08/27/2026: Live from ILTACON 2026, the State of Legal Technology

0:01All right. All right. good morning to everybody and uh uh congratulations on making it through the week and and showing up here on the last day uh we're probably all equally exhausted uh i just had the opportunity to intervene the ceo of i manage and all he could do was talk a lot of much fun of me at this party last night uh that's the kind of week it's been i think um but um so uh for those of you who don't know us All of the people you see sitting here on the stage do a Friday show about Legal Tech Week. We're all journalists and cover legal tech in one capacity or another. And usually on a Friday afternoon at 3 o 'clock Eastern time, we do a live Zoom webinar called Legal Tech Week where we kind of talk about the week's news.

0:57I am trying to record this. Hopefully it works. And we'll put this up in lieu of our live episode this week. But all of these go up on YouTube and you can just search for Legal Tech Week there, find all of our past episodes. And there's a sign up form there to catch our future episodes if you're so inclined. But very impromptu, we just got to talk about some of the news and stories that struck us over the week. And of course, right now we're going to be focusing on this week in Vilticon, what we've seen and heard here. So what we're going to do, we'll just start with who we all are. I'm Bob Ambrosia.

1:34I write a blog called Lost Sites, and I have a podcast called Law Next. And go this way first. Nikki, do you want to pick it up? Yeah. My name is Nikki Black. I am the principal legal insight strategist at 8 a.m. It's the team behind my case, Lape Case Peer, and Docket Wise. and I write regular legal technology columns for the ABA Journal, Above the Law, and the Daily Record. Hi, everyone. I feel like we should turn this way. Maybe we should rotate the stage. I'm Steve Embry. I write the blog, Tech Law Crossroads, and I also write for Above the Law. Hi, I'm Joe Patrice. I'm senior editor at Above the Law.

2:19Are you my boss? Yeah. I don't know. And I also have a podcast called Thinking Like a Lawyer on the side. And yeah, good to be here. Jo? Oh, we're sharing my phone. Hi everyone, I'm Caroline Hill. I'm the editor of Legal IT Insider. I'm losing my voice. I'm based in the UK. I've been going 30 years and about 40 % of our audience are from the US. I expect to be here. That's what I need. Hi, everyone. Hi, everybody. I'm Rhys Tsip-chan, the editor of the Chief of Dull Tech News. Just a quick display. I hear a speech. I did a swear. I was not nervous, so if you can hear me talk slowly or slurp, that's just how I talk.

3:07I promise I'm still enjoying the best of these things. Thank you. All right, so I think the most debated topic of the week has been the question of exactly how much did Labora pay?

3:23Any insights on that, please? Well, I asked ChatGPT and did a little research on it, and it's anywhere from$300 ,000 to$500 ,000. All right, we'll take matters to it. If ChatGPT says it so, then it's got to be so. But, I mean, really, that was kind of indicative of the fact, I mean, this was the biggest Ilta Kahn ever. in terms of attendees. I don't know if you all out there heard in the media briefings that we had, they talked about the fact that the exhibit hall, the number of exhibitors was more, but not that much more, but the tonnage that they brought in of booth merchandise and booth equipment and all that was three times last year's tonnage, right?

4:04Is that right? Do I have that right? So, I mean, it's just like an over-the-top build account, right? I mean, what do people think just generally of the show?

4:14Yeah, I mean, it was wild. I don't know if you noticed this, but there might be a lot of money behind some of this AI stuff. And it's money that needs to get spent somewhere. And whether it's Sheryl Crow or building the Berlin Wall, the Hardy Wall, as I call it, that whole obstruction on that side of the exhibit hall, yeah, a lot of money had to be spent. Yeah, I was impressed, I guess, by the over-the-top nature of the conference. You know, every year I go to the Consumer Electronics Show, which is probably the biggest show of any shows. And what you see there is now what we're starting to see here in the exhibit space, and that is that the exhibit space and the exhibitors booths are becoming not just sales booths, but attractions.

5:07people come and they want to go see the booth they want to wander through it and that's a bit different and of course we've never seen in the legal tech space that I know of the kind of celebrity performers that we saw right now yeah I mean

5:26we cost a lot of little big town lady A I mean it was just incredible I've never seen that before I think they know, speaking to the venues, they know that they've got original and they know they've got kind of everything to play for. They know that there's a risk in terms of spending this kind of money not on product and that it can be divisive in terms of customers. I don't know if you've got a view in terms of where they should be spending their dollars but they know that they know that it can be it go down badly with customers who want them to be spending the money or whatever but at the same time everything's about the brand and that familiarity not just with law firms but with corporates and you know they try to sort of increase their market share and I think they know that um I probably shouldn't swear because we're being recorded but it's like it's like now all by us you know and I think that they know that there's a risk behind but they felt that there's a window and that window's gone.

6:20And I don't know what's going to happen after that. That's the question. That's the question. The last time I saw companies that have cash on, the haul on the hardest day is probably pre-COVID, and probably 2018, like, you know, like, road that's pretty tickish turning to explode. And just like, you know, it goes to show we are at the fate of the growth that has been happening since 2023, 2024, 2025 too. It's like the Apexis, it feels like a little way back in the past and all the huge established players in the scene today, which just comes to a huge era of the history. So it does almost seem good to mix them too.

7:20And I guess, while it was fantastic to see Shilfro in a small crowd of 1.13 people, that was totally something we will all remember. It does affect the question to where do we go from here? How does this go anywhere higher? Is this the height of it? Is this the end of one of these cycles? You know, it just seems to get larger all the time. And, you know, it always begs the question, how large can we care? Do we all get a call on a ship? What really struck me was a sense of excitement. When I would talk to some of the different companies during briefings, there were people that were veterans. You know, companies had been in this space for a really long time, and people weren't just excited about the fact that AI had potential, but they really had an opportunity to make an impact.

8:23That's what one person said to me, and it really struck me. This is like a time to sort of seize the moment and really be able to change what the practice of law looks like. And so there really was this sense of excitement, especially since there was this lull preceding this. People were finally moving into the cloud, and technology seemed kind of stable. They've adopted the cloud. Right? But, you know, there's like this overall sense of excitement. But in some ways, I also felt like I felt watching the Met Gala. I didn't watch a lot of it, but seeing the pictures afterwards, it feels kind of Hunger Games.

8:58Like things are culminating to a head here, and it's hard to see what good is going to be on the other side. It feels like we're going to have this kind of fall. That's a question. There's one legal tech founder who said to me this week that we have achieved peak legal tech this week. And so where do we go from here? You know, I was thinking as you guys were talking, I mean, one of the things that's different, at least in the time that I've been covering people tech is outside money has come in, outside investors, equity capital pouring in like we've never seen. And we see the result of that here with all the extravagance and parties in the exhibit space.

9:36And, you know, a lot of these vendors are now at the point where, you know, we should got all this money. Let's only spend it on them. Let's have a party. Let's bring in Shiro Kuro. So I think that's a big distinguishing factor. And whether that continues, I think hinges on whether the AI bubble bursts or keeps going. And that's a question that concerns not just the legal tech community, but the economy in general. Yeah, I think bubble is inevitably going to burst in some form or another. and what that means when it bursts at the top of the general AI world, what does that mean for legal? Because we can run on different models and stuff like that if necessary, but what does that fall out bring when somebody gets in many trouble there?

10:32I've also been wondering, like my biggest takeaway of the week as far as peak and why I think that we might start pulling back a little bit on the extravagance and even with illegal is what I've been talking about is to get it. That when we start having to really pay for what this is worth, then what's going to happen? It's all fun and games when everybody can churn all day. I think they call that shit hitting the fan. Yeah, right. Another good one. That one works too. But that's what I was kind of interested in. And I feel as though when you say peak legal tech, that token of concern, I feel, was in a lot of the meetings I had.

11:18A lot of meetings that have been, you know, different kinds of providers. There were two camps that were people who were just like saying the same thing they did six months ago. Yeah, it's all going to be great. But a lot more were starting to talk about ways in which their product will help, you know, users get better results for cheaper. or for more efficiently. We can do things to enrich data to get you the right results for less spend. We can build product consultants, building processes that help you use less or lower power models to get the same results. And I thought that was interesting because we've had a year or so of best, best, best, most accurate, most accurate, most accurate, most powerful, most powerful.

12:04And then I started hearing this, and I was like, everybody's starting to see that there might be a need to pull back from all power oftentimes. And I'll say that, so to give vendors their credit, I have to say that, you know, there's obviously a ton of work, a ton of progress, you know, that we've seen this year. Whereas I think in previous years, AI is like on the side. I think what we've seen this year is it's now becoming completely infused. And, you know, I think there will come a point where we probably just talk about product. Like eventually it's just going to be in everything. And I think we're seeing that now and they're seeing some quite extraordinary progress in terms of AI workflows.

12:44And I think that, you know, we have to give them the credit. Renters are working really hard. I think Joe's point about the cost is really interesting because we've been, something that we talk about all the time and have done at this conference is we've been gorging, we're getting everyone to gorge on this diet of AI. And then now a lot of the conversations at this conference were, well, how are we going to start working out what that's going to cost and what tool we need, what product we need for what task, and starting to talk a lot more about things like orchestration. So the conversation, I think, was quite a lot more sophisticated this year.

13:17You're going to look so much further than the law. I mean, one of the things that's really interesting, to follow up on that point, is the number of applications where the UI there is almost becoming irrelevant, and it's the sort of idea that headless, there's so many different applications are integrated with each other through MCBs or APIs or whatever. I mean, integration has been kind of the buzzword of the week. But it's really changing, I think, the whole idea of what workflows look like in legal and, like I say, even what UIs look like in terms of how people engage with that. When I spoke to somebody at a company, they essentially said the platform is essentially dead and people now will just have like one interface and they'll interact with the agents that go on to these platforms do it, extract everything and the question really then becomes who is that one interface that everybody really goes into are tools just going to give plugins to one interface and like all these, you know, what is to like disco boxes to appeal?

14:36Here I have a gendered AI tool that essentially tends to like integrate everything they have. So it's like one interface, one touch right too. And we also have like folks like Claude and Google and or Xity as well, who are looking to become the interface from the entire industry. And everybody just like XM2. And the entire industry is really focused on like Airbnb and core too. I, you know, I'm quite focused on these big tech providers as well because they own the interface and almost everybody's on it all the time anyway. I meant to mention, I'm sorry. I just want to quickly say, I meant to mention this at the outset which is if you were in our audience on our Friday show and so some of you I see who are regularly on our Friday show you would know that there's a whole chat full of snarky comments going on we don't have a chat window here but if people want to make snarky or intelligent comments here go ahead and rate your hand we're happy to hear from you as we're talking sorry no worries I was going to say you know the question of what's next I have sort of overarching concerns about what's next.

15:59There are going to be lots of companies that fold, I think, over the next year. There are going to be a lot of jobs that are lost over the next year that are going to be layoffs, I think, and jobs that positions just not backfilled or filled. There's going to be a structural challenge in our profession with training, like where a young lawyer is going to get their training. and then there's this bleed-in of fact and fiction, you know, reality and fiction blending together both in our culture and then in courts with like deep fake evidence and hallucinated citations appearing in court orders and not always getting caught as they're sort of filtering up into the source of truth in our profession.

16:41So there's a lot happening very quickly and I think between now and the next year, there's going to be a lot of negative things happening even as there's a lot of the sort of positive evolution and AI integrating and streamlining workflows, there's going to be a lot of other things happening. So I wonder what that's going to look like on the other side of that cliff as well. The job loss, that's probably going to come through a situation over time. It's probably going to come through people just like hiring all the teams, the associate class will be smaller too. And it will probably take some time to, we have the tools, we have the tech, these are gigantic AI solutions are helping to take tasks from associates to juniors, staffers too.

17:39The problem is that we haven't really understood how to price everything and to change workflows too. And it's really hard to change the way people operate and culture as well. And I would say the industry has changed way faster since 2022 and even since 2020 than I could ever have been detected. However, it's still like historical slow compared to all the other industries. It's probably going to take some time and we won't probably see a big sweeping job loss. It'll just still like, you know, trickling in over time. And then like one day we'll realize, oh, the industry is way tinier and we're able to do the same, you know, I guess, you know, like with half the people.

18:28Yeah. Got it. To make these points, you know, we always have to be careful when we talk about this amongst ourselves. I used to have a client that was fond of saying, let's not get in the closet and talk to ourselves too much. But the reality is that we see people in this room and on this panel, we see a lot of tech, a lot of AI, have encountered a lot of change. We don't know what's going to happen. It's all this big and extravagant. But then when you get into the law firm itself, particularly bigger law firms, what's really going on might be a lot different than what we think is going on. The usage rate and the adoption rate may be slightly different than what it appears to be while we're sitting here.

19:13And if that's the case and the bubble does burst, it could be that the impact on the lawyers is not quite what it would be on the vendors, which is an interesting phenomenon. I was going to say that to this idea that we kind of saw here a lot more people where they're not kind of trying to dominate the user interface. It's okay if people go through here, but they get to our product display. We'll have an interface, but people can choose. A real democratization of how you access it. The guts are important, but how people choose to access. That was a fight six, seven months ago. That was the whole conversation.

19:53It was like, we're going to be your single pain. We're going to be the one that dominates. And I always thought that was weird because how do you make somebody get out of copilot when they're in Word? That just wasn't going to happen. People have realized in the MCP world, the lawyer is going to choose what the lawyers are going to choose. And so long as you build what's underneath it and that data right, they're going to get the right answers. And democratization also plays into kind of the attrition and everything. Also, one of the reasons that we've been joking about this in the press room a little bit, one of the reasons I think this kind of horizontalization of the AI models that's happened is because of the laffle market that's crazy.

20:34You spend, I told this story a lot, you spend$100 million bringing over a team from another firm. They say, oh, well, we don't use that product. We always prefer this one. What are you going to do? Tell them no. We've already spent$100 million bringing them over. Sure, you're going to have everything. And then you just have all of these different access points. And that's going to be interesting. And I think as a financial thing, if these companies built themselves on the idea they were going to win an exclusivity war, that's unfortunate for them. But if they built themselves trying to just compete for eyeballs, then they're in good shape.

21:07If I just go back to your recent point about pricing. So I think one of the other things that we've seen, which is really interesting. So obviously we talk a lot about the practice of law. We've been talking a lot about practice of law stuff. I think some of the real developments are in the business of law, and actually those are where perhaps the real wins are coming. And one of the really interesting things is about, so law firms typically don't understand value. They don't understand how the time is spent. I think we've seen some real progress in, you know, we laugh about the bill of Allah, you know, the bill of Allah, and talking about it.

21:35I've heard people speaking. It goes in peace, Trost, but, you know, there's a resurgence of the bill of Allah instead. But I feel that the technology is starting to get to the stage where we really can start to facilitate that because what they need is understanding. They need transparency. They need visibility of how they're doing, create work product and how they'll spend the time, which traditionally they haven't really had. And there's some quite cool tools now that can really show them what they're doing, how they're creating work product and how they might move to start to think about value, which I think firms are really horrible at.

22:06Is this where we cue the death of the bubble? The bubble of the bubble. We're stuck in the beginning. Should we do it? We actually think it's going to be actually the time. Was there anything? I mean, we all see a ton of products, and I'm sure we all sat through a ton of demos this week and briefings. I haven't barely been able to keep up the flow of press releases. I mean, this is probably one of the busiest, probably the busiest Iltaclan I can remember, just in terms of all of that. Anybody see anything unusual, interesting, something that really caught your eye? Sheryl Crow. Sheryl Crow. I was thinking more of a legal tech product.

22:43But I would say the adjuntic AI changes from access. It's just cool to have a tool that can understand the intended task somebody's trying to do. The industry is the start of these pretty fun workflows and there's 200 people who have to choose. It's quite ominous to have a tool that can understand that you're trying to do XYZ, like you need these highlights and these agents, these skills too, it's like exactly where we should be, the predefined work those kind of go to restore, in a sense. And I'm so impressed that we were able to get to this dynamic and trying to get as quickly as we're able to.

23:33I don't have the tools, so I don't know how well these things work. However, in theory, it seems like a huge upgrade from everybody just creating tools for very specific workflows, as opposed to just having the tool to understand what the attorney is after, and to understand how the attorney operates in his or her tone. I think context obviously is the one to do, and I think that progress in terms of personalisation, having actually an assistant that you don't have to start from scratch every time. I think that's really been a major milestone so that you can do a task and you can start to use it really as an assistant and obviously that eventually in a more agentic way.

24:28I think that's been, and that's just one thing we've seen that. We've talked about the one contest, but it's obviously a huge link in terms of people actually being able to use it and go back to it and it's a real number of good and leverage your own. The other thing I suppose is context has more to do with your own knowledge as well. So personalisation and context where it's really using your own knowledge and people are starting to focus on that heavily as we've all had these conversations about how you protect your IP. So people are becoming more sophisticated I think as we all go in terms of thinking about leveraging your own data and your own knowledge.

25:00which I think that's been a leap across a lot of times. There were two things that stood out to me. One was going back to what Joe said about everything opening up, then going through the MCPs and people not trying to be the platform of choice. I was surprised at the number of companies I talked to, there were two that were insisting that they were going to continue to keep everything locked down, which surprised me, given that it seemed to be that the trend was the opposite. and so I thought that it would be interesting to see in a year I mean I think it's already going the way that Joe said so it'll be interesting to see in a year where those companies are on that position but then the other thing there was one person that I talked to from Startup Valley Matt Kervis with Practi and it was really interesting because Practi is a tool that is designed to help lawyers set up subscription practices and it also assists like helping them determine like what flat bebeling looks like in a subscription practice and I think that it's an interesting and it's something that he's always talked about he sort of had a consulting practice before he launched this tool like eight months ago but I thought it was a really interesting timing to be releasing a tool like this because I think that it does a great job at filling this gap this pressure point that a lot of lawyers and law larger law firms in general are feeling about trying to figure out what pricing looks like and then the The only other thing I wanted to mention about pricing that I thought was really interesting was that one person I spoke to during a briefing told me that as law firms that serve corporate, that have corporations as clients, that what they're finding is that when they're trying to shift the law firms, like we're going to move to a flat fee, the corporations are saying, no, no, no, we like this hourly billing, especially when you reduce your hours with AI.

26:55And so there's this friction point that I thought was really interesting. So it'll also be really interesting to see how that plays out as well. Yeah. I was going to say a while ago when you were talking, Joe, about the move toward more integration and partnerships.

27:12Sometimes we forget how fast everything is moving. Most of us were in Boston last fall at the Clio conference, which was all about one provider covering everything from legal research to back office to everything we want. And now what, six months later, we're at a conference where not many people are talking about that anymore. Now they're all talking about, I'm going to integrate here and partner here and integrate there and partner there. So I think that we need to remember that six months from now, we've been talking about something completely different. But one of the things that I noted here that at least a few voices are now starting to say, we need a way to determine and analyze the cost-benefit ratio of using these tools because the day is coming.

28:01And I think even in one of the vendor meetings I was in, a very well-known CEO said, that's just reality. It's coming. and thus far there haven't been too many ways to assess, okay, how much more are we willing to pay to get another 1 % accuracy? And in the practice of law, as most of us know, I mean, you constantly make that decision. Clients constantly make that decision. What's it going to cost to file the summary judgment motion? You know,$35 ,000. What are the chances of winning? Maybe 5%. What the hell are you talking about? Don't waste my time and money. Don't file it. And that's the kind of thing that has been missing from this equation since the beginning, because we're all under this impression that you run AI, it can do anything and everything, doesn't matter, you don't get the right answer, put another prompt in, keep going until you get it, and it's been a free drive so far.

28:57I definitely think that that's true. I was going to change the topic just a bit. Back to the original question about what interesting thing I saw. One interesting thing I saw was, and it's not universal, but I, throughout this process, I hate the agentic thing. That's a buzzword. But my sense of it has always been why I never really liked it and didn't think it was a good fit for legal was, it's, you know, these GPTs just take the wheel. But it is not how most lawyers like to work, right? They don't want to just be like, oh, I typed in a goal and who knows what happened. I got something back. And for a long time, the way image vendors talked about it was, oh, you know, we can now automate because we're up to this point.

29:44Actually, we can go further. It was like a real push to like look at all that we can do. We can have this agent take you from, gets the complaint and it'll draft everything all the way to the end. And the check on it was, oh, there's a human in the loop, which, I mean, in real life. It was that big. Yeah. In real life, if you write the word, I'll keep you in the loop, that's what you write right before you don't invite them. So the in the loop thing was always weird to me because it is always, oh, well, we'll have a lot of trail at the end. And it's like, oh, yeah, I'm sure a partner is going to be a 50-page rentout of what all the agents said to each other.

30:17Sure, that's happening. It never made any sense to me. So I've been wondering about the psychology of it. What do you do as a design and user interface to encourage and make easy the process of human intervention at places where it's necessary and not where it isn't? And I did hear for the first time of going to all these shows over the last couple of years, I heard a couple of vendors talk about, you know, we have it like this such that you can click this button. Then you intervene on this agent at this point. And you can just look at this one. And I was like, oh, people are starting to have that psychology moment of the tech may always get faster.

30:57The human brain isn't getting faster. And so how do we make sure that the human lawyers are able to intervene in ways that are meaningful? and that's something that's been missing that I did start hearing the little rumblings of that I thought was useful We wrote a report my colleague Neil Cameron he's talked a lot about this in terms of orchestration and creating a spine so that there's some vendors here that do exactly that in terms of rather than so people have been sort of dictated to almost by the solutions I think and they're used in kind of an ad hoc way which is very hard to manage from a government's perspective.

31:38But actually, what they need more is a process and an understanding of where these tools fit in. And that's important from a government's perspective, but also to make sure that they are controlling the narrative and they're controlling how things are done. So you create this sort of spine and then you go right, and you need to be more fully layered about these things, I think, because there's this thing with cognitive surrender, which we can talk to you about, the whole human and the need doesn't really work because we're all just like overwhelmed by the quantity of work for starters and actually if you need to start creating for people it turns about right you do it like this and come in here and it's going to come in time when we're just sort of when we supervise it right rather than being creating a lot of this stuff and then I think that unless you have a way your way of doing things and this comes back to that IP thing as well but this is how we do it and we're a charge I think there's a really big risk of things being that will make those for the project.

32:34Yeah, there was at least one legal tech company that I actually talked to last week before the show, but I felt like they almost got stuck in their own words because they were talking about the idea that, you know, just go to our agent, tell them what you need done, and five minutes later you're going to get the finished product. And I kind of joked about, you know, does this mean the lawyer doesn't need to be there? The lawyer can just go off and get coffee or something? And they kind of thought about it for a second. Oh, no, no, no, the lawyer needs to be in the loop. But they never described the linear loop in terms of the whole workflow they're talking about.

33:05It's kind of funny. You know, and that's a really interesting question because when you talk about a human in a loo, what you're really talking about is somebody in the loop that has the judgment and discretion to take some actions. One of the vendors who came up with a product this week in an announcement, part of their marketing material said the product will perform, is engineered to perform at a level of a senior associate. When you think about that for a minute, you think, okay, what do we need a senior associate for? Now, what do we need a junior associate for? It used to be when all this first broke, the theory was you need to look at these tools as being able to perform sort of like a beginning of somebody right out of law school.

33:51And now we're senior associates. The trouble is, in 10 years, as some of us who are aging will be aging out, so to speak. who's going to replace us that has the kind of judgment or are we all going to just rely on AI and agents and really don't need a human in the loop? Not to say we don't need, not that. So there's actually this part on that came out of Stellar thing last week. And what they do is create a digital twin of folks and firms. And essentially, they want to take all their knowledge and expertise and create an online clone that can respond to emails and can interface with the Asian students.

34:50So to potentially answer that question, I think they'll just start to clone people. And you know, like, you know,

35:00like, digital world too, I mean, like, there, like, always has been a question of, like, how do you capture the expertise? and I think that's where some startups are trying to really focus on, just due to the concern of once the expertise is out, I'm ready to go to the BICEP. And my crew will actually oversee everything we have. Yeah, there's no unauthorized practice of law problems with digital twins. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this may be a get off my lawn approach here, but I have such a problem with this idea of even stating that your tool can do what a senior associate does. I mean, you're talking about a lawyer's got, what, five, six years experience if they're a senior associate.

35:52And I think what's missing from all of this is the analysis. There's this idea that these machines can analyze in the same way that a human can. And I can only speak from my experience. I practiced law for a decade in the litigation space. And so as a litigator, it's not just, you know, these machines spit out this brief. That's the starting point. You're not supposed to take that brief and just file over the court. It's essentially your research results. As far as I'm concerned, you need to pull all those cases, read them. and actually, I mean, there are very fine distinctions that are made in these cases based upon a single fact and you need to understand how that fact compares to the facts in your case and there's multiple facts in your case that kind of are a cascading function that actually ended up with the result in your, you know, whatever is being litigated and you need to find different cases for each of those facts and try and find ones that are analogous and explain why they're analogous And machines don't do that.

36:51They spit out legal principles, and they find some cases that sort of have similar facts. But you can't—this idea that the machines can just do what lawyers do, especially in the litigation space, which is what I know, is so inaccurate. And I just don't think that they're ever going to be able to do that. And so I don't know how this ends up getting reconciled. You know, the being able to perform at a level of senior associate statement bothers me a lot for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is we have a technology company, not a lawyer, not a legal professional, but a technology company trying to convince us all that that's what we want to have.

37:32We want to have technology and AI that will do what a senior associate does. And the fact that they're trying to convince us people that that's true, that that's a fact, is really worrisome to me. Because it just shows sort of an arrogance and a lack of responsibility for the whole notion of the need to have a training regime, a training program, and be thinking about it. It's like, let's forget all that shit and let's just build more AI. And the other thing is it doesn't touch on strategy. I mean, when you're a litigator or any type of, you know, negotiation is a strategy. There's strategy involved.

38:08And that's understanding the personalities in the room. You've got to understand opposing counsel. You've got to understand your judge. You've got to understand your client and how to navigate and also how to lay the groundwork across the case so that you have the strategic end result that you want. And sometimes that strategy is not just factual. You know, it's working with the people in the case and moving things along the way you need it to go. And I don't think machines ever can handle the strategy either in an effective way. Well, and this gets back to that ROI and token getting issue, right?

38:36So we already see, I think it does a lot of stuff, but it's stuff that if you're being responsible, you have to then edit on the back end and make these nuanced changes. And we're already starting, we've seen a couple of studies in different sectors of market. We're starting to see kind of a break between the vibes of AI and the data. I saw a survey where lots of people were like, yeah, we're using it, saving us a bunch of time. And then the data is showing that they were billing more times than our man. And if they're billing more times than our man, that means maybe it is that the AI is giving them new insights they wouldn't have otherwise had, and they chased those rabbit holes, and that's a good thing.

39:18But when you then have to pay by consumption, is that enough of a good thing to justify that? And I think that's all what's coming to a head. Who's going to pay? Yeah. Who's got to pay for the consumption? But I think also that's a big part of why you're seeing so many of these platforms move toward strengthening the data layer so that they can get better at exactly those kinds of tasks. I mean, I totally agree with what you're saying in terms of, you know, these are not at the level of a senior associate. But they definitely, you know, I mean, that documents is doing a lot with bringing in case law as well as access to documents in Topps and Reuters.

39:53announcing this week the development of their own model, which I thought that was really one of the most more interesting stories of the week, just because I think it portends something, a direction we're going to be going in. If you didn't see that, I mean, Thompson Motors announced Thompson, which is their own LLM that they've developed for a little bit. The benchmarking that they've shown so far, which is all they did, it's their own internal benchmarking, but shows it as really performing comparably to the frontier models, and in some cases better when based on the Thompson Lawyers data set.

40:32So, you know, that's an interesting trend. So just quite quickly to go back to the trading aspect. Like, I went to a special model, and they were talking about the concerns over what they called ride lawyering, where people just don't really prompt. They have a tool, they have a complaint, and they upload the complaint of the tool, and they say, please write me a story. But people don't take that approach. You're essentially handing over all your judgment callers to the tool. And you've seen a rise in a vibe or two. And these tools, people probably have higher expectations of what they can do, but they need a ton of expertise and actions too.

41:29I think there is a disconnect between what people say these tools can do and how much training and how much content. and just the details and instructions that people really need to hand over to have these tools do the stuff that they're looking to do. Sorry. And to turn to ELL, the proprietary LLM stuff, Parv2 came out you know, like, I think, Pryter, um, um, AI and other as well. And it's interesting, because, like, they created it, I believe, on the Kining 3 Chinese model. And it's interesting to see folks creating stuff on those, just because we don't, you know, it looks like they will be under the target of, like, the DOJ, and if we still have access to all of those too, you know, like AR Shaker, they're really easy to play around the two, and like they've also released a few data machine cards.

42:50You know, I don't have the technical

42:55expertise to give out to them, however, I was at a panel with a few data scientists who were like, you know, these don't really, you know, like these aren't up to par and they have a ton of questions too. So like it's interesting how, you know, these companies are trying to be as transparent as they can with their proprietary AI systems as well. And I would be super interested to like have a room full of like data scientists kind of like go into all those benching networks and you know, just like take this truck out. I think going back to some of you speaking about senior work, everyone's points about senior associates, I think that we've got to remember that this technology is at the top of the hill in terms of its capability.

43:42I personally think that it's going to we all think it's going to change everything right now and I think it will radically change the way that North delivered. I think that it will be capable of doing, I don't think it probably is right now, but the work that senior associates do, I think it will change the work products for firms ultimately delving new roles. We're already seeing roles that didn't exist in legal engineers. I think that firms are going to start productising the work that they do. I think that perhaps they're going to be providing what they've not provided. They're going to become, people talk about them becoming intelligence businesses.

44:16They're going to start becoming much more sophisticated. Technology is going to enable them to be more proactive rather than reactive. I think it's going to change everything personally. I don't think we're there yet, but remember how the technology is improving a rate of knots and what it could do last year is not comparable to what it can do now. But I do think that Mickey's point about the judgment, I think you're completely right, particularly in some area, actually in any sector, about litigation corporal. But I feel like it's going to be, as long as you treat it as a starting point, not a final point, and I think that would be a mistake because you're completely right.

44:51I think about, you know, we need to make sure that he's still leveraging that human judgment, which I don't see that that being, you know, that they are being able to replace that in a time soon. But I guess it's just like working out how much you handle them to tech. And I don't think it's there yet. Anybody have a question? Anybody in the audience want to bring up anything or ask us about something? Yeah. Yeah, I'll try and make it. So we're talking about the digital twins and the clones. Who owns the clone? So he forgot. I have a hard time believing that attorneys are going to continue with this idea of like, yeah, institution, you can have my knowledge.

45:32Because that's my swatikare. So I did talk to these products and the verb essentially knows the clone. They don't actually call it clone. They call it a twin. And the twin technically only has access to what the firm will use. So like it has, you know, built in or directions to like the twin is essentially. actually owned the high-d firm to kind of like share the aesthetics in the college inside the firm. However, the startup told me that there was one firm who was trying to have the twins of the clones to interact with clients because the clients didn't want to pay a high rate to talk to a senior partner.

46:23partners so like you know the uh the twins of the clones could um potentially um you know um like responded emails and they could charge you cheaper or right to the shill that the trees felt fully owned and you know restricted to holiday um you don't have a it's an event don't want it It's a fairly new, I don't know, whatever. It came out of stealth with some, you know, with a fairly large ovening round and with some pretty orange, you know, few seeds behind it as well. And, you know, it's been a few firms with a few very, I would call,

47:08auric, and it has a few of the animal 50 firms and it told me it's really trying to grow of the Amalur 50 space, and it's seeing like height in hand as well. And I take that with a great salt of the berries. You know, it has, you know, at least a handful of like Amalur 50 clean eyes. Yeah, well, the problem is, I think, that. Because if you're a lawyer in your prime, why would you give the firm that information when you're about to get$100 million and move to another firm, right? Like that's not how they want to do. It's going to be founders of the firm who are retiring maybe. You know, maybe they'll be okay with it, having a digital David Boyce or something like that.

47:56But if that's what's happening, like a dead-hand lawyer years after that, that has absolutely got all sorts of unauthorized practice of law problems in my mind. And I think the regulators of our profession probably will agree with that. And I think the reason we say VCs are kind of behind it, and I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think one of the things that is going to happen, as we talked earlier about VC money coming into legal, is we're going to start seeing a lot of stuff influenced by the deeply misanthropic worldview of the people who have that money in Silicon Valley, who really believe the end state of all of this should be to turn all four people into the batteries from the matrix.

48:36and if that's the people who are coming in, that's why all the messaging from that investor room is like it's going to replace senior associates, it's going to replace this because they view this whole thing as an opportunity to get rid of humans that they have to pay and we as a profession understand that that's not right but it's going to influence everything and that's where all the money is. I think they watched them and then moved to the Bahamas so the twins will work and every other one is just get to go and get someone. And that actually touches on a point that we haven't mentioned and is often not mentioned, and that's the clients.

49:14And one of the things that worries me, particularly when you see marketing materials that say inform at the level of a senior associate, most of the clients are not as sophisticated as we all are, as you all are, and they hear this stuff and they believe it. I used to practice insurance defense law, and I can tell you, carriers are looking for every single way to reduce fees. And I can just see them saying, I'm not going to pay for a senior associate. You know, use your AI bot for all this stuff. And then when we say, like Nikki pointed out, this is what we do. So I'm judged that this is our insight.

49:56We say that under the background, with the background of a lot of excesses that went on over the years. with the billable hour model where people would say, you really need a lot of judgment of the senior partner and$1 ,000 an hour and blah, blah, blah, and why? And so that's kind of BS. And so we got these various pressures that I just fear are going to result in clients demanding things that are in excess of what the technology can do, but not really caring. And I think that's a really interesting question from an employment law standpoint too because you're going to find, you know, associates have no they're going to come in without the ability to really negotiate.

50:41The firm's going to dictate what they can and can't do with their knowledge. But it's more interesting from like a, they're having to lateral people in which they're absolutely going to have to do because they're not going to have associates to promote. So when you're lateraling partners or senior associates in, what is, they're going to have some leverage and they're going to be able to negotiate what happens to their knowledge within the firm. So I think that might be interesting. And it's going to impact the employment agreements. I'm not sure how many firms actually have employment. They must.

51:12I don't really know. But it's going to impact the content of employment agreements. And it's going to be something that's probably pretty hot and negotiated because that's what you take with you and you ladder all out like Joe referenced. And you take the client base and you make a lot more money somewhere else because you're bringing your knowledge with you and your experience. So that's an interesting question about that concept. I just actually found the article I wrote on it, and it's called Twin One on AI. That's the name of the company. And the seed funding grant also saw funding fund work as well.

51:49So the firm is also invested in this startup and that goes to show that firms really want to kind of strap this inside the firm as well. And that tends to raise all the questions we raise here, although it's something we'll have to pay closer to the Chinese because this is happening in real time. I think it will help to overcome culturally. Firms have been really bad about, you know, knowledge being stays with one person. I know that perhaps you could argue you've studied, you've earned the right to build your own brand, and I do agree with that. But in terms of knowledge sharing, firms culturally are really bad, as you know, at sharing, and I think things tend to get locked in.

52:35I think that's been really problematic. And I do wonder whether this will help with that, that, you know, it will mean you could start to really leverage that knowledge across the firm for the benefit of everybody, which I think firms have been, you know, it's been a real challenge. You know, people don't have to share. I do wonder if it will help with that. Yeah, that was a great question. Is there anybody else in the audience who have any questions? Hi. Hi. Well, Ferenc and Farno are getting at VOAI. You were talking about observations earlier, and as I was walking the vendor floor, I was noticing that many of the vendors were talking about return on investment.

53:11If you buy your product, you can get this to review. return on investment. And what I think is missing from the conversation is that so many law firms that can potentially purchase these products aren't measuring things today. So how are they going to prove, we were just, that this vendor's product and housing through their return? Yeah, so a lot of vendors are talking about return on investment, law firms aren't measuring, monitoring that, so how do they demonstrate that ROI? That's a darn good question. I think we've seen some really interesting, Harvey did it in its company update, is providing a benchmarking now.

53:50I think we've seen vendors trying to help, you know, you need to, it's quite difficult. I've seen firms who take interesting decisions in terms of, well, we'll just get the technology and we haven't really got a sort of, we haven't really got anything that we're trying to achieve, but our competitors have got it. And we haven't really got any specific use cases in the ROI. I think that that's becoming more challenging, particularly it will become more challenging with the changing costs. I think that we're seeing firms becoming more sophisticated in terms of, right, we've got this problem, and does it solve it?

54:18So then it can be a bit more sophisticated in terms of going back to old principles of how you should be using buying technology, but also the vendors that did started to step up. And Harvey, for one, is providing some really interesting continuous benchmarking stats, which I think will go towards helping with demonstrating our own work. That's their intention. I think really the question is not what the law firm return on investment is. It's what's the client return on investment from the law firm usages. When you think about it, law firms that bill by an hour, their return on the investment means use less AI and bill more hours.

54:59It's like a minus return on the investment. But for the quiet, you know, they can say, yeah, law firm, if you use these tools, I expect my bills to go down by 10%. That's the return on their investment, so to speak. I mean, there have been a couple of surveys that were put on recently on this question of law firms are buying all this stuff, but they're not using it. They're not seeing the value out of it. And, I mean, you know, again, I've heard a lot this week that the largest firms, they're just buying everything and putting it out there. And mid-sized firms maybe have some more difficult decisions to make because they don't have those kinds of budgets.

55:35But there is a lot of – there seems to be some of these survey evidence that firms are not measuring it, but to the extent they are measuring it, they're not really seeing value out of some of these products. To be deeply cynical, there is no – it's a buzzword that everyone knows they're supposed to talk about it, so we're all going to talk about it, but we have no way of measuring it. And that's the cynical data. And the more generous take is, like I was saying earlier, these studies that say, yeah, you're using AI, you feel like you're saving time, that you're really billing more time. Well, maybe that's because it's sending you down new paths you wouldn't have gone down otherwise.

56:12And maybe that's valuable, too, but that's hard to measure. And so, yeah, I think everyone knows all AI matters and it's all Biden-based. I'm shocked that you're deeply cynical, Joe. So that's fair. We've only got a couple of minutes. I wanted to ask what people thought of the Gaylord this year because I'm hearing people, some of us have hated this place with a passion, and yet I'm hearing people warming up to it this year. You were one of those people, right? You were like, this is not so good. Because the other large legal tech conferences are moving to convention centers in the large cities like New York and Chicago.

56:48And that is, that's just, there's nothing warm about the convention centers. and then, or even like interior design-wise, they're not pleasant. And then you have to walk from hotels near the convention center. So if you need a break during the day, it's a lot harder to escape. And even though this is a lot of walking, it's a beautiful environment, all things considered, even though it's a little surreal to be in a bubble. And sometimes have no access to food, even though there's restaurants everywhere, because everything's booked. But I find this a thoroughly more pleasant experience after having been in the convention center.

57:23So now I've completely changed my mind about the Gaylord facilities. Any other thoughts on Gaylord? I was lost the entire week. All right. We are just about at the top of the hour. Any closing thoughts? Anything else you have you wanted? Closing. I think we should return on Friday. They should just do it with the individual clowns while we all came in. I like it. I love it. All right. Well, thanks to all of you for coming here today. Really appreciate it. And like I said, catch our show Friday in Little Tech Weeks. Search it on Google, and we'll find out how to sign up for it. Let's see.

58:04Let's see. Let's see. Let's see.

58:19Best time here. Best time here. Best time.

58:30Some little things I can send them to you. Oh, thanks. Oh, thank you. Sure. Everybody. Oh, that'd be great. Let me stop my recording.