07/31/2026: AI Evidence blurs line between reality and fiction, Chinese AI model impact on legal tech, and more

0:03Happy Friday, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Legal Tech Week. It is the last day of July, 2026, and this is the show where we talk about the top stories happening in legal tech and legal innovation. and I am Bob Ambroji. I write a blog called Law Sites and have a podcast called Law Next. And our other panelists today are Stephanie, you want to kick it off? Sure. Hi, everyone. I am Stephanie Wilkins. I am the director of content at Legal Tech Hub. Hopefully I am with you the whole time. My laptop died today and I have an appointment right after this I have to run to but yeah we're trying I have this whole setup with like a wireless keyboard swag and an iPad and everything so hopefully I stay with you for the whole hour we hope so yeah yes all right Nikki my name is Nikki Black I'm the principal legal insight strategist at 8 a.m.

1:04Niki Black: the team behind my case law pk spear and docket wise I write legal tech columns for a v journal above the law and the daily record and i'm looking forward to being here and and our resident wine expert it's like i the more i see you so much on social media now giving your wine advice that i almost forget you write about tech too yeah i have two passions right now i guess wine and tech they don't overlap much but i try oh i think wine and tech should overlap all the time yeah

1:38speaking of ilta um anyway uh and uh also reese sure um hi i'm reese i'm uh the editor-in-chief of eagle tech news all right and joe joe patrice from above the law and uh thinking like a lawyer and for the next month or so i'm guest i'm guest uh i'm a return constantly returning guest every couple weeks on the legal af podcast on wednesdays and then i am uh i'm i'm your wine expert but you know because i complain about things i guess so that's my oh i was gonna oh hey have we talked about this one yet i went and saw um i went and saw that movie uh the the lagora commercial guy did uh it was really good um what are you tracking are you the no the the guy who shot the lagora commercial with jude law was the guy who did uh the odyssey he's the cinematographer for christopher nolan which was a which he'd done several movies for christopher nolan before and including the and then now this one but i just like bringing that up because it's the most absurd little fact that I know is that they they decided to invest in that guy to shoot their little commercial rather than get you know me with a camcorder or something which would have been just as just as well camcorders a real throwback yeah well there my wife was complaining last night about how that commercial haunts her she's like can't get it out of her mind.

3:19She hates it so much. And she doesn't understand why in the world any company would have done something like that.

3:26Niki Black: So I don't know whether that's the reception overall or what? I don't know if that means it's effective or not. Like if you can't get it out of your head. Can't get it out of her head, bud. I guess. She's like haunted by images of Legora. We're talking about Legora, Andrew. Legora's Jude Law commercial. But I haven't seen the Odyssey yet. I mean, spoiler, they make it home. I do want to see the Odyssey. Yeah. There was an article in the Globe this morning about whether you need to see it in full, whatever, 72, what is it? 72 millimeters, whatever they call it. The full glory or whether you can just see it in any old movie theater.

4:12And the Globe critic was like, just see it in any old movie theater. It doesn't really matter. it's just too hard to get the 70 millimeters those tickets are almost impossible to get yeah and it's the fun one yeah the fun one that uh that people do is the four the four dx one which is the one where it like shoots water at you during the storm scenes and everything uh apparently that that's the version yeah oh yeah that uh the the union square theater does that well it has a theater i don't need random stuff being squirted at me and you didn't squirt theater. That just is not, no. Sounds like Universal Studios do stuff like that.

4:56So I'm still thinking about, even before we get to legal tech stuff, well, I guess we're still, we haven't gotten to legal tech stuff, but Nikki, you just sent out this thing about the PR bots and how there's like this article about this one agency that's now using completely made-up people to cram journalists' inboxes with story pitches. And other than Jude Law, that's also one of my worst nightmares, I think.

5:24Niki Black: All right. I just noticed that before this started, so I popped it into our Slack. But talk about PDU material. Definitely nightmare category stuff. I mean, as it is, I'm at the point of just throwing my hands up in the air. when I look at my inbox. Seriously. The one thing I've, is anybody using the Gmail like AI inbox thing? It's kind of cool. Tells you all the stuff you should have done or responded to in your inbox. Goes through your inbox every morning and tells you you should have responded to this or somebody's waiting to answer. I'm on Microsoft for work, which is not making me happy. So I miss the days of being on Gmail for work.

6:08Yeah, Gmail was awesome. And I regret saying all those horrible things about Gmail now that I'm on Microsoft 365.

6:20Well, all right. Well, we can talk about legal tech. So, Nikki, you had a good piece on Above the Law this week about AI evidence and how that's, I mean, we all know that's a growing problem, but you kind of dove into it a little bit. You want to talk about that? I just popped both links into the chat, the PR art of the AI publicist and then the above the law.

6:47Niki Black: So my above the law column, I focused on sort of the growing phenomenon of fake evidence in cases where the evidence is AI generated, which is, you know, predictable. I feel like we all saw this coming, and it's, I don't think you have to be a genius to see it coming, right? Like that's, you know, people have been using technology to create fake evidence for ever since technology has been around. And they've created fake evidence before technology, fake signatures, you know, like this is this happens. But AI makes it really easy to do at scale and it's really does a really good job at it. So it's popping up in cases.

7:26Niki Black: And I talk about two of them in my article. And, you know, it's making the judges really angry. They're, you know, imposing jail sentences. They're not just going for like regular old, you know, civil sanctions. They're getting pretty mad. And, you know, I get it. Both judges use pretty heady language about the integrity of the justice system and, you know, how it undermines it. And they're right. But what I found interesting more than that was an overarching trend. You know, when AI first came out, I talked about this and we all did. It wasn't just me by any means. everyone's talks about it, how AI had the potential to start rapidly blurring fiction and reality.

8:08Niki Black: And I think that when it comes to the trends that you're seeing in our court system with hallucinated cases and then the hallucinated cases that are in the briefs end up in orders sometimes, you know, court orders when they're not caught. And then they're, you know, the courts have to amend their orders when they are eventually identified. And so you're seeing this blurring of of reality and fiction there, and then you're seeing it with evidence and on LinkedIn, a judge, his last name is his name escapes me, but he called me out and called he disagreed with me and he said that you can't really conflate the two they're very different things and I know he's right, you know, but when you when I look at it through this, and there's very different reasons for them happening and lawyers have ethics obligations, people that are just creating false evidence don't.

8:57Niki Black: I mean, they're not the same thing, but I think it is part of this overarching trend of reality and fiction blurring. And it's happening at scale, and it's happening a lot faster now as AI becomes ubiquitous and the internet becomes AI slop. And AI starts training on its own content that it's created that's all over the internet. And so it's, I always see that like overarching trend, not just in legal tech. And that's what I'm seeing happening. And it's two different examples in legal tech that are affecting our administration of justice in a pretty negative way.

9:39Yeah.

9:40Niki Black: Can't hear me? I can hear you. Somebody said they couldn't hear you. You sound loud to me. You're better now. Initially, you were quieter. hopefully it's gotten better but yeah i can check the sorry i would have i noticed i would have could you start over no it did it got better on my end so i didn't say anything so maybe that i don't know how when that comment came in volumes at high almost there it was at 92 now it's at 99 on zoom itself and my computer is normal i'm not having any trouble hearing you so i don't know Usually I have such a big mouth, no one ever complained about that, so I consider that a compliment.

10:22To the deep evidence stuff, it's interesting because there seems to be a push to change the federal rules of evidence, and it's going really slow. I don't think it's going anywhere, actually. You know, there seems to be a consensus that, you know, it's not really a problem. It's, you know, like only a tiny percentage of cases, if even, and people don't think like we really need to change the rules. rules. However, like, you know, there are some folks like Professor Moria Grossman, who are like, you know, it's going to be a large issue. And by the time, we can actually change the federal rules of evidence will probably be to eight um however it seems to be showing up way more in state courts at this time i guess and like family law stuff as well um and there seems to be a question of like you know do the courts have the resources and expertise to you know to actually determine if you know a deep fake is a deep fake.

11:47And, you know, like they've been like handling the problem of like fake evidence for quite some time, although deep fakes require a bit more of a technical expertise.

12:02I mean, you know, one big question here is, I mean, obviously courts have to, courts have to set rules and courts have to impose sanctions and all of that because, but, but are sanctions really going to make any difference because probably going forward a lot of the you know there there is going to be there are going to be a lot of self-represented litigants who are the ones using using deepfakes sure lawyers will try and do it too i'm sure no doubt but uh if it's the self-represented litigants they're not likely to even be aware of the fact that there are sanctions being imposed for doing this or or whatever it's you know it's um i mean we've seen even with the hallucination cases that sanctions, you know, only go so far in terms of stopping some kind of a behavior that needs to be corrected.

12:51So I don't know. I really don't know what ultimately gets done about this, except that there needs to be better detection technology, I think, available to the courts and other litigants to be able to pick up on this, because it's just going to keep getting better and better, the ability to do this. I also enjoy the times when folks create deep fake evidence, and it's so obviously faked, and it's so horribly done. I think we need those types of deep fakes, just really obvious deep fakes that are just like almost hilariously faked and i've seen a few of those cases and i'm like it's clearly not real and now god knows what's going through people's minds when they you know bring that to court yeah but i agree that we're going to need better technology because i mean i think people fancy themselves very good natural ai detectors and they are very wrong about this like they've convinced themselves of certain tells or they've just you know they don't trust anything anymore which I get that, but like, yeah, I don't know.

14:05I mean, this is not exactly on point, but like, do we all see that LinkedIn is rolling out that report AI slop button? And I'm like, that's just gonna be wild and terrible. And so, I mean, I feel like everyone, I don't know. It's just really - Yeah, that button's called the select all button. What? It's called the select all button. Yeah. That's from our wine expert.

14:35I mean, yeah, the trouble with LinkedIn is it's hard to detect, it's hard to differentiate the AI slop from the other slop that was already there before.

14:47this is off on a slightly different tangent but the other evidence story in the news this week I dropped it in our Slack channel for our little group here if anybody read that story in the New York Times about the guy who got convicted on child sexual abuse imagery charges based entirely on his you his username uh on kick i mean from reading the article it sounds like there's absolutely no other evidence to convict this guy although they did seize his computer and all that but uh it sounded like it was entirely based on his username and he served an 18-month sentence and then went on probation and then they discovered that the username of the of the person who was creating these sexual images had an extra underscore in it that nobody picked up on all of this time so this guy's username was not even the username that was used to commit uh commit these crimes like how bizarre is that yeah it was a first road up or it says a first dot dot or row dot um it i'll put uh basically i'll put in the chat like how it how the two different ones looked to point out how ridiculous it is but like if we can't even detect that how are we detecting deep things like yeah right i don't know yeah so i wrote about it in our

16:26Niki Black: in my LinkedIn newsletter too, a little blurb about it, but it's unbelievable that it passed, that so many people looked at this, you know, and so many different, and this person must have looked at it at some point, the defendant, his attorneys who are trying to disprove his conviction, right, just to provide evidence in support of him, along with everybody else that looked at it. It's amazing that probably 100 people, I bet, looked at that and not a single person noticed. Clearly not a single copy editor. so since since julie's not here let's point out this is all canada this sort of nonsense wouldn't have happened in america oh yeah we're so much better over here i mean our impeccable record of always getting the right convictions over here uh is not like what they've got going on up in maple syrup country that's right it was In Nova Scotia, no less.

17:21So, all right.

17:28What else do we have? I have nothing this week. Joe had nothing this week. But fortunately, Stephanie and Reese had things. Stephanie, you want to talk about zero. It wasn't something you wrote, but something about zero data retention that you had on Legal Tech Hub. um yes cheryl wilson griffin from our team wrote it but it also came up last week when i was um speaking at the master's conference in new york and um yeah so i mean it came up in in that conference in the context of you know everyone disagreeing on the heppner ruling and the other rulings about privilege and etc and you know can people really see our chats and whatever and so this new stance by Anthropic that, you know, for certain of their like mythos class models, which include the fable models, they are retaining everything that gets put in for 30 days to do like a, I don't think they call it abuse monitoring, like Microsoft calls it, but they're equivalent of whatever we're calling abuse monitoring, right?

18:33So they can like check it for safety and they can check it for, you know, just improper content, which coincidentally happens in a lot of, you know, legal cases, like that's what cases are about. So those topics come up all the time. But so I mean, the question becomes, if people are reviewing these for 30 days, and if they get flagged longer, does that change anyone's mind on whether or not your prompts are actually going out to other people? And there's others. I mean, there's confidentiality, it's not just a privilege thing. But the zero data retention is what a lot of people have built their whole AI governance strategy around this concept that there is this and it's maybe not that anymore and you know i've always been more pro hepner i'm not saying 100 agree with hepner but i am you know in the minority that sees some merit in it but i just i think this is a really important issue that it gave a lot of people pause in the room last week who otherwise did

19:25Niki Black: not have pause on this topic i thought it was a super interesting and insightful and timely article and it was something that I hadn't thought about. It's the idea that AI data retention policies and all the other back-end policies about how what's happening to your data is a moving target. The AI is changing so quickly. They're coming out with different tiers. They're coming out with different products and they're all controlled by different user agreements and and different promise levels of data management on the back end and data protection on the back end. And that can change, right? Like companies suddenly add a new tier and that can impact the tier below it.

20:10Niki Black: I mean, we see that happening all the time with all the different LLM. So it's I thought it was super interesting to think of it that way. And but then what what is the solution? What's a company or a person to do when this changes? I mean, it's almost like you need to have a person or an AI. Maybe the solution is to have an AI monitoring your AI and an AI, you know, monitoring the evidence submitted in court. We just have to turn everything over to the AIs. I think that's going here. Well, one of the points Cheryl made on the like, what's a person to do? And it's not a perfect solution is that I mean, so far when we've come thus far most organizations are thinking about AI governance by approving things on a platform level, right?

20:56Like, oh, we've approved Claude, we haven't approved Claude. And maybe it needs to be more like approving things on a model level and not necessarily a platform level. And I don't know, that's much logistically much harder. I mean, we have a small organization and our Claude, they slowly turn things on with it or whatever. But when you're talking to bigger organizations, I mean, that's harder to do, especially as people are swapping in different models all the time. But, I mean, it definitely is the case that it's model-specific threats being offered now within a single platform and not just the platform.

21:29It just gets harder. So, quick question. Like, does any tech provider actually have a zero, you know, retention policy? It seems that the Emerald apps even have to collect data for a short time for legal obligations. And do we actually have tech providers and AI companies who actually just don't ever retain anything that goes into their platform? for? Well, we've had these zero data retention agreements for a long time. Obviously, it has changed with the AI of it all. And so I don't know how closely, I think that's part of the thing here. Everyone's still signing these agreements and are they actually legitimate?

22:23You know, I mean, is there, is that such a thing? Yeah, it's a really tough question. Okay, so stupid follow-up question. And I'm the only one here who isn't an industry, is an attorney, so excuse me for this. Can they have those zero retention contracts?

22:48If the FBI or the NSA or the DOJ is like, we need info on this person's data, can those like zero data retention contracts hold up? The issue is actually huge with the Stored Communication Act and like the, I'm trying to recall the term, except the FBI could essentially ask Microsoft to turn over the Outlook data for some of its users. And it was a huge issue, too, because some of the servers were in France or Ireland, and it was a whole PR issue as well. So do those zero out of retention contracts actually hold up? Well, Rhys, I am an attorney, and just hold on for a second while I ask Claude that question, and I'll get right back to you.

24:18Um, well, I mean, I guess, separate from the contracts, like, in theory, if they're promising zero data retention, they're not retaining anything, and they wouldn't have anything to turn over to the FBI or whoever asked for it. If they are retaining things against those agreements, that's a completely different question. That seems like a contractual, you know, violation. But I mean, there are always like, aside from the ZDRs, it's like, there's always certain exceptions for like law enforcement obtaining things as opposed to, you know, other outside parties. So I don't know. I think it's just a I mean, it's a really good question, but it's also a good question is, you know, as we go forward, is zero data retention even possible here?

24:56And it's more so like if people think that is protecting them in these contracts, maybe they need to understand what it means and do a deeper dive. And it's like, yeah, Michelle put this in the comments. I remember a couple of years ago, Isha and Cassandra wrote that article about the abuse monitoring at Microsoft. it's the same kind of principle so this is not a new concept it's just now I mean anthropic doing it across certain classes of models is a pretty big deal so Cassandra saw this coming oh but I'm pumped is this because you just watched the odyssey yeah yeah I've gotta keep I've gotta keep going with these references go for it yeah no it's a really interesting issue and everybody who is so anti like the holding of hepner in the room last week actually had a moment of pause of like well if they're actually retaining stuff what does that mean yeah super interesting too like you know like do they have to legally retain some stuff i don't know i am again no attorney i can ask claude though so i'm halfway there

26:11Well, that whole sort of line of questioning is, in a sense, an interesting segue to one of the stories you had this week, Reese, on the sort of increasing use of open-weight AI models, and specifically Chinese open-weight AI models, and what that means for legal tech. I know you didn't write it, Benjamin. Joanna wrote the story, but do you want to kind of recap that a little bit? Sure. So, so, then I essentially talked to some folks in the Eagle Tech space around, like, how these, like, new Chinese models are going to, like, change the industry or, like, impact the tools. And they have actually performed pretty well.

27:09Some say they're close to what the newest anthropic models can do. And the huge advantage, too, is they are open-weight. so essentially people can tweak them to increase their accuracy around specific subject areas and they are perhaps the only like open-weight models out there and you know Ben talked to TR and one other source where I can't remember where he was from However, they all said that they expect these open-weight models to be integrated into the legal tech tools. They won't do the front-end stuff like the heavy and Alice-esque. however for like you know the back-end tasks such as extraction classification and review you know they're pretty like you know well performing and also they're pretty cheap too and they're pretty easy to tweak as well you know we ask them too if like firms will kind of be able to play around with these two and like you know tweak them for their own use cases as well and the vendors weren't so sure that the firms would be able to do so um however we came across um i believe it was on uh like the financial times an article around

29:18McKinsey trying to tweak these open-weight models and create something that really is tailored to I assume that it's going to have a huge impact because people are able to tweak it into customizer too. And also it's quite cheap. you know the only thing that could potentially prevent these models from taking off in the eagle space here in the states is you know like if you know there are any restrictions that come out of the Trump administration and if I hope so like anthropic and like open AI aren't you pleased They say that essentially these Chinese models were created with the outputs of their own models, and that's why there's so much cheaper.

30:32However, that does beg the question then of why won't OpenAI and Claude kind of do this same as well? so like we are keeping a close eye on like how you know it's going to change the industry and potentially change the economy too we can restrict them here in the states you know like however you know if they take off everywhere else like I don't think that

30:58Niki Black: does us any good well listen I don't think they're long for this world in the states if the recent news that we're banning foreign-made robot vacuums like and i put i included that in my linkedin newsletter um this week as well but it's you know if we're it was it's basically foreign-made robots are being banned and so clearly like generative ai is not going to be far behind with this administration uh i mean anything that's made in china and i'm not going to say it the way that trump says it because somehow that feels wrong but um i you know i think it i think that it's far behind if we're banning Roombas made in China.

31:38So I will say, oh, um, you know, like I've had two Roombas and they're terrible. So I would totally hope to have like an open way Chinese Roomba. It's gotta be an improvement.

31:55Well, as Naveen to point out, we talked about this last week a little bit with the when with Claude going rogue not Claude but the anthropic models going rogue and that that it took hugging face had to use one of these open weight models in order to track down the how the infiltration it had happened because the the the general models weren't wasn't weren't letting it do that so you know i saw the headline about that that was just like u.s to ban you chinese autonomous robots i was not picturing rumors i was picturing like all those crazy videos of like kickboxing robots and fighting stuff and i'm like that's okay i mean seems like a weird priority but sure well now they have the the horned centaur with the chainsaw you've been tracking that one.

32:48That's the new Nightmare Fuel. And I think that's an American company even, right? Horned Centaur with chainsaw? I didn't see that. Yeah. Saturus? That sounds insane. That's the new Lagora ad. You haven't seen that yet? Yeah. Jude Law is riding the Horned Centaur. This machine, which is designed to protect to go you know save people from places humans can't get to it's a california company design that any other way like but that is terrifying i saw that coming at me while i was trying to be saved i have a heart attack i yeah it's uh it's a decision let's put it that way uh it's yeah the the chinese model situation i i've long thought that they had a uh better strategy for doing things than the Americans.

33:49And, you know, part of it is an IP related aspect to it. But another part of it is a lot of our AI culture is based around people with Messiah complexes who think that they're going to invent artificial general intelligence that the Chinese models are like, what if we gave you something cheaper that like fixes your email? And it's like, yeah, that would be great. I would love that. And so I think their strategy i've long thought that if there's an american version of that strategy uh it could end up dominating because it could be the much much cheaper option that gets all the way there without you know not being able to answer questions about tiananmen square um and that's also super interesting to the timing uh just you know due to the pricing concerns too um like um like all those corporations are like freaking out over like oh our like costs are so high and we were supposed to save costs all our costs on like you know like uh a lot of chat gbt or whatever are just through their roof um and as cost concerns are you know growing these new models are coming out and i'm Like, well, you know, it's like the perfect storm, too.

35:13Yeah. You know, this is completely unrelated, but since we just talked about intellectual property law, one story that came out of this week that's not really a legal tech story but is a legal story is, you know, the Anthropic was getting a lot of flack this week for it came out that they are buying up all the rare books in the world and destroying them, just chopping them up as they scan them. And people were like, oh, this is so evil. And I saw social media where it's like, you know, they have these devices. They are able to scan them without damaging the copy. But the reason they're doing that, of course, is that in the infinite wisdom of our intellectual property law, the court order that they're under is that it's fair use so long as at the end of scanning it, there is not a physical copy that remains.

36:02because the rule was you can transform it from a physical copy to a digital copy, but if you add a new copy, then that is no longer fair use. And so that's why they're doing this is because the court order that Judge Alsop put in puts them in a situation where they only are allowed to scan these particular rare books if they choose to destroy it at the end, which is the reason they're doing it. So it's yet again, we have a broken intellectual property system, which should be reformed, but no one has the time or energy to do that because our Congress has more important things to do, like relitigate vaccines or whatever the hell they're doing these days.

36:46I did see that like RFK has a new cooking show. Oh, good. I heard he was pushing that everyone needs to start eating more liver this week. And all I could think was that is, you know, there's a there's a winning strategy. Tell people to eat liver that that has worked for so many generations. People will vote Democratic just just not to do. They've come a long way from H.W. Bush telling them not that we aren't going to have broccoli anymore. And now they've come around and they're like, but yes, liver.

37:30The list of things we can and cannot eat currently is growing. So I'll take whatever just is disease-free at this point. Yeah.

37:42I have children who have a whole litany of food allergies. So the list of things we couldn't eat in our house for a long time has been extensive already. So it's just getting worse. So I didn't write anything this week because I was engaged all week. And as I said to Joe earlier, he's sort of lobbying Lollapalooza, which is one of my other jobs as a lobbyist. And this was the end of our legislative session here in Massachusetts. And it's been a really crazy week, except that I'm happy to say I got through something that I've been working 21 years to try and get through the legislature. So it's like kind of crazy that it took that long.

38:16But so it's been a very exciting week. But I was thinking, I was like, I've been thinking a lot, finding myself thinking a lot about legal research. And there's been a whole lot of developments over the last couple of weeks that I think start to have sort of a common theme. And Describe, I know I saw Richard in the audience from Describe, and they had news this week that I haven't had a chance to write about. I don't know if anybody else did. But they announced this new, what do they call it? New open connector, a new, here's what they describe it. I'm reading their press release. A new initiative that enables law firms and legal organizations to build, customize and control their own AI powered legal research tools and workflows on top of Describe's legal engine.

39:11And there's two parts to this. There's an SDK and a Python SDK that provides the technical foundation for connecting custom applications to describe. And then there is a set of legal research workflows, which are reusable research processes that organizations can use, modify, or expand to reflect their own needs. That was interesting. But then also just in the last couple of weeks, I talked last week, I talked about this thing I wrote about called Dingduff, which is MCP connector that two lawyers started partly because they just didn't like the way, didn't like what they were getting out of Westlaw and Lexus.

39:49and also partly because they were afraid that Westlaw and Lexis were just going to make themselves so expensive and unaffordable that they wouldn't be able to use them anymore. So they decided to kind of create their own legal research tool connected to MCP that does research kind of the way, lets them do things the way they want to do them. and then there's another research new legal research product that's coming out Monday that I don't think it's been formally announced yet so I won't mention it but yeah yeah yeah are they out yeah so I am but that's again taking a taking a kind of a very distinctive approach to how to do legal research and then there are things like just like mid page is MCP connector, where I was talking to Otto from Midpage last week.

40:42And one of the interesting things he mentioned is even though Midpage started as a platform for legal research, now virtually the great percentage of their usage is all coming through Claude, through their MCP connector. People aren't using their platform. They're just, I mean, not at all, but they're using it very little compared to how they're accessing it through Claude. And so I guess what's interesting about all of this, I think, is that we're starting to see, I mean, it used to be legal research was legal research. I mean, there were different providers, but it was basically the same thing, right?

41:22You did use the same set of data, more or less. You approached it the same way, putting in queries and getting lists of cases. Obviously, AI products has changed that in some way. But again, it's very much looking alike. Whether you go to Westlaw or Lexus, you put in a question and you get an answer and you get a list of cases that matches that answer. But it seems like there's this whole trend toward making legal research much more customizable to the particular workflow, to the particular way you like to do research, to the particular applications you work with. And I haven't really put my thoughts together entirely on this, but I think we are kind of, in a sense, on the dawn of a whole new maybe spur in the way legal research products are going to be developing over the next couple of years.

42:14So I don't know. Does that make any sense? Anybody think there's anything to that? Yes.

42:20Niki Black: I don't know. Oh, so go ahead. I have some shameless self promotion. I actually did two articles in this, or potentially three. I cannot remember. It was like in April and May. And it's just kind of like around the explosion of legal research startups and why we're seeing that explosion right now. and it essentially comes down to two issues. One, the tech has improved where somebody can essentially tell like AI agents to go to all these court websites and just scan everything and to do it in real time and they can do it cheaply too. You know, like it's crazy how Describe is like, you know, a very tiny company and it's a husband and wife team and they were able to do stuff that i you know you know was quite impressed with you know like in 2016 when i first uh came here like i talked to to case tax and to us too and like they were the new kids on the block and it was really hard to acquire all that case law.

43:42It's really easy these days due to the tech and also due to the expansion of the free law project as well. I actually talked to Michael

44:03and he has expanded expanded his data base a ton. And, you know, like, you know, like, it actually seems to be, like, like, all these new, like, research tools. And the cat's kind of out of the bag. we have the data, we have the tech because people can just plug into cloud, plug into chat, gpt and essentially say okay like you know like splice this right up um so like you know like all the the high barriers to entry um have shrunk a ton um and it's shrunk to the point where like almost anyone who has the tech know-how can create their own custom research tool. We are in the second Cambrian explosion, essentially.

45:29And I cannot actually say that quotes from me. I talked to Pablo at Case Text, and he called it the second Cambrian explosion. and he's the whole industry changing. Yeah. I was, I don't know, I may have talked about it here.

45:53Niki Black: I wrote an article about Claude Legal, but more broadly how I think that, how I conducted legal research using Claude Legal applied to one of the big two, applied to MidPage, MidPage's database, or no, Claude Legal applied to MidPage's database, research in mid page and then research in one of the big two using their you know AI functionality and the Claude Legal applied to mid page the results were so much more sophisticated it was the analysis was equivalent of someone who litigated for 30 years it really impressed me and I also in the same article talked about how I used Claude Legal to and chat GPT to assist me with all the different um hurdles i had to go through to get our um you know small lot winery here in the finger lakes um licensed new york new york and federally um to go through the trademark process so that i could get an intent to use for our name and make sure that that was cleared um and to go through a whole bunch of other different um regulatory things i had to do on the new york side of um this but you know i wasn't a transactional i was a litigator so all All of this was new to me.

47:08Niki Black: I did watch a CLE, by the way, all legal had a CLE specific to wine and trademark. So I did watch that to really give me like the foundational information I needed for that. But I was able to get all of those things done quickly without a lot of back and forth, which I think from what I've understood, it can be kind of typical. It helped me answer all the questions correctly in the forums and and the research that it when you take a matter that's designed for not a matter but a model designed for legal and apply it to a reliable legal database the output is unbelievable and it's far exceeded the output from either of those LLM's apply to their data, you know, companies.

47:49Niki Black: these guardrailed and everything else, LLMs that they had applied to their databases. So I think 100 % that the trend is going to be exactly what you were both talking about, sort of the customizable ability to do research. But also I think the top is going to be one of these models tailored for legal applied to one of the many different case law and regulatory databases. So we'll see. But you can get a lot done with them. So the question is, I guess, like, you know, like, how do the huge players like Clio and TR and Lexus essentially respond? And I spoke to TR, too, for the article, and I was just, you know, like, all about, like, how the editorial expertise they have is going to keep them ahead of everybody else.

48:45how they are like the only trusted source and then you know like there's some truth to it too and like how they're you know like complex like secondary treaties too are really hard to okay um and also like how they're um you know really going full on with like creating their own um um ai um you know like it's crazy it's it's essentially become like a race. And it's completely changed from a pretty stable, you know, market where you essentially had like two or three giant players who controlled everything. It's completely like, you know, turned on its head. Yeah. And, you know, you talk about it.

49:39I forget what you said. Pablo said this is the second I forget what he said. But there was, in fact, an earlier kind of surge, you know, like around 20, what was it? Andrew can tell us when. I think it was 2014 that Ross got launched, Case Text launched around the same time, Ravel Law launched around the same time. And those were all, again, sort of attempts to take very different approaches to legal research. but you know i think i think reese and nikki both kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of talking about how the technology now makes it so much easier to do this and and not just to try and do some more or less slight variation on what westlaw and lexus are doing but to be to really be different in in your approach to how you build these products so it really is a it's a really interesting time i think for the field and it it's it's funny because i just over the years of watching legal tech it's it's one of those topics that has sort of come up in waves it's like for years nothing happens nothing new happens in legal research and then there will be this surge of a bunch of new products and then nothing new will happen again for a while or nothing nothing major uh but we're certainly in one of those times right now So shouldn't we all start our own legal research companies and wineries?

51:06Niki Black: I think, yeah, definitely wineries, but I think we also just need to create some AI tools. We keep talking about this. We just have to do it. Our multi-million dollar payout is right around the corner, and that can help fund my winery, by the way. So I'm all in. I'm all in for this. We're looking for investors. Sort of, not really. but I'm all in on this let's start may as well be a research tool so let's do an AI research tool you guys we'll work on it at ELSA yeah but I don't know that we should be all starting this because I think really the real I mean the real threat and we've talked about this a million times isn't all these myriad little startups that are coming along and building MCP connectors or something the real threat is that company that they're all building the connectors based on I mean it's it's anthropic because it's open AI.

51:53When you talk about asking Westlaw or Thomson Reuters whether they see this as a threat, to me, and we've talked about this a million times, but it's the general models that are the threat here. And that extends to almost all of legal tech. I mean, it's really getting to the point where there isn't anything you can build on, you know, just on Claude that you would need a separate platform for, I hate to say it. I just feel like, well, and this is what I thought about the described news earlier when I heard it too. And I also haven't had a chance to write about it, but there is something to be said for those big, you know, like we were talking about the open weight models and everything.

52:41The downside of those big folks who can come in and, you know, do a lot in this industry, but they also don't give somebody the kind of power to create their bespoke version of what they want to do nearly as well. And that's why, like when I was talking with Describe about what they're doing, I kind of liken it more as the analogy I came away with was more like an Ikea situation where you say, I'm not going to try to sell furniture at this point because everybody whatever but but i've already done the work of building designs and you can put together what you need to do on top of this but i'm gonna start basically selling the fact that i've come up with a better done the done the legwork on the design and i think there is something to that that might be the intermediary because i think we we kind of have talked about the idea of like a clod or open ai out of a box jumping into legal but i think we're going to see them stumble just over the fact that all legal is slightly different.

53:47But if you can be in between and give something that allows folks to build what they need with, you know, a little bit of technical stuff already done, like that might be that might be a strong place to be, because I think everybody's going to want to have some degree of control over what their AI looks like in the near future, which goes back to the Chinese model situation. Yeah, 100 percent agree with that. That makes sense. All right. Anything else we forgot to talk about? Thompson created a new large language model called Thompson. Surprise, surprise. We've talked about that before, but they came out with new information on it.

54:37Yeah, they did come out with new benchmarks. marks and surprise surprise it does pretty well um and they also say they spent around 20 million creating it which was interesting it just you know gives people a sense of how like you know like the cost of um like you know uh creating your own um a large language model um and just you know going to the earlier point too like they are really you know like trying to win the um uh the ai race too and they're you know there's spending tons of their own cash um due to the fact of like all these news startups kind of like trying to like uh take over the space um they're really trying to hone in on we are the most trustworthy

55:39and accurate too. And it's kind of hard because it ties to a whole other conversation about how these tools will as well and how that's a feature for all of them, except that's probably a conversation for some other time because I think almost that time and that will open up a can of worms.

56:04Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're leaning, leaning big into that, uh, trust, uh, trust issue as their, as, as their moat, so to speak. Um, all right. Yeah. No, look, no bar exam. We didn't talk about bar exam. She's, I mean, that was a lot of my week, not so much legal techie but it was a lot of my week for other reasons yeah well maybe we can catch up on that another time alright well I think that does it for today's show and I hope everybody has a great week and hope to see you all back here next week

56:46bye everyone