks to power users of Mac products. But we're going to talk to power users who really push their legal tech and really find their legal tech to be essential to their everyday work, their practice. So, Carl, welcome as the first guest in the Power Users series.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for having me. I don't know that. I realized I was the first, so hopefully I can live up to expectations.
Speaker 1:Expectations are low. Don't worry, we're very informal here, so I'm sure we'll both do just fine here. I have seen Carl face to face, in real life, as they say, at the Legal Tech Fund Summit back in December down in Miami Lovely warm Miami. It was a pleasure to see you then. Good to see you, as we had our video going a little earlier. Tell us a little bit, carl, about what you do. You wear two hats. I'll let you elaborate on that right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, first of all, thanks for having me on, and it really was nice to meet you in person last year at the Legal Tech Fund Summit. I'm a practicing litigator based in Austin. I have been doing litigation now for 19 years. This is year 19,. So it's really flown by almost 20 years and I had a pretty direct path right out of law school.
Speaker 2:I went to law school at South Texas, a school known for advocacy, based in Houston, and joined a large firm and kind of did that associate track that a lot of people kind of view as the most clear path for becoming successful, I guess in your career Like I want to make partners someday and that seemed like that would be kind of the crowning achievement would be just going to a big firm and making partners.
Speaker 2:So that was kind of where I started, charlie, yeah, I know it well, yeah. And so I started at Winstead PC, which is a great firm based in Texas. They've got about 350 attorneys give or take, and that was kind of the early days of my career. So joined that Houston office of that firm right out of law school and just had an amazing time. Really, one of the things that I appreciated so much about my time working there is I got thrown right into the trenches and what I mean by, that is, within a month.
Speaker 2:I got to go to trial with one of the partners. Within two to three months they were letting me take depositions, and that can sometimes be difficult experience to come by at a larger firm, discovery work and back then reviewing banker's boxes full of documents and I did some of that too. But for whatever reason, the partners did give me a chance to get in the courtroom and also get in the conference rooms where we used to take all of our depositions. I kind of figured out pretty quickly what I liked and what I didn't like in the practice of law and where I really ended up finding my niche, if you want to call it, that is in personal injury defense work, which is a little bit ironic because I went to law school to thinking I wanted to be a plaintiff's personal injury lawyer and now the vast majority of my practice is personal injury, but on the defense side.
Speaker 1:So that's one of your hats as a lawyer? Now I don't mean to steal your thunder, but now you have your own firm, if I understand correctly.
Speaker 2:No, no, yeah, exactly. So I did that at Winstead. I made partner there and in 2015, this year will be the 10-year anniversary of my law firm and a good friend of mine, trey Doyle, and I left to open our own firm and it did not go exactly as planned. In fact, it went kind of poorly at first, but we had, you know, a lot of enthusiasm. We're leaving for the right reasons. We really did want to build a firm where you know our clients could get high-quality representation at what we felt like would be a more competitive point, and have since grown it from what originally was two people Trek and me, the only two employees with one case and one client into a firm of 30 people with 15 attorneys about to be 16, and the vast majority of the rest of the team are paralegals that support us, the backbone of the system as I say the paralegals do so much for us and have now grown it to about almost 40 institutional clients that send us repeat cases, primarily personal injury, across the entire state of Texas.
Speaker 1:So it's been a really fun ride across the entire state of Texas, so it's been a really fun ride. Yeah, it sounds like a success, initially at a larger firm and now continued success at your own firm. But the other hat to which I alluded is you are also the founder and CEO of a legal tech company. I am the founder, I won't take credit as being the CEO.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so the legal tech company is called Scribe S-K-R-I-B-E. Scribeai is the website, if any of your listeners are interested.
Speaker 2:It is really created from two things One, my personal passion for technology, the way that attorneys and legal professionals practice law, and two, my own personal frustrations with how slow and archaic and expensive the deposition process and the process of analyzing testimony has historically been for litigation teams.
Speaker 2:And so you know, as I mentioned earlier, when I started at Winstead, I had the good fortune of being given the opportunity to take a lot of depositions and I really enjoyed that.
Speaker 2:That was, you know, many years ago, pre-covid of course. So a lot of that involved, you know, driving across the state of Texas, a handful of out-of-state depositions that I had to fly to. But I always kind of thought in that process that it seemed strange to me that we were still using a stenography machine, which is that funny looking keyboard for the attorneys that are familiar, that the court reporters video equipment that looks like it's almost for filming the movie Jaws or something like that from the 80s, and we would spend all this money and all this time when I had such powerful software on my phone and my iPad and my laptop and I thought there's got to be a better way to do this to where I could take a deposition at a lower cost. I could have a record instantly, as soon as the event is over, and I could begin to analyze that testimony, to create video clips, to summarize it, to search it. And so that was really what inspired me to be one of the founders of Scribe was my own personal journey.
Speaker 1:And I remember seeing you present at the Legal Tech Fund Summit as one of the companies that was asked to do some demoing, came away very impressed. I, as I may have told you, was a corporate lawyer very impressed. I, as I may have told you, was a corporate lawyer. Whenever I had the urge to be a litigator as I joked before, I would lie down to let it pass. So I didn't have very much experience, other than the one time, regretfully, when I was deposed myself in a matter with depositions. But I could see right away from what you demoed that it's an important tool to have if you're doing litigation and came away very much impressed by what you put up on the screen at the stage and what you spoke about on the stage. And it's scribeai. If people who do the sort of things you do are interested, it's a pretty damn good piece of software, I, as a lawyer must say, and I encourage people to visit the site to learn more about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I'd say thank you so much for that and I would say just high level. You know, there's a few things that we believe that if they resonate with you, it's probably worth. You know us connecting and feel free to reach out. If you're listening and want to have a question, I'm happy to answer it. But one is that the future of testimony is software. You know the number of people young people going to stenography school is way down. The number of cases and claims and litigated files is way up, and so we have a shortage in the industry. There's literally not enough court reporters, and the quality of AI transcription, coupled with human proofreading when needed, is just getting better and better and better.
Speaker 2:And then the second is that video is truly the most persuasive form of evidence. The juries expect it, the judges have even told us they like it and prefer it, and so when you can get a witness in their own voice and let the jury or the judge really see them testify and hear the tone and look on their face, it's just so much more powerful. And then the third is I think in today's legal industry, speed is not just important, it's a requirement, and today's world moves fast. Clients want things done very quickly. They want updates shortly after an event occurs, such as a deposition. You can't really afford to wait weeks or more to get a copy of whatever it is you're waiting on, such as a deposition transcript or a video. I think those days are long gone. So a big part of this, honestly, is speed Charlie, I mean one of the a lot of because of the cost savings, because it is less expensive than the old fashioned way of court reporting.
Speaker 2:But normally the number one reason that they give us when we're checking in with customers hey, what do you like? What's keeping you coming back? Is really the speed, the fact that they're able to take a deposition in the morning and within about an hour they have a video sync record that they can search and clip and apply AI against it to analyze the content of the testimony, really to move their case forward faster to move their case forward faster.
Speaker 1:Undoubtedly, speed is very important. You know, you give me the idea, although I think, since it's not compelled by court order, I'm not sure I could get this across the finish line. But it might even be someday. We videotape negotiations in transactional matters, because what better way to get a sense as you're looking back over what was said and discussed at a negotiation? What better way to get a sense as you're looking back over what was said and discussed at a negotiation? What better way than just looking at your notes and consult a video? But I don't think we're quite there yet.
Speaker 1:On the transactional side, however, my own two cents. I think we should consider that Priv privacy protected, limited distributions, all sorts of things. Maybe we ought to go down that road. But now that we're talking about tech, as I just suggested with my harebrained idea about transactions and videotaping, let me ask you to put your lawyer's hat on and let's talk about the sort of tech you use as a practicing lawyer and what comprises your sort of everyday driver, the bag of tech tricks or tech stack as they call it that you use.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm happy to dive into that and I'll give this caveat Some of these things I'm still in the process of testing and and I haven't rolled out firm-wide yet, because rolling it out to someone who's a techie and early adopter and is familiar with the limitations of general AI as well as the benefits of some of these types of technology is, of course, different than rolling it out to every single user on your team, some of which who may have less interest in AI than you and I do. So some of these are going to be. I'll start with some we started using in the firm, and then I'll go into some other tools that we're considering using Sure, and we have a task force set up, an AI task force set up that's going to be piloting some of these other tools this year. So a couple of the ones that I already use. One is the most common one that, frankly, a lot of your listeners have for sure heard about unless you're living under a rock which is ChatGPT by OpenAI, and I think it's important to stress. If you're using it for professional purposes, like a law firm, be sure to subscribe. You need to pay for the product, otherwise you're risking the privacy of your data. If it's free, that means you're the product. But OpenAI has some very good, competitively priced plans, as low as $20 per user, up to about $200 per month per user, depending on the strength of the model that you're trying to leverage. And by doing that by launching either a Teams account or an enterprise account they have a few different names for them you will be buying effectively a much better, more responsible privacy policy where they do not train on your client's data. So I just wanted to give that caveat to your listeners in case they want to test any of these things. So chat GPT.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you how I use it A couple of ways. One is I use it quite a bit in drafting things like emails, discovery responses. I don't use it for case law research I'll come back to that in just a minute but, yeah, a lot of like taking my notes and putting them in a more organized structure, or taking notes from a call and making them into a post-call recap and action item list that I can then review, proof and finalize to send to my client. I use it for things like that every single day and it really does. It saves me quite a bit of time, but perhaps one of the more interesting use cases that I have implemented at my firm is and for the attorneys that are listening, that can relate to this. If you want to get an example, just feel free to reach out. I'm happy to share.
Speaker 2:But a lot of law firms have their time by the hour and when we submit our invoices. Depending on your clients, sometimes they will hire third-party companies to scrutinize invoices and to write down things that they think were either excessive or not described properly. So not everyone realizes the kind of push and pull on some of these dockets between the attorneys that are just trying to get paid for their work and then the vendors that some of these clients have basically hired, who are trying to decrease their overall legal spend by scrutinizing the attorney's invoices that get submitted. So for those of us who have a lot of our own clients that do the type of work that's subject to the scrutiny, it's a real pain. So where does ChaiGPT come in?
Speaker 2:Well, what I'd created through ChaiGPT, they have this ability to create these sort of like agents or like little GPTs they call them where you can tell it.
Speaker 2:Here's the instructions, here's what I want you to do, here's the guidelines I want you to follow and here's what I want you to analyze and provide feedback on. And so what I did was I took the outside counsel guidelines the most common ones a lot of them overlap and I provided sample appeal language, based on my own personal experience, to appeal some of these write downs. And I've ended up, after tinkering with this a little bit, setting it up so that my billing administrator can go in on a monthly basis, upload the write-downs just the time that's been written down and generate recommended appeal language for the partners to then review. So we're not submitting something that just comes out of GPT and calling it good, we're putting our eyes on it and so the partners review wordsmith sometimes disagree with what the recommendation is, but it has really sped up the process of doing those appeal reviews, so it's been a pretty interesting use case.
Speaker 1:I like that, especially from a financial standpoint. It goes right to the bottom line. If you can increase the likelihood that you're going to win those appeals, Very attractive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and another. I'll mention it now just because it overlaps with that topic. There are companies that have launched in the last we'll call it year to two and I met one of them actually in December, at the same summit you and I met at in person, and they are set up to help attorneys and law firms capture more time that is lost.
Speaker 1:Oh yes.
Speaker 2:So what do I mean by that right? Attorneys aren't always that good about keeping track of their billable hour, but we often are told we're supposed to track them by six-minute increments one-tenth of an hour, and some attorneys are more diligent than others about taking notes and maybe tracking it in real time in their practice management system. My firm uses Clio, but there's obviously lots of really great ones out there, and it is amazing how many attorneys just no matter how many times you tell them to do it daily either do it at the end of the week or, you know, some of them even at the end of the month, and so these AI timekeeping softwares we're getting ready to pilot one called AJAX A-J-A-X.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the one that I actually interviewed one of the founders on that, jack Weinberg. Oh great yeah.
Speaker 1:And put up a podcast. Saw Jack at the summit in December.
Speaker 2:He's a very nice guy and since he's already been on your show, I won't go into a bunch of detail. But the short version is the software monitors your activities, which does have some privacy implications, and we're reviewing some of the privacy policies to make sure that we're comfortable with it. But it reviews your activities and then it recommends recommends based on the text, on the suggested time entries, so for, and then it syncs up with your practice management system. So it'll you know, at any point during the day you can go to the page for this timekeeping software and it'll say here's what we think you should bill for today based on all the work you've been doing on your computer. So it is. I think it has the potential to be really, really good and robust. It is one we are testing, not yet deployed.
Speaker 2:But there's just so many and one of the next tools that we'll be testing is probably going to be a more robust, slightly more expensive version of ChatGPT. They just launched deep research.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to say that you know I've gotten a couple different reads on that. Forgive me for interrupting, but there is a Wharton professor, ethan Mollick, who wrote a newsletter email out today. Very good writer on subjects pertaining to AI. He was gushing over deep research. On the other hand, gary Marcus, who's a noteworthy LLM skeptic, threw a little cold water on deep research not to be confused with Google's deep research. But from what I've seen I haven't tried it yet and I think it's only on the $200 a month version. I think it'll trickle down to the $20 a month version soon enough. It's supposed to be quite astounding in its step-by-step chain of thought reasoning capabilities.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I watched over the weekend when they released the whether it was yesterday or this morning, the days are blurring together but I watched a little bit of the announcement on X by OpenAI and it was a really fascinating video. So I think, without going too deep in the weeds on it, the short answer is attorneys, particularly of all stripes, but I know litigation, so I kind of speak to that need to be looking for ways to implement AI into your practice, because you're going to get left behind if you don't, and I think that at some point, attorneys and their clients are going to start noticing a difference between the firms that are leveraging AI and the ones that aren't, both in the quality but also, frankly, in the cost. You know AI has the potential to significantly reduce the number of hours needed to complete a task.
Speaker 2:Now, that doesn't mean that we still don't need human input and oversight. We absolutely do. But if I can generate a first draft of a brief of a report, of whatever it may be, and I can generate, that first draft in, let's say, 30 minutes to an hour, with quality, prompting and quality input.
Speaker 2:you know reference documents that would have taken a parallel and associate five to seven hours or more. I think at some point. The question you have to ask yourself is do you have an ethical obligation to leverage the software tool to save your clients money? And I think, personally, the answer to that is yes. Now the American Bar Association has alluded to that in some comments that they released within the last year or two. I don't know that any rules have actually been finalized that go quite that far, but I think that's where this is likely to be headed.
Speaker 2:And one of the tools obviously we mentioned Scribe earlier, one of the things that it does.
Speaker 2:In addition to helping attorneys capture testimony faster and less expensive, it also helps you analyze it faster, and so, for example, I met with my team today on a catastrophic injury case.
Speaker 2:My law firm team and we spent about 45 minutes to an hour strategizing on this lawsuit of ways we're going to try to mitigate exposure, and several times in the meeting we were trying to recall some of the testimony from various depositions that had taken place in this case, and with Scribe's web application.
Speaker 2:I was just able to fire it up on my laptop during the meeting and, as we had those questions, you know what did the witness say about topic X.
Speaker 2:You know what did this other witness say about this key issue? I was just able to pose that question to the chat within Scribe, like a GPT-like chat experience, and it was able to give me a quick answer and pinpoint video testimony and create a video clip where the witness was testifying about that particular topic. So you know and it's interesting because it was the type of meeting that I've been in many, many times throughout my career that would usually require coming back to that issue later, like, hey, we can't recall exactly what the witness said. Okay, paralegal, I need you to go review the deposition transcript or, associate, I need you to go review the deposition transcript after this meeting so that we can make sure we've got this issue nailed down. So instead of needing to have that post-meeting follow-up, we were able to leverage the software right then and there get the answer within 15 seconds and then make the next decision on the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's nothing like that real-time, in-the-flow availability of information through using some of these artificial intelligence applications so that, as you're doing the back and forth whether it's in a strategizing session or just a discussion with some colleagues on even mundane matters to know that you can extract in real time and in the flow of your discussion, consistent with the flow of your discussion, whatever it is you're looking for. That's astounding and it can't be beat.
Speaker 2:And I think that's the lens with which I view almost any of these tools, these AI tools in particular is is this something I can put into use in my actual law firm and get value out of it? And two, am I confident in the response? And what do I mean by that? We've all heard about hallucinations, and so when I'm looking at whether it's Scribe or some other tool and I have a couple more to share with your audience that I've enjoyed testing One thing I'm always looking for is I want the reference material. I like the answer, I like the convenience of having that chat-like experience, that GPT-like experience, but I want the answer to include reference or links to the sources. Tell me. I want to be one click away from verifying this is accurate.
Speaker 2:And so I think you know when that was one thing that really was interesting about the OpenAI's deep research, the new model that they're in the process of rolling out is it sounded to be. It sounded like it was very heavily focused on having reference to materials as it goes and spends time quote, unquote thinking and researching and coming up with the answer for whatever you may prompt it, and I think it separates a lot of these tools apart. It's one of the things that separates a scribes tool apart when it comes to analyzing legal testimony is it gives you the answer and it backs it up with synced video clips or audio clips of the corresponding testimony created for you. That was a couple of things I was looking at and I mentioned earlier I would come back to the case law research question, and so I'll come back to it now. I would not use ChatGPT or Claude or Google Gemini or pick your average kind of well-known consumer-facing large language model. I would not use any of them yet maybe keyword yet for legal research when it comes to citing case law.
Speaker 2:Now, that's not to say I haven't tried it for that purpose and gotten decent results.
Speaker 2:I have also tried it for that purpose and gotten horrible results that included all sorts of made-up case law, and so one thing that CaseTex, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters a couple of years ago, as well as Lexis AI, did really really well, and my firm uses Case Text.
Speaker 2:We have not yet subscribed to Lexis AI, but I did test it. One thing that they do well is they provide the reference material. So Case Text will let you not only ask it legal questions and get a summary back with the reference case law one click away, but you can upload a database of documents or a large quantity of documents to case text and it will generate a timeline of events and you can download it as an Excel spreadsheet or some other file format if you need to. But in addition, you can just view it in their application, and when you're in their application, not only do you get a really amazing timeline or summary of whatever you uploaded, but you have the source material one click away. So it's always footnoted or in a table. There's a link to the file. So it gives you that extra layer of confidence and trust that the answer is real, and I think that's very important when we're talking about generative AI tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah, certainly for us lawyers. And you know, the thing about Gen AI generally is it's designed presently to predict the next word and it's also designed to try to be helpful. And that has, if not cabined properly and guard-railed properly, can lead it to hallucinate, and some people say that for creative purposes. That's a feature, not a bug. But if you are sensitive to that possibility of its giving you many right answers and I put right in quotes, all plausible, all well described in good language if you're sensitive to that risk and if you're, because of this ability to link to the source, the ground, truth, so-called, and it's only going to get better, the worst AI is generative AI and other versions of artificial intelligence is today. It will only get better, that's right. It will only get better.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. Today. It will only get better. That's right. It will only get better. That's exactly right. And I do think also, although we talk a lot, you know, in today's podcast and blog posting and social media, there's a heavy, heavy focus on generative AI. And you know, I think we shouldn't lose sight of there's a lot of powerful software out there that doesn't always leverage generative AI that can also really help you streamline, you know, your law practice and one of the things that I think is sometimes misunderstood, particularly when we're talking about, you know, capturing testimony. What does that look like in 2025?
Speaker 2:You know, the knee-jerk reaction is often well, I can't possibly use software to capture testimony, isn't it going to hallucinate? And that comes from a misunderstanding that speech recognition software, often called ASR, automated speech recognition, is a completely different technology. It operates fundamentally differently from generative AI tools. Like you pointed out, charlie, generative AI is trying to predict the next word and generates text purely based off of probabilities. Asr, on the other hand, isn't trying to predict the next word. It is taking the spoken word, the phonetics of the spoken word. It's analyzing those phonetics and acoustic patterns and then deciphering that into text that you and I can read. It's actually quite similar to how ironically how a stenographer does their job, which is they type phonetic notes of what's said, then they go back and convert those notes into text that you and I can read, and so now large language models have had an impact on the field of automated speech recognition, and the way that it's had an impact is when you have the phonetic notes and they've been converted to text.
Speaker 2:There are times when the context of the sentence could potentially impact which word was actually spoken Right. Is it there or there? Is it T-H-E-Y, apostrophe R-E, or is it there, as in over there, t-h-e-r-e? That's just one silly example. But with the advent of large language models, now you first get the phonetic conversion and then the software can begin to apply a little bit of large language model analytics and predictive and text analysis to know. Okay, I know they said this word. There's two different ways to spell this word, depending on the context. Which one is it likely to be? Just like a human being would do that based off of their own experience and their own knowledge of the English language. So anyway, maybe a little deep in the weeds but it's interesting.
Speaker 1:No, it's very helpful. And you're right, there's all sorts of AI and machine learning. I guess that's employed without the generative aspect tied to it, as you described. With phonetic, stenographic type work there was training a model to be able to do that transcription, but it's not generative and it's not likely to be hallucinating at all. And yeah, let's keep that distinction clear.
Speaker 2:I think it is important and I think the reason generative AI gets so much attention is look, it's kind of one of those moments in your life. If you're the least bit interested in technology, you probably remember the first time you picked up an iPhone and you interacted with the touchscreen and it was so fluid and it was so much different than what we were used to. And it was so fluid and it was so much different than what we were used to At least for me, I remember it vividly. It was kind of this aha moment of like this is going to change the world, this is going to change how we interact with computers. And, of course, I had a very similar experience in November or December of 2022,.
Speaker 2:I guess it was GPT came out and I remember the first time using it, my mind was blown and I remember spending hours just prompting it. Prompting it, I was flying back from, actually, the LegalTech Fund Summit, so it would have been in December, actually shortly after it came out, and I'd heard about it but I hadn't had a chance to sign up and tinker with it yet. So I did, right there at that conference a couple of years ago now, up and tinker with it. Yet so I did, right there at that conference a couple of years ago now, and I remember anyone who would listen for the next probably three to four days that's all I was talking about was this is going to completely change so many aspects of our professional life as well as our personal life.
Speaker 2:And when I think about kind of other technologies that have always jumped out at me as changing, you know, I often tell people why are you interested in technology? And I said I I've just always been intrigued by it. And I remember when we used to send you know, the net to get a, a dvd, you would either go to blockbuster or you know netflix started mailing them, or you had a kiosk at Redbox you could get a DVD. And I remember reading on one of the tech blogs that I followed years ago about this streaming box that was coming out and that Netflix was going to start streaming TV shows and movies. And Roku was the brand, of course, a fairly well-known brand, but they were the first one to launch a streaming and I bought it just as soon as I possibly could, and I remember bringing it home and telling my wife you know, oh no we don't have to wait on the DVDs anymore.
Speaker 2:We've got this streaming box that we can just stream all this stuff and of course the selection wasn't that good.
Speaker 2:When they first launched it, there was not a ton of great content really available to stream, but it was clear that that was where things were headed. And so when I'm trying to think about, like the practice of law and now I'm 19 years in, what's the next 19 years going to look like, next 20 years going to look like? It really is interesting and fascinating to think about just how much it's going to change, just how much it's changed since 2020.
Speaker 2:I mean if I had told you, charlie, that you know, in 2019, if I had told you that the vast majority of depositions over 50 percent some say it's high to 75 percent we're going to be happening through a computer video conferencing system, you would have told me to get out of here. You're crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you would have said there's no way right, and so I think that you know when I present on the topic of, you know technology for lawyers and where things are headed. I do think that one of the things that has yet to make an impact, that will have a significant impact, will be virtual reality and augmented reality.
Speaker 1:It's just what I was thinking. Yeah, I think that negotiation session that I spoke of you know, back in the day, pre-covid, and when I was practicing pretty much all face-to-face, when you had a heavy-duty negotiation to conduct, all face-to-face, when you had a heavy duty negotiation to conduct. Now you know it's streamed over Zoom or Microsoft Teams. We're going to get to a point where we have real life versions of Star Trek's holodeck and you're going to be in Texas, I'm going to be in New Jersey, outside New York, and we're going to be be our avatars, look just like us, almost reach out and touch one another, shake hands. We're going to be talking, discussing, side by side.
Speaker 2:I think you hit the nail on the head and I think, while that, you know, maybe in 2025 to those who maybe aren't as geeky but following tech it sounds a little far-fetched I would just ask you to think about it from this perspective.
Speaker 2:We're already doing it through Zooms and Teams. All we're talking about is a better quality, more realistic, lifelike version of that. So I think where the rubber is going to hit the road on this is when the headsets become A more affordable and B more comfortable. And so, while everybody's not necessarily clamoring over, you know, kind of stepping over each other to sign up for a $3,000 or $4,000 set of ski goggles, what happens when they look more like a pair of eyeglasses and they only cost $500? And you know, I think that at some point that market's's gonna shift and consumer sentiment and what's normal. I remember again this is another silly, kind of silly but funny, useful example I remember when apple launched the airpods, the very first version of the airpods right as well as the ipad, and both of those products were ridiculed when they were first launched because a because of the name.
Speaker 2:They thought ipad was a terrible name sounded like a feminine, feminine hygiene product.
Speaker 1:I remember, indeed, yeah, saturday night live do. How would you ever call this an ipad? Yeah, and then the, the other was the uh, the airpods.
Speaker 2:Everybody made fun of those, saying they look like q-tips, you know, hanging out of your ear. Who would ever want to walk around with that? It looks ridiculous and so I think that that's kind of the knee-jerk reaction a lot of people have to. Augmented reality and virtual reality today is I would never put one of those things on my head. How ridiculous does that look. And I think that sentiment, that perspective, will change. Cultural norms will change, particularly as they get a little smaller, maybe a little less heavy bulky, and also as the price comes down.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah. Well, there was a comment that I live by when it comes to tech matters that Arthur C Clarke, the science fiction writer, made. He said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and when I saw GPT at work the first time, it was magical. It really was. It was a machine dishing out human-sounding, articulate language with incredible flow and sometimes almost elegance. And one of the things that keeps me going with technology and that even had me, as a practicing lawyer, play around with technology and use it in practice back in the old days, was just the surprise and delight that I enjoyed from playing around and having it not only make work faster and easier, but just more delightful.
Speaker 2:Yes, that is. We say that a lot of times at Scribe. You know, one of the things that we want to do is make attorneys more awesome at their jobs and have more fun doing it, and so you know for me when I think of some of the really, from a tech standpoint, not overly complex things that we built at Scribe. One is I always wanted a way to take video testimony and very easily create video clips and share those clips and put them in my reports to my clients, put them in my briefs that I filed with the court, and I just always thought, gosh, you know why are we still getting these files in such an archaic format where the video is not really tied to the text? And if I want to create a clip, I have to go either outsource it to another vendor or find the IT person at my firm that can somehow create these clips after I highlight a PDF. I just always thought in today's technology, with today's technology, we should be able to share testimony with video clips of the corresponding testimony just as easily as you and I share a YouTube video. And so that's part of what Scribe has built is.
Speaker 2:Now I tell attorneys they often worry well, how hard is this to learn? Am I going to have to sit through a training session and my response always is well, do you know how to highlight a Word document or a PDF? Do you know how to select text? Yes, I know how to do that. Well then, you know how to highlight a Word document or a PDF. Do you know how to select text? Yes, I know how to do that.
Speaker 1:Well then, you know how to create a video clip now, isn't?
Speaker 2:it amazing. That's as simple as it is. You just highlight the text of what you want, a corresponding video clip created from, and you get a clip that you can either download onto your computer or you can share it with a URL, with a website link, and the recipient doesn't have to have specialized software to view it, they don't have to pay for it, they don't have to download anything. They can just click it, just like you and I would again share YouTube.
Speaker 2:And that makes it very powerful because then you can, with that making it so simple, you can then take those important pieces of evidence video testimony and you can begin to put it places that in the past you would have never thought possible, such as a motion for summary judgment that you filed with the court.
Speaker 2:I had a mediation position statement recently where there was a lot of testimony on both sides of an issue and we just put the video clips directly in our mediation position statement and I remember the mediator telling me he said, carl, I've mediated cases for almost 40 years and I've never had anyone in their mediation statement actually share with me video clips A how did you do that? And B, that was so helpful for me as the mediator to get to actually watch the key witnesses so that I could provide both parties with my view of their credibility, how they came across and what a jury or a judge of those people. And you know that's not to say that there aren't other ways to present that evidence, but when it becomes so effortless, you really can begin to use technology to do a better job for your clients and ultimately I think, whether it's Scribe or some other piece of legal tech. That's really what we're trying to do. We're trying to find better tools for our toolbox.
Speaker 1:That's right, and you know when getting a clip from a video is as easy as the equivalent of copying and pasting from one Word document to another. You would be silly not to enhance your effectiveness as a litigating attorney in not using that, and I would hope that what you described, that you did with the B layer, becomes much more accepted and routine. And you know court-based dispute resolution, where I would imagine there's. You know it's not as easy to get it introduced that way, but it damn well ought to be.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you, before we wrap up, being a little jealous of our listeners' time is there something in today's legal tech in your practice, whether you're testing it, using it and you don't have to name names, but just speaking generally, that is really missing, something that we would really do well to have vendors such as yourself or others pay more attention to.
Speaker 2:Interesting. That's a really interesting question, something that I like. That question, something that's missing, something that I kind of wish I had.
Speaker 1:One of the things that has always bothered me and this goes back more than 10 years ago and I was still practicing and it's gotten a whole lot better is that vendors back then just didn't pay enough attention to the user experience and the user interface and it was unduly complicated and messy. And now, with people using tech as consumers, legal tech vendors realize they've got to step up their game and make it as easy to use as it would be if it were a piece of consumer tech on an iPhone or an iPad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good that helps frame. I'll tell you the one that comes to mind and I actually and if you emailed me about this question ahead of time, I'll admit to your audience I forgot you were going to ask it, but I thought of a pretty good one because I'm thinking kind of proactively in my mind what would really benefit my law firm? What would help us move cases better, faster and I think that whether Clio or Favine or my case or any of these folks are working on it, they should be maybe Talk to me about it. But the idea that comes to mind is, now that we have such powerful large language models, it would be really nice to see a tool built into some of these platforms that could be maybe a little more proactive in suggesting next steps in a case. So I think about it again.
Speaker 2:I only know litigation, so I unfortunately can't speak very intelligently to your institutional or corporate attorneys that do transactional work. But from a litigation standpoint, I know what needs to happen in a case, particularly the types of cases my firm handles. I've been doing it for 19 years, but I can't work on all 250 to 300 cases that we have, and so each of our attorneys has more than one case, obviously that they're working at any given time. They often have 20 to 30 cases, and so if the software could begin to either know, based on predefined prompts, what's supposed to happen in a case, what's a typical stage of a case, or just kind of proactively, as you're uploading things into the system whether it's a pleading or discovery request that just came in or client documents, whatever it may be if it can end and begin to flag and highlight recommended next steps and then leverage generative AI to actually maybe do a first draft of what it's recommending, I think if someone really nailed that from a functionality and UX UI standpoint, they'd be pretty far ahead of the game.
Speaker 2:Because I think if someone really nailed that from a functionality and UX UI standpoint, they'd be pretty far ahead of the game, Because I think that law firms particularly litigation firms, I think often fall into a trap of is you know what needs to happen, and a lot of the attorneys on the team are really good at developing action plans, but execution is sometimes where things fall short. And timely execution at that is getting it done when you say you're going to do it, and I think software could help us do a better job at that.
Speaker 1:I think that's a marvelous example and I hope people start working on that and I could see awise. I like that. It's a damn good answer. I can't thank you enough for the time you've spent it's. It's a great way to kick off the LegalTech Power Users series. I had a lot of fun talking a little bit more generally about LegalTech. Thank you, carl, that was. That was marvelous.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, thank you so much for having me and again, I think legal tech is. It's so nice to see the industry come together at some of these conferences and really try to chart the path forward of how is technology is going to play such a critical role in future attorneys and paralegals and other legal professionals. It's going to play such a critical role in our careers, and so having forums like this where we can share ideas, where we can talk about what the future could look like, is just so healthy for everyone who's involved in the world of legal tech and practicing law.
Speaker 1:I agree, and I hope we get together somehow, someway at a conference before next December, if you're planning, as I am, to go to the next Legal Tech Fund conference. In any event, we will be in touch and again, thank you so much for your wisdom and good cheer on this podcast.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for having me, Charlie.
Speaker 1:Take care. Thank you for listening to the Legal Tech Startup Focus podcast. If you're interested in legal tech startups and enjoyed this podcast, please consider joining the free Legal Tech Startup Focus community by going to wwwlegaltechstartupfocuscom and signing up Again thanks, signing up again. Thanks.