Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And we are the co-hosts of Reqless. What is Reqless, Rich?

Rich: Well, we’re going to talk about software in the age of AI.

Paul: Let’s play that theme song and then give people a little more context.

Rich: Let’s do it.

[intro music]

Paul: So, Rich, you and I are the co-founders of a software company called Aboard. Aboard.com. A data-management tool that uses AI in a bunch of different ways to help you organize your data and help you search your data and do all kinds of great stuff. And people should check it out. But we’re also old-school software nerds.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And we see the world changing through AI, and we want to talk about that because it’s what we talk about all the time anyway.

Rich: We are by default skeptic.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: And to name a podcast, like, to decide that we’re going to talk about AI and software is a big deal for us.

Paul: It is.

Rich: We’re very non-committal.

Paul: It’s—just talk to our wives. It’s hard.

Rich: It’s hard.

Paul: Today we’re going to talk about a specific industry, a very special industry filled with the nicest people. The law.

Rich: I mean, it’s worth noting, AI, every industry is sort of eyeing AI and wondering how it’s going to disrupt things. Today, we’re going to focus on the law.

Paul: That’s right. And legal stuff is happening really, really fast. And we also have an advantage here, which is not only are we software nerds, but you are a lawyer, or you were, you let your license expire because you started building software companies, but you could go practice. You’d have to go get re-certified, right?

Rich: I’d have to go get continuing ed, catch up on my classes. I let the emails still come in. I don’t have it in me to call them spam.

Paul: I get it. I mean, being a lawyer is a thing, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so, and actually, you—

Rich: I took the bar exam.

Paul: Yep.

Rich: Just gonna get that out there.

Paul: Yep.

Rich: Went to law school, graduated, practiced for about 20 minutes, and then did a hard left.

Paul: Little longer than that, but nonetheless. So we’ve got a lawyer in the room. We’ve got two, I wouldn’t say that we are true AI experts in that, like, I couldn’t sit down and write you a large language model from scratch today, but we’ve definitely invested a couple years in understanding how this stuff works.

Rich: Paul—

Paul: So here we are.

Rich: Paul—

Paul: Let’s go.

Rich: Paul!

Paul: Let’s go.

Rich: Let’s call ourselves experts.

Paul: I know.

Rich: This is brand-new territory.

Paul: I like, I like—

Rich: We just discovered an island that no one knew about.

Paul: It’s good for people to know exactly what level of fraud they’re dealing with because almost no one else will tell you. Right?

Rich: [laughing] Fair.

Paul: So I don’t know every single thing, but we’re going to talk about the applications of the stuff and kind of just try to make sense of it.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: So I’m going to throw you a curveball, and I’m going to throw you what I think is a truly great application of AI. And this one started a while ago, started like, I think, 2016.

Rich: Oh!

Paul: And it’s called Do Not Pay, donotpay.com.

Rich: Okay!

Paul: You ever heard of it?

Rich: No! But it sounds like it’ll save me money.

Paul: You go into Do Not Pay, and you say, “Help me fight my parking ticket.” “Help me with airline flight compensation hacks.” “Help me deal with casino taxes,” “dispute other tickets,” “help me donate plasma for cash.” Like, if you’re a little down on your luck or just don’t want to deal with the bureaucracy, [laughter] this bad boy is going to set you up to deal with the man, and you’re going to be able to use the man’s language to get out of some stuff.

Rich: This is interesting.

Paul: I mean, it’s like, the list is actually an amazing list because it’s like, it’s like lives can get rough. And there are definitely have been times in both of our lives where some of this stuff would have been useful. Like college fee waivers? Connect with an inmate? And then there’s also stuff like contact government representatives—

Rich: Amazing.

Paul: Rights as an egg donor. So I see this as like, hey, I’m never going to. I’m a person kind of living my life. I don’t make a lot of money. I live in a, in a medium-sized town, and I’m not going to go give a lawyer $150, $200 an hour. It’s just not—I don’t even know how to start that process.

Rich: Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of times, especially if one ends up in an adversarial setting, the law can really scare people. Like, it’s scary. Like getting those paper, that paperwork is scary. We often associate it with jail. It’s not about jail. It’s about you being vulnerable and you being attacked. Like, essentially somebody going on the offensive for whatever reason. Right?

Paul: I gotta say, I got, I got served recently because they’re suing the city around properties.

Rich: Yeah?

Paul: Nothing really for me to worry about, but it’s depressing. When you interact with the law and you don’t have control? In my world, I call insurance. It’s all done, right? Like, it’s just like it’s, it’s—

Rich: It’s like, we’re coming after you.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: We might take your bank account, we might seize your house.

Paul: They just come at you hard. You are guilty. You might as well just admit it.

Rich: I mean, it’s an adversarial system.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: That’s the whole point of it is you get to the truth by like putting, pitting two people against each other, two parties against each other. It’s rough, it’s not good. And so it’s cool that this site exists because it’s essentially saying, ah, one of the most powerful things I can do as someone that it’s educated in the law is to look at someone and say, “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal.”

Paul: It’s true. It’s huge. When a lawyer says, when the lawyer says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, this? Don’t worry about this.”

Rich: “Yeah, we’ll sort it out.” That brings the temperature down. The best lawyers, it’s like the best doctors, they calm you down. They’re like, “We’re gonna make it through this.” And that’s a big deal.

Paul: “I’ve seen this before. Don’t worry. There’s a strategy.”

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: The most wild thing about Do Not Pay, which I strongly suggest everyone go check out. This is a cultural artifact like none other. When you hit the top nav, the first link is burner phones.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: So.

Rich: Sure, sure, sure. Wow, this is an exciting website.

Paul: So that’s, that’s one way that I can, I can use AI and it will give me a script to follow that I would normally have to—

Rich: Wait a minute, is this an AI startup?

Paul: Yeah, yeah, it’s been around for a while. It uses AI, uses content generation, it gives you scripts to help you fight the case.

Rich: Whoa!

Paul: It’s not a lawyer, but—

Rich: It’s robots that know the law, giving you language to use—

Paul: For extremely templatized situations.

Rich: Sure, sure.

Paul: Like parking tickets.

Rich: Sure, sure.

Paul: And so the judge gets it and is like, fine, you did the work.

Rich: Right, right.

Paul: Right? I wanted to just throw that out, because I think that that is absolutely, that is—when we talk about AI right now in the world, we’re talking about things that tend to do centralized power in giant companies like Google or Apple. And we’re going to talk a lot about law firms and how they’re using this stuff.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: But there are applications that are kind of for individuals to kind of make their way.

Rich: I love that. One of the things I like about AI and what it can do is it can, it can defang a lot of expertise and empower people, because the thing that you thought you had to go to an expert for, you might be able to take care of yourself. Not everything. Things can get very complicated, and sometimes you need experts. But I love that. My whole career, a lot of my career, a lot of our career, is demystifying stuff, like, making people feel comfortable with where things are going.

Paul: I like it because it’s good at rhetoric, but it’s bad at facts. But an enormous amount of life is rhetoric.

Rich: Immense amount.

Paul: Especially the law is certainly, their facts are very important to the law, but rhetoric is just as important. So let me, let me throw this to you for a second. As someone who, you’re a lawyer, you’ve been following this industry. We’re going to talk in a minute about specific applications of AI to law. Take a second and just kind of summarize what you think is happening. What’s going on?

Rich: Well, I mean, let’s come out of the law for a second. There’s massive investment happening in AI, and a lot of that investment is in specific sectors and specific domains of knowledge. The law is a wonderful target for AI innovation. There’s a few reasons why, though.

Paul: Why?

Rich: I’ll tell you why. The body of knowledge around the law is unstructured. It’s mostly text based. It’s not a database.

Paul: But it is digitized.

Rich: And it is digitized.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: So sifting through that knowledge and teasing summaries and answers to questions and whatnot? Very powerful. So that’s reason one. Reason two: Big cases deal with massive amounts of information. A big M&A transaction, a big mergers, merger, or a big lawsuit with, like, truckloads of discovery documents, because it has to dig through—like the Purdue case. Famously, what happened was Purdue thought they could, like, flood the lawyers, the litigants, with documentation so that they couldn’t, they would never have the energy to sift through because they would get these requests for information and they’d have to deliver. And they’re like, all right, you want it all? Here it is. Trucks.

Paul: It comes in a truck.

Rich: It comes in a truck.

Paul: Good luck.

Rich: And that’s a tactic to intimidate, but also tactic to obfuscate.

Paul: Sure, because we don’t mind spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to print it all out and throw it at you.

Rich: That’s literally what happened.

Paul: Right.

Rich: And so, look, you don’t have to go to a case that big, even a personal injury case that has a history to it and a lot of medical records. It’s a lot of information you’re sifting through. And lawyers have to spend immense amounts of time making sense of it, organizing it, accessing it, et cetera. The third reason, so I’ve got two so far. One is the body of legal knowledge. Case precedent, tax code—

Paul: Sure.

Rich: —is vast and unstructured. Very nice target for AI. The second is when you have cases with large bodies of evidence and information—discovery documents, depositions, et cetera—making sense of that is hard, it takes work. The third is what I call sort of the administrative side of law. A lot of stuff doesn’t require creative legal thinking, it’s just process.

Paul: We’re actually back to Do Not Pay, but one level up, at like a corporate level.

Rich: Yeah, I need, I need a permit. I’m trying to navigate the local laws so that I can add a parking lot to my property. Things like that.

Paul: I’m renting a floor in an office building, it’s expensive, and I need to review the contract.

Rich: Yeah, it’s not adversarial, it’s not deep. There’s details, and a lot of that is often templatized and sort of normalized, but very often you need help. So a lot of opportunities. I think there are others, I think people are trying, I think there are many, but because there are many of everything in every sector—

Paul: We’ll talk through them. But as you’ve been looking at this over like the last year or so, these are the patterns you’re seeing. I will throw out for number one, legal information in these giant databases is extremely structured by legacy standards, but you can’t get to the level of like the density of information. Like there’s taxonomies, we know, there are keywords, there’s stuff like that.

Rich: I think it’s one better, which is a lawyer that has a set of facts in front of them that a client has presented, has to then go to the body of law that’s out there, case law, statutes, et cetera. What AI allows, and I don’t know the details of where these startups are, but this is, I think, incredible, which is if I can feed it the facts in front of me.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And then say, go find me cases that are going to be relevant for my case that is new, that’s not a search query, that’s not a prompt, I’m actually feeding it the information I have in hand about a current case where a truck hit another truck on the road, and I put all those facts in front, I tell what state it’s in and what city it’s in. So it’s going to focus on the pertinent state laws and local laws, and then it goes and searches the body of knowledge.

Paul: How much time was that before AI? Like how much time would you spend finding case precedent if you’re a junior legal associate.

Rich: It is part of the rite of passage. You send the associate to go get a brief done that essentially pulls in the laws that are relevant, that are going to strengthen my case.

Paul: But is this—

Rich: Library. You’re in the library if you have access to like Westlaw or Lexis—

Paul: This is something pretty common. How long, how long are we talking? Days? Weeks?

Rich: Days to weeks.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Days to weeks, depending on the complexity of the ask. I mean, you’re essentially, you’re putting together a brief.

Paul: Okay, so my first pass of that used to take days to weeks, and now it’s going to take minutes.

Rich: It could take minutes. I don’t know if the tech exists yet, by the way, but, yeah.

Paul: Well, that’s what they’re working on. So, I mean, I’m going to give you, we’re going to talk through a couple categories.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: I bucketed some of it and a couple companies just to kind of like, get our bearings around this space.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: So the first application that’s really popping up, right, is sort of legal research. Just what you just described.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you know who’s all in on this? Lexis. LexisNexis.

Rich: I mean, they have the database today and now they’re going to bolt on AI capabilities. It makes total sense.

Paul: So they’re—

Rich: Not everyone might know what LexisNexis is.

Paul: It’s a huge database of law and news, and you can use it to find news articles and you can use it to find law and you can use it—it is one of the like five or six true giant databases that run our world.

Rich: Also there’s bodies of knowledge around specific sectors and stuff like trade and whatnot. Like, LexisNexis is a vast world.

Paul: Let’s be real. You are starting a biotech company and you have to worry about patents.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Here we are. A lot of their stuff is helping you find citations. The other one that’s big in this space because again, we’re focusing on the big guys, is Clearbrief.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Which anyone or any chatbot can write legalese. So this is what’s fascinating to me. I’m seeing this message as, I went through all these sites. A lot of them are now starting to counter the broad AI narrative, because the broad AI narrative is you can’t really trust it. And there have been cases like, one lawyer got slapped by the judge. There’s an article, we’ll link in the podcast notes, in the >Harvard Law Review, where a lawyer just had ChatGPT write a brief and it had made up cases. [laughter] And, you know, the judge is like, yeah, no, go to hell. Like, don’t—

Rich: It’s also on the lawyer. He could get in trouble for that.

Paul: He did get in trouble.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? And so what’s happening is if you hit these websites, they’re saying, hey, we’re going to get you real facts. We’re going to do real work. We’re going to—and in fact, I actually saw one where they were just like, we will validate the citations, which is very cynical. You’re going to generate this garbage with a robot, and then we’ll actually go in and make sure that the robot didn’t lie.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: Which I’m like, is that really, is that the additive approach to the law that we want in our country, where we just let, we do Mad Libs—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then we have something decide if the Mad Libs are good or not.

Rich: It’s not surprising that a lot of the AI innovation is around policing the output. [laughing]

Paul: Yep. Yeah, that’s Clearbrief. Clearbrief will let you spot fake cases in a brief.

Rich: That’s what they do?

Paul: Among many other things.

Rich: I see.

Paul: But that really popped up in my brain.

Rich: Yeah, sure.

Paul: Fake, it’s like plagiarism detection, but for the law is now another application of AI, which was created, a situation that is being created by AI.

Rich: Humans will invent things to manage the things they invented. [laughing]

Paul: Okay.

Rich: You gotta love it.

Paul: I gotta say, clear brief kinda gets a yikes for me. Because I’m like, really? Are we going down that path? But like, but obviously LexisNexis, smarter search analysis. Okay, fine.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Now we move on to contracts, right? A lot of startups. Ontra, and there’s one, unfortunately, called LawGeex with an X.

Rich: That’s fine.

Paul: You’re okay with that?

Rich: Give it a roll.

Paul: Lawyers—let me just make a point—lawyers don’t have any taste.

Rich: They don’t.

Paul: They really don’t. So—

Rich: They’re just fancy plumbers.

Paul: [laughing] Honestly, I’ve seen better-dressed plumbers.

Rich: That’s probably true.

Paul: Yeah. So, okay, LawGeex is contract analysis. It’s a whole platform. You drop a contract in.

Rich: Uh-huh.

Paul: And it helps you review the contracts. Talk, just for a second, about contract review. Most people have never probably reviewed a contract in their life.

Rich: I think there’s different levels of it. I mean, there is this sort of template contract. Like, I do 100 of these a month. It’s what our business works on. I pull up a template, I fill in the blanks.

Paul: I’ll give you an example. I bought an apartment years and years ago and I worked with a real estate lawyer, on our side. And I’ve never seen anyone consume a contract like that. Like, it was just like, [flipping through pages noises] And he was like, “What the hell is this?”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And it was, he, he was able read—

Rich: Yeah, he knows the key clauses and all of it. It’s just—

Paul: It was, like, in minutes.

Rich: Yeah. It’s—look, experienced lawyers go down the same well-worn paths over and over again. That’s kind of the point of going—it’s like a doctor who’s done heart surgery 2,000 times. They’re better at it; they know everything. Where it gets tricky is the more complex contracts. Good contract drafting requires—you have to run disaster scenarios and test the contract’s language against them.

Paul: Well, this goes back to the thing that you always say about the law, which is, it’s kind of, a contract is—what is it, a rule for…

Rich: It’s a set of instructions for when things go wrong. Right?

Paul: There we go.

Rich: Very often—like if you’re going to the contract, that means the dialogue is probably broken down and you’re pasting a clause. When you’re pasting a clause in an email?

Paul: That is—

Rich: [laughing] It’s gone bad.

Paul: You know, it’s funny, that would happen at the agency because people would panic, right. They’d be like, “Oh my God, are they going to deliver it on time?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they’d paste like, “Hey, you know, I went back to the contract.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You could do two things. You could be like, we’re going to—you could have an answer. But the only answer was always like, “Let’s get on the phone, let’s get on the phone!”

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: And I would say every single time that happened, it was easy to resolve on the phone.

Rich: Always, always.

Paul: “Hey, I see how upset you are, but don’t worry, I’m hearing you.”

Rich:  That’s right. When you’re writing a contract, though, a lawyer is not going to rely on good graces after the fact.

Paul: No.

Rich: They’re going to write these clauses out and then what happens is they run scenarios against them. In their minds, they’ll be like, well, if I test this language against this party X doing this to party Y, are we good? Are we protected? Right? And that tug of war, that back and forth, is contract negotiation. So, you know, these tools could help with that. You could drop a clause in and say, hey, you know, is this, does this clause still protect my interest? AI will answer. I wouldn’t trust AI’s answer in the law. Like, you still need a lawyer’s experience to interrogate what AI outputs.

Paul: Here’s what’s puzzling: In this particular industry versus medicine, I think medicine is very—they’re going to be real careful because the ethical and the structural systems around using technology are actually pretty well defined. So you can’t just throw a bunch of chatbots in the middle of that. Right? But law is funny because it’s big and it’s much kind of less regulated and rule bound.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Lawyers can kind of get up to stuff like, you know, personal injury law.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: And so, like, if a personal injury lawyer decides that he’s just gonna, like, just start dumping stuff over in the bot and make a lot of money that way.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: There’s very little that can stop that person from doing that.

Rich: There’s very little. That’s right. I mean, the only deterrent is that he could lose his license. Like, if this goes sideways.

Paul: I mean, those guys often are in a position where they could lose their license a dozen different ways.

Rich: Exactly, true. True, true, true.

Paul: This is one more way to move stuff along, I think, like, if you, what is wild, like, you go to Ontra.ai, which is another contract automation platform, and it is just, you know, big law firms, like, they are, people are, the bigger law firms, I think, are seeing this as a huge deal. And it’s, again, this one, you hit the website and they’re like, we have a human-in-the-loop approach, which really stuck out for me, because I think that phrases like that are going to be more and more common to identify the premium product. The premium product is, yes, we will accelerate you tremendously. But we also have commodified and added just this much friction to keep stuff from spiraling out of control.

Rich: You have to. The consequences are too serious.

Paul: Well, because when you go out and you go shopping, you see there are two kinds of companies. There are ones that are like, we just took the bot and it does the law. Wow. [laughter] Holy wow!

Rich: I mean, it is a wow.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Just to be clear, like, as someone who’s read through, you know, thousands of legal contracts and documents and whatnot, it’s a wow. Like, it is a big time saver, but boy, oh, boy, you better be careful. Right? I think distinguishing between generating information for a lawyer to sift through, so you save them time and using it to help lawyers deal with the volume of information that’s out there, that’s different. Those are two different things.

Paul: I’m going to propose two razors that you can use to determine if this stuff is worth using or not. Razor one is, does it always connect back to the original document when you see a thing that has been produced?

Rich: Citation.

Paul: Can I get back to the place where that data is?

Rich: I think that’s a good test.

Paul: So that I can double, double check the robots work. Two, is the human in the loop, some communication that lawyers and others are vetting this product and sort of clarity as to kind of where I am in the process. A robot generated this entirely. A human reviewed this.

Rich: Right.

Paul: And also I think, like, it should be built into the system. We used to use a CRM to do sales, and every time that unless the deal closed, whenever you check something off, it would immediately make you enter a next action.

Rich: Yeah, keep going.

Paul: Yes, because sales is about getting to a close or losing the deal, but one or the other.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you can’t just get that little satisfaction of clicking the box and go, then go get coffee.

Rich: Right.

Paul: And I sort of feel that that kind of accountability needs to be built into legal AI systems where it’s like, has been reviewed, is approved.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So I think workflow is going to be increasingly huge in this world. And when we think about software—so we’re talking about AI kind of changing and blowing stuff up. But to me, AI is a layer.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: And what happens, software is going to need to build accountability and sort of analysis tools into these platforms.

Rich: I think, look, you know, I feel like this is, “take jobs, will it take jobs”—I mean, it could be a segment on this podcast. Like, will it take your job? Like every podcast we say, will it take your job?

Paul: I mean, God, what would it be like if there were less lawyers?

Rich: Well, here’s the thing. I think—

Paul: I think what, the sun just came out in this building and there’s a rainbow.

Rich: [laughter] I think it does more directly impact the paralegal. Look, first off, let’s talk about paralegals for a second. Paralegals, are these, the assistants of the lawyers. A paralegal that has 20 years of experience might do 75% of the work on it on a, on a deal, or a case.

Paul: They’re sort of like the enlisted officer, or the enlisted soldiers.

Rich: There are very serious paralegals out there that actually are as knowledgeable—I mean, if you think about it, a paralegal of 20 years and a law graduate of a year, right? That law graduate’s not there. That paralegal seen everything, right? Especially ones that get relied upon to do more serious things? Their world is much more changed.

Paul: They’re vulnerable.

Rich: Not vulnerable. I don’t think they are vulnerable. I think if you’re a paralegal and you’re seeing these tools, that means you get to go up the chain, in fact. You can actually use these tools to do higher-order work in this process.

Paul: Interesting. So if I’m your—

Rich: I think that’s the case for a lot of AI.

Paul: If I’m your niece or nephew and I’m a paralegal, and I go, hey—

Rich: Go learn the tools.

Paul: Uncle Rich. I don’t know, man. Is this going to take my job? You’re like, no, but you need to go learn it.

Rich: Can I say something controversial in 2024?

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Level up.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: It’s an opportunity to level up. If you are where you are, that doesn’t mean you get to stay where you are until you’re 72 and you’re on a cruise. Level up. Tools showed up that freed up your time. What are you going to do at that time? Yeah, you could go gardening. I like to garden.

Paul: I mean, the funny thing is, you say this, you’re like, can I say something? And you’re kind of aggressive about it, but like, I say it in my gentle, soft tone.

Rich: Same message.

Paul: You need to go out and you need to build your skills, always in a career.

Rich: Why not?

Paul: It’s just like—

Rich: It’s more fun.

Paul: Here’s the thing is, there’s a fantasy that somehow we can change that? That’s unfixable, in a world where there’s a lot of change.

Rich: There’s a lot of change.

Paul: Level up and be the person who is the AI expert.

Rich: I want to close this with a question for you.

Paul: Okay. Okay. We didn’t even get to all the—

Rich: Do you want to go through some more? You want to rapid-fire ’em?

Paul: Let’s rapid-fire.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: I’m seeing other applications out there. I’m seeing client-interaction platforms, like help me manage my relationship with my client.

Rich: Ridiculous.

Paul: So—really?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, Smith.ai provides AI-powered virtual receptionist.

Rich: That’s been around.

Paul: It’s just chatbot. It’s chatbot with a little law inflection.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay. I mean—

Rich: Why is that law?

Paul: Because it knows a little bit about the law. You’re like, that’s ridiculous. And then, of course, I’m sure you go and it’s like, it’s a $700 billion company, but—

Rich: Fine.

Paul: Regardless. Fine. Time and billing management, but AI-enhanced. Predictive analytics, so on and so forth.

Rich: Which leads to the question I was going to ask. Time and billing on for law firms? The fact that lawyers get to bill by the 15-minute increment is one of the worst things in the world. A lot of work goes into generating invoices. Like, it’s, there’s like, systems. They’re wired up, so you have to put the client code into the photocopier. So each piece of paper that’s printed is $1.50. Like, there’s all kinds of crazy shit out there. It’s ridiculous also.

Paul: I mean, I’m going to give—

Rich: The million-dollar company is ridiculous.

Paul: I’m going to give you the name of a legal-practice management tool that uses AI to help you do more in less time with, you know, draft correspondence. It’s called Smokeball.

Rich: No, it’s not.

Paul: Smokeball.com.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: Just when you know there are lawyers out there, if you guys—

Rich: You sure it’s not a hot sauce?

Paul: I swear to God, you go and hire a lawyer and they turn to their computer and it’s smokeball.com.

Rich: That’s ridiculous.

Paul: So that’s, that’s where we are as a society right now.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay. Two more categories real fast.

Rich: Yeah, go.

Paul: Legal writing, drafting. Right? It’s writing the. It’s writing the letters.

Rich: Sure!

Paul: You’re like, okay, sure.

Rich: You got to read every word.

Paul: You still, you can’t, you can’t escape.

Rich: I mean, you could. You could try.

Paul: And then you might get disbarred.

Rich: And you might get repri—or you might screw up.

Paul: Let me throw one that I think is going to work beautifully. Compliance, which meaning like, regulatory construction guidelines change in seven states.

Rich: Keeps up on them.

Paul: Every year, and it tells you—

Rich: Hellish stuff.

Paul: Yeah, like warehouse construction.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That one for me is like a big climate one, because a lot of regulatory stuff is changing as the climate changes. And like, keeping track of that is really hard. Like, you don’t know what’s happening with warehouses in Tennessee right now.

Rich: I mean, the last few I’ve been shitting on. But, like, this is powerful stuff.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Because what you would do is you would tell an associate, “Hey, Jenny, do me a favor. Go read up on the latest changes to the zoning laws and make sure our agreement is in line.”

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And then she’ll say, “Okay, I need about four days to do that.” And the possibility of feeding AI your artifact and saying, make sure it complies with local zoning laws is wild.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: You should still check it. Check everything. Last question. Any more?

Paul: No, no. We can call it there.

Rich: Like, let’s say something out loud. It’s nothing to do with the law. Has to do with AI. 80% of these are going to melt away. There’s this a lot, it’s really frothy out there—

Paul: I don’t even know if melt away. It’s a big wild world out there. Maybe they, but this what I do think—

Rich: Consolidate.

Paul: Slamming AI on top of it, which, hey, we do it, too.

Rich: No, we’re AI from the ground up.

Paul: We are AI from the ground up. That is real. Like, adding AI as a feature probably doesn’t last forever.

Rich: Right. Right.

Paul: Like, I think this is a technology that’s going to get absorbed into the layer cake of technologies.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: But we’re in a moment right now.

Rich: We really are. We really are.

Paul: So here, let me just summarize. The law is actually fundamentally changing the way that law is practiced because of these technologies.

Rich: I don’t know if everyone’s embraced it yet.

Paul: Every big law firm has taken this seriously.

Rich: Can I end this with a question?

Paul: Sure, you can do whatever you want, co-host.

Rich: There is an inverse correlation between doing things in less time and lawyers making money.

Paul: Explain.

Rich: My bill should get cheaper.

Paul: It should.

Rich: You’d think!

Paul: You’d think. I mean, this is actually our value prop, is we’ll build you more software in like, 10% of the time.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: So does that mean lawyers are going to bill—because lawyers, the commodity is time.

Paul: Yeah, this is actually a really good point, which is, wait a minute, if I actually sell lawyer brains as my product.

Rich: Yeah—time! Lawyer time. By time.

Paul: Well, that’s by time I chop up lawyer brains by the minute.

Rich: There’s no such thing as deliverable-based law.

Paul: Yeah. So…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Does this actually kind of wreck the industry?

Rich: I guess not. We’ll find out.

Paul: But realistically, it should.

Rich: It should really, it should bring down the cost of legal services.

Paul: So I think if your law firm, when you engage a law firm, you should ask them, do you guys make use of AI tools? And will a discount be reflected in my bill?

Rich: Will you solve my problems with less of your time and less of your people?

Paul: Because it seems like you’ve engaged these amazing time-saving tools, and I would love to know how this is going to bring the cost down of our engagement.

Rich: Great.

Paul: What is a lawyer going to say to that?

Rich: Well, what they’re going to say to us is, send us a cease and desist letter to tell us to shut the hell up about this.

Paul: You know, what they’re going to say is, like, it accelerates, which allows us to really focus on the things that matter.

Rich: Legal strategies. [laughing]

Paul: Which include billing. All right, so that is a good call at the end. Our advice to you is, if you engage a lawyer, get a discount.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. Get time. It’s fair.

Rich: Check out Aboard at aboard.com. Aboard uses AI to ship software that you need faster. That’s the best way to sum it up. It skips a lot of steps. It gets you to about 70%. And then we send a team in to finish it off for you and.

Paul: Then send us an email@helloboard.com. We’re going to, we’ve got a list of industries that we want to cover along these lines. But if you have any place you’d like us to focus, we are out there in the world trying to figure out this wacky new universe along with you.

Rich: Yes, we are. Have a wonderful week.

Paul: Goodbye!

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