10/09/2026: California new AI disclosure law, Ropes' new AI experiment, and more

0:03Welcome, everybody, to Legal Tech Week for October 9th, 2026. This is the show where we talk about what's been happening in legal tech and innovation over the last week. And I am Bobby Ambrosi. And we haven't done the Zoom Friday show. Oh, there's Stephanie joining. There's Stephanie. We're already live. Stephanie's here. Thanks, Stephanie. So, yeah, just saying we haven't done this show for a couple of weeks because we've been kind of on the road doing some live editions. We did one at Kaleidoscope a couple of weeks ago, the 8 a.m. conference, which is posted on YouTube. And we actually just somehow got posted.

0:47We did one live at Relativity Fest last week, And that only just got posted today because of something stupid I did. But it is now up there on YouTube. And so if you didn't get to see us the last couple of weeks here, you can go back to YouTube and watch those live recordings. And meanwhile, good to be back here. I just got back from the Masters Legal AI Conference in Dallas, where I met even more people who say they watch the show every week. So it's always great to hear from all these people who tell us they watch our show. So without further ado, let's get to introducing our panelists who are here today.

1:37Nikki, you want to kick it off? Sure.

1:41Niki Black: My name is Nikki Black. i'm the principal legal insight strategist at 8am the team behind la pay my case case peer and backwise and i write legal tech columns for aba journal above the law and the daily record and i'm looking forward to talking about everything super intelligence related today present company excluded uh reese Sure. So hi, everybody. I'm Rhys Ipshan. I'm the editor-in-chief of Eagle Tech News. And I also just found out this week that I'm also an enemy of the state. Surprise, surprise. So please go easy on me. because you use the word artificial intelligence is that the words or for other oh no no no no oh no we didn't say that we didn't say that out loud okay okay okay okay we're all enemies of the state now i guess i didn't say it i didn't say it not me okay um well uh what you what you can do Steve is introduce yourself.

2:53Sure. I'm Steve Embry. I write the blog Tech Law Crossroads, and I also write for Above the Law. All right. And our correspondent from Finland, Stephanie Holkins.

3:07Niki Black: Hello. I'm already an enemy of the state because I'm not living in the U.S. Stephanie Wilkins, Director of Content at Legal Tech Hub. I'm actually currently on a very large boat between Stockholm and Helsinki and I make no promises about my Wi-Fi holding so if I freeze or disappear that is why but I'll try my best to hang out for the hour okay watch out for fjords or whatever those would be uh and Victor very rocky on the boat hi everyone my name is Victor Lee I am assistant managing editor for the ABA journal covering business of law and technology I wonder how this super intelligent thing, how far this goes back I mean, do we have to rename that Spielberg movie from 2000 something, do we call it SI now, I mean, I don't know Maybe And last but not least, someone who has long been an enemy of the state Joe Patrice Fair enough Joe Patrice, I'm from Above the Law and the Thinking Like a Lawyer podcast I'm, yeah I also wrote a little bit about the super intelligence thing this week.

4:15And as for being on the road, we have been on the road, I think, as we've already established. And we are continuing to be. There are more conferences that we're going to between now and Halloween. And I had a travel story that kind of came up. I don't ever get a plane to Boston because it's so easy to take trains. and I found the train that I wanted and I was like, oh, this is the train. And I didn't buy my ticket because, you know, I knew for Clio what time I probably wanted my train. They had a ton of availability. And I went to pull the trigger yesterday on my actual schedule and learned that they have canceled almost all the trains between New York and Boston.

5:00They are now only running three trains a day, two of which are sold out. They're running one at 5.30 a.m., which I am not going to take. But, yeah, they are doing construction, and they are just willy-nilly canceling all of the trains throughout the days, especially on a Sunday, which is when I was planning to do it. So I have a way to get there now, so I'm fine. It's probably even a better way than taking the train. But, yeah, I had banked on the idea that Amtrak wasn't lying to me about trains, but they were. Wow. I had no idea. That's fascinating to know. I did not know that. They're rebuilding a bridge that both New Jersey Transit and Amtrak run.

5:45And because of this rebuilding project, for five weeks, basically skeleton service on both of those. So here we are. Good Lord. You know, you can still take the bus between New York and Boston. It's not too bad. And they usually have Wi-Fi in the bus. I got it better. I can go directly from here. So it's fine. But yeah, thank you to Suffolk University who will drive me from here to there. Oh, that's right, too. Was that the crazy story you're going to change here? No, the crazy story was that all the trains got canceled. But now I will allow Suffolk's debate team to drive me because they will already be here and they can just take me that night.

6:28All right. And Steve actually is already in Boston, but he's going to leave before Cleo, I'm sure. and get back. I'm going to leave before Clio and then return. All right. And I'm always telling people I'm in Boston, but I'm actually not anywhere now, like an hour from Boston. So people, I never tell people where I actually am because they never, most people have never heard of where I actually live. So I just say, I live in Boston, but I'm in Rockport. All right. So I've got some stuff to talk about. You know, So, Kurt, I don't know, is there anything more we want to say about REL Fest? I mean, we did a show on the last day of REL Fest, and a number of us were there, and we did one with a guest, Mr.

7:14David Horrigan, sitting in. I missed the party where people showed up with David Horrigan masks, apparently, at the costume ball. Joe, you were one of them, right? Didn't you get a Horrigan mask? I sure did. The Horigettes? The Horigettes, yeah. Yeah, no, I had one. It was great. And by the way, for those in the audience that have not listened to it, we did discuss our usual topic at our panel at REL Fest, which was the food. We did. Thanks to you, Steve, we did talk about it. No. And somewhat remarkably, no one in the audience stomped out. In fact, they all seem more interested in that than the rest of the stuff we were talking about.

8:05I have to ask, too, for the people who didn't enjoy the food at the conference, why didn't you enjoy the conference food, I suppose? It was probably one of the best food spreads. And they had pretty good healthy stuff, too, which is really hard to find at these conferences. And I always feel horrible every time I go because I'm just eating brisket for three days straight, which is tasty, although it'll kill you. well they had like they had like convention version healthy food like like it was okay i i thought the kaleidoscope had classical conference a week before if we're gonna get into food reviews had much better food and i agree and much sort of uh broader array of of healthy and sort of creative healthy food as opposed to uh like a convention caterer's idea of healthy food But yeah, I mean, it was fine.

9:10It was fine. It's just like, you know, I don't eat meat, so I complain when it's like overly meat and not a lot of other stuff. But it did have other options, so I can't complain. I didn't starve for sure. You have to remember 2.8 a.m. was at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, and Relativity Fest was in our good old Hyatt Regency on Wacker Avenue in Chicago. Yes. Most of us can navigate. People have called Ohio to see the win of Chicago.

9:47I did get like the best hotel room I've had at a conference in a long time. Yeah, you had actually again, the Kaleidoscope had good conferences, good hotel rooms. Kaleidoscope had great hotel rooms, but they had great hotel rooms for everybody. You got a room that like while the rest of us had normal rooms at the Hyatt, you had the presidential suite or something i did i had a super great room and then i checked out of it early because i was going to fly out of o 'hare and then my flight got canceled so i ended up staying in a fleabag hotel over here while i gave away i actually didn't check out i gave my room to somebody who may be in the audience here today who needed an extra an extra night of room and so So hopefully they enjoyed my luxurious suite for a night.

10:34All right. Well, oh, no, but yeah, all right. The reason I brought up the Relativity Fest is just because, you know, again, there were a couple of things that came out of that that we haven't, we did talk about it a little bit. I don't know whether we want to dive into it anymore at all. But I still thought it was I still I've been thinking a lot about the the I was just at this master's conference where a lot of people were talking about MCPs and Claude and all of that, which everybody's talking about everywhere. I thought it was really interesting that Phil Saunders, the CEO of Relativity, at the press briefing we did in the last day there, talked about the fact about, kind of talked about the idea of how they also are going to be kind of doubling down on partnering with Anthropic and OpenAI going forward, and less so with like RV and Legora, which almost, I don't want to say it seemed counterintuitive.

11:31I think it seems very intuitive, but one of his comments was something to the effect that, you know, we strongly believe that we're pretty much getting to the point where every lawyer is going to have on their desktop one of those two, OpenAI, you know, ChatGPT or Claude, not necessarily Harvey or Legora. and I thought that was really an interesting thought and I mean, it just kind of doubles down I think what a lot of people have been thinking and talking about but this whole idea that lawyers are just working in CLOD and working in open AI more and more. Does that anyone else think that was interesting?

12:13Go ahead, Victor, a second. Please. Oh.

12:19Niki Black: Am I, can you all actually see and hear me? We can. this you're kind of going like this you know it's kind of like oh my gosh this boat is actually kind of way rockier than i thought um but yeah i mean because i was the one that asked that question because i remember last year they were very like surprisingly open about the fact that they were talking to both harvey and lagora with the goal of picking one of them for an exclusive partnership and then we never really heard anything else that's why i actually not i wasn't surprised at their answer because you know in their opening uh keynote they had slides of all the different you know frontier model logos that they connect with and everything so i kind of assumed that was going to be the answer but um yeah they just said priority even though they admitted that like most big firms probably have either harvey alert or the gora they're like every lawyer has one if not more of the frontier models on their desktop so yeah i don't know it's interesting i mean part of me is like well i guess if you i don't know i mean why join another big legal tech company when you could just join the other big ones i don't know it was interesting i mean i i guess i wasn't i should have expected the frank answer i got because that's how phil's press conferences always are but yeah that was i was kind of surprised about that too i mean it it makes sense because, you know, most people, if they don't have Quad or ChatGPT on their desk at the office, they certainly do when they go home.

13:45And so people are just used to using those tools. So it does make some sense on the part of relativity to make that, to enter into those kind of partnerships, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know if you wrote it, Steve, or Bob, but, like, I think when Google, was it Google Gemini? Or when, was it Google or Microsoft? When they release their lawyers, whatever, the lawyers edition of their – one of you guys said something about how Google's primacy might give them an advantage over the other vendors. And I remember thinking, well, who cares about that? I mean, if Harvey and Legora are better products, then why should that matter?

14:26But then, you know, kind of, kind of, you know, after hearing what they said at Relativity Fest and whatnot, it's kind of, well, I guess, you know, if people are used to using Google for the searches, they're not going to want to then, like, take that extra step of, like, you know, paying for these other companies, learning how to use them. You know, it's easier to just kind of figure it out, how to do it on something that you're already comfortable with. So, I guess maybe just people being lazy or people just going with what they're used to. And that kind of, again, shows how, you know, how ChatGPT kind of cornered the market in a lot of ways because they were the first ones off the map, first ones off the block, and everyone just kind of used them for a lot of things.

15:04You know, they're probably my go-to for things just because I'm used to using it. So that made it a lot. So ultimately when I thought about it like that, I was like, oh, that does make a lot of sense. Yes, me too. But it's also true when you say cornered the market. It was a market of basically nothing to the extent that 98 % of people still use the free version. And it's like they dominated the like the mind space of that's how you interact with AI and what you do. But as far as market, it didn't really get anywhere, which as far as monetizing things, which these companies now desperately need to figure out some way of doing.

15:40I think it is interesting because like the Harvey's and Lagora's of the world have a plan to make money, wrap up all this stuff that is changing so quickly. and you can build stuff for lawyers that people will pay for. So the idea that you would go around that back to the source is interesting. I wonder if the logic is, and I'm not entirely sure technically how true this is, but I wonder if there's some logic that if you coordinate and make sure your product is optimized for the main, you know, for the source, that that actually can bring benefits to you to the extent that when it gets wrapped up, it provides better answers too.

16:25If you've optimized how your product works with Gemini or whatever, when Gemini is part of a perplexity computer or whatever it is, then maybe it helps. I don't know. But it was interesting that they were going to the source. Yeah. And for anybody who's listening to the audio version of this show, we have now been joined by Julie Shabawale. If you're wondering why people are saying hi, Julie, all of a sudden in the middle of the show. And Julie, you want to say a quick hello and introduce yourself?

16:59Niki Black: Hello. I'm the resident Canadian on the panel. For all those listening to the audio. Yeah. We have a lot of people listening to the audio. We have the audio version of this goes out. So when Bob made himself an enemy of the state by using incorrectly the term artificial intelligence, air quotes there, Julie, as a Canadian, was already an enemy of the state. So we're just catching everybody up on where we are. All right. So she can say that freely. She can use that phrase freely. Well, no, but she can't say Lake Ontario, though, because otherwise she would become a real enemy. all right so steve we just got you offered what were you gonna say we're gonna say something i can't remember now oh i know what i do i do remember and i think i raised this as the panel is it is gives me some some pause when you have a chat gpt and a clod running the mcps for all these different products they're sort of like controlling the the highway in a sense.

18:08And so what they could do with that to make money because they're not making money now could cause some problems in the future because if your only option is ChatGPT or Claw to access 25 legal vendor superintelligence products, choose those words carefully, then that sort of of beholdens you to chat GPT and Claude. Yeah, although, I mean, a lot of the MCPs will work with, we can work with Harvey. I mean, it's not, they're not necessarily just restricted to working with Claude or whatever it is. But it was funny, I talked to a developer earlier this week who has had a product that's a platform.

18:58It's a practice-related platform. It's been around for a couple of years. But he said he's basically just like he's just like doubling down on MCPs on the theory that he he he it makes no sense for his company to continue to focus on sort of building the tech back end because Claude Anthropic and OpenAI are going to keep building better and better tech. And it makes much more sense for him to be developing the kind of the tools and the resources that can be accessed using that tech through the MCP into what he has. And I thought it's an interesting way to kind of think about it. It's like he's basically telling his customers, you're going to get the best experience by just coming to me through MCP rather than directly onto my platform.

19:54you have like a like weird situations where the like the ai suppliers are like you have to essentially like you know host your tools on like us you know and it's you know it's weird because like at the first instance they're trying to become like the the platform or like the ecosystem system for everybody. So you could have like, you know, like Harvey and Google, or I suppose, like, and just, you know, like go through like chat, JBT or Claude. You know, it's weird though, because like there are a few companies like Harvey and TR who are, you know, telling people they're creating their own large language models.

20:41And it's actually just like, you know, tool-making and fine-tuning and customizing the open source ones. However, like, they're saying it's way more targeted to Eagle, and it's also cheaper. and I always like grapple with the question of like will like you know like a Claude or a place like a Harvey. Harvey is really tailored to the industry it has deep you know connections to the industry and the Ropic could throw cash at the problem and do this aim although do they really onto and is the industry going to give them enough revenue to really be sustainable too? We always question how Harvey can pay in itself and kind of like pay back the investors it has and compared to Harvey, Anthropic and OpenAI are like trillion dollar companies.

21:59So like it's, you know, it's a question of like where this is going to go. And are there, you know, Harvey's and the TRs who are trying to create their own path? You know, is that... It's going to be really interesting to see how that all plays out. I think somebody from the chat said define trillion. Tons of fake cash and cryptocurrency, I guess, in the back it's like the scooge make duck uh cold alt i i think one thing when we talk about

22:32Niki Black: these issues that i i think we need to to lay out up front is are we talking about large firms are we talking about everybody else because solo small and even mid-sized firms can't afford harvey you know depending on how you define mid-size um but you know let's just say solo small and slightly bigger than small firms can't afford harvey they can't afford lagora they're all using chat gpt and claude and then the tools they're already using that have these tool ai built into it or else have mcps into those tools and so they're two completely different markets and i think that you have to separate them when you're talking about these and also understand that solo smalls uh solo and smalls are the majority of lawyers it's just that's not where the majority of the money is in terms of what's getting spent which is a good point i was thinking relative sorry sort of relativity's point that they believe that you know everyone's going to have at least one of these frontier model tools on their desktop and i think that probably is true the smaller firms are more likely to have you know a paid subscription to chat gpt or anthropic than than harvey like the ones you're saying that can't afford that i think that is true sorry julie go ahead.

23:45Niki Black: No, that's okay. And I was going to say there's also going to be a sweet spot emerging between the small solos and the large firms for firms that do want to do their own thing through open source. Sometimes that is the cheaper alternative. And I know some midsize firms here in Canada that are actively exploring this because Harvey is the most expensive. like right now we're talking about the two polars right the the small solos who obviously can't afford all of these and they're just going to use the paid chat gpt model and then of course the you know the harveys and what tr is doing and and the others i think there's a in between there does stephanie just freeze for you guys

24:35Niki Black: a perfect freeze it's a perfect freeze yeah that was amazing oh no I unfroze her no Stephanie you were frozen at the best moment I think she still is I think she's just frozen at a different moment now she's recovering from her drink I wish I had done a screen grab oh yeah video what am i saying

25:07anyway julie did you finish we're all distracted by stephanie drinking oh my point was if the um

25:15Niki Black: as as open stores and developing your own private llms becomes cheaper i wonder if that becomes another entry for some people to come into the marketplace to like I'm just thinking of not bar associations but like you know if a group of solos or smalls or you know got together and actually did something like that I think right now it's cost prohibitive and also the expertise is a factor but it but I do know mid firms mid-sized firms who are doing this so that to me is the one little other question mark here. If it gets cheaper to do your own thing, then why even go with either of the models that we just talked about?

25:57Nikki, you'll be glad to know that my wife was on a CLE program this week. Not a speaker. She attended a CLE program this week on AI for small law firms. And two of the speakers were praising 8am for their MCP integrations as the first law practice management platform to have that kind of MCP integration. So, you know, that demonstrates, I think, the kind of interest in that. I wonder if we should move on to some other topics. We've got lots of other stuff to talk about this week, including the fact that California has launched, has not launched, has signed into law this new AI disclosure law.

26:38And in both both Steve and Nikki brought it up in there in our little log for stories to talk about this week. So maybe Steve could kick it off and then Nikki could share her thoughts. I know Nikki, you wrote about it, too. But Steve, you want to kick it off? Yeah. Yeah. And I did not write about it. I was just I cited an article and then I went and actually looked at the at the provisions of the of the of the law. And it's like what so often happens here is a legislature or a judge or a bar association just goes overboard, at least that's in my opinion. So it starts out by saying an attorney shall not delegate the practice of law to generative – well, I guess – well, this is California, so they can say artificial intelligence because they're already enemies.

27:32So that's one thing. What does that mean? And then it's got a provision that you cannot enter confidential, personal identifying or other non-public information into a Gen AI tool. And the rules, the ethical rules, aren't quite that strong. I mean, if you get your client's consent, you can do that. And there may be many times where it's borderline and the client says, well, how much money can we save doing that? And you say, well, we can probably save, you know,$5 ,000 and the client says, just do it. You know, so I thought that was a little bit overreaching. But then the one that I think concerned me the most was that it provides that any lawyer who files anything in court with a citation that came from an AI tool has to personally identify or personally certify that he or she has read the citation, read the case, and that it's a real case and stands for the proposition for which it's submitted.

28:46And that's pretty strong because it would suggest that you, if you're a senior partner in a law firm and you sign the pleading, then you've got to go read it. You can't rely on a paralegal. You can't rely on an associate. I would assume that you could not even rely upon a tool like ClearBrief to sight check those. So that really sort of changes the way, the cost factor of using artificial intelligence at all. Because if you've got a$400 an hour partner who now has to spend five hours site checking every case and can't use any tools to do it, you might as well just not use AI at all. So I thought it was a bit of an overreaction.

29:35And the other thing it provides is an arbitrator cannot, if they put it, delegate any part of their decision-making process to any generative AI tool, which I know AAA has been providing tools that do some of that. So, you know, to me, it was once again sort of an overreaction to what's going on and trying to to straightjacket rules that really hamstring lawyers in a lot of ways. Yeah.

30:09Niki Black: It just really surprised me because why are we picking on the lawyers? I mean, there's a lot of laws you can pass and I don't know why they honed in on the lawyers. And well, you know what? I think I probably do know why now that I'm saying this out loud. that real housewives of new of orange county was it no beverly hills who was the wife i know the wife and the what was the guy's name that lawyer who did all that unethical stuff and completely hills i thought that yeah i'm mixing yeah it was one of the real housewives i don't know but come you know he did so much unethical stuff you're already sure yeah yeah and cahoots would like other taking people the ethics people on the ethics boards out to extravagant dinner.

30:51Niki Black: So that's probably what's happening here. It's just them continuing to try to show that they're super ethical by passing this law. But I mean, my article, I'll share it in the comments. I mean, I think that it's just over the top. There's no reason to be passing laws that simply reiterate or they barely go further than what you see in most of the ethics opinions. There's one or two things that are just stupid. You know, Steve raised some of them. And then the other one that I thought was stupid was the obligation to disclose the use of AI. And that means every lawyer basically has to just say, have a standard, I've used AI.

31:28Niki Black: Because some tool that they've touched in the process of creating that brief had AI embedded in it. And they probably don't even know it. So they just all have to say, I'm using AI. And it's so stupid to require them to say that in the first place because it's everywhere. It's embedded in everything. And it just, I can't stand when ethics committees write opinions that don't need to be said. This is way past that. Like, what are we passing laws for, specific to lawyers telling them what they can and can't do with this new emerging technology? It's such, I think it's ridiculous. And I said as much in my articles, just with a little more, a little less over the top.

32:08I attended and I wrote an article about a judicial panel at Relativity Fest. And Judge Goddard was on that panel, and she talked a lot about the frequency illusion. And her point was, look, how many gazillion pleadings are filed every day in every court as compared to how many hallucinations are reported? So, yeah, there's a lot of hallucinations reported. But if you compare that number to the total picture, you know, start thinking like you, Nikki. I mean, like, you know, so a plane crashed. So now we're going to, you know, we're not going to have any planes anymore because it's, you know, it's just it's it's crazy.

32:50I mean, it's completely over the top, at least in my opinion. Yeah. But they passed it.

32:57Niki Black: yeah one thing that troubles me i don't know if this was mentioned in your article nikki it's um like the bigger professional regulation questions are popping in my head because this is like a total is like the legislature is coming in and saying you know we're going to do the ethics committee's job essentially we're going to do the bar association's job as well and we're going to be super specific in legislation on what lawyers can and can't do so it's almost like uh implicit um understanding that the california bar can't manage this i i i'm not trying to like make this a bigger deal i'm just thinking like why why do we even need legislation in the first place and then we've got such stupid legislation um and so it's like we don't actually trust the regulators or the associate the bar associations to do their job i know i know we just talked about that scandal um from real housewives but like it actually brings up a really big point because it's california i don't want anyone else to copy this legislation please don't it's very terrible precedent and um these are all things as you guys have mentioned we've talked about this many times as a lawyer, you already have the ethical obligation to make sure that what you're submitting is correct to court.

34:22Niki Black: You don't need new laws or ethics opinions or anything to say that. And at the same time, this law really clearly shows we've lost the PR game here. Lawyers are not always good at the PR game and the hallucination stories continue and they continue to be really bad. And so I agree. Percentage wise, it is a very small percent that are actually, you know, getting caught in all of that. And I'm sure the actual human mistakes compared to AI is even greater. But we are in a hyper media landscape and we just have not had an adequate response to this. Like, this is very clear to me that we haven't. As somebody who talks to people who are not in legal tech and when they ask me what I write about, this is usually the first or second question they ask me.

35:14Niki Black: What's going on with those hallucinations and the lawyers? I just heard this story about this judge who did this. Like, that's what happens. And we collectively have not had a good answer. So this actually really worries me because like, this went through super fast. Where was the consultation? Where was like the time for, you know lawyers to be like this is california like where was the time for people who actually work in tech to be like hey wait a minute there's other ways to do this and amend that no it's just like we're here i had a much more cynical take on this like my my my cynical take was that um we all know gavin newson's running for president in a couple years um and obviously this bill has been i mean like like i mean obviously you know this has been in the works you know for a little bit it wasn't like he just woke up and said hey let's let's get this law on the books but like you know i mean there's been a drumbeat last few the last you know a couple of i mean just we joke about the super intelligence thing but i mean it does kind of emphasize just how there's been more of a drumbeat of like oh the government has to do something we don't know what it is we don't know what it should entail but they have to do something um and you know so this kind of struck me as okay well i'm gonna do something and you know it's not gonna really be earth chattering or be, you know, be that, you know, be, you know, a big deal.

36:33But then I can say, Hey, look, I was the first person to act on this and blah, blah, blah. So that, I mean, that was my very, very cynical take on this, that this is more of a political thing than anything else. But yeah. I sort of, I sort of just pictured these guys, you know, debating this, this bill. And so what are we going to do about this A1 crap? Something's got to be done about A1 and this is it. I got an idea. oh my god it's the uh stakes of us and it's taking over the country um you know it's just basically um people in a state congress trying to look like they're solving a problem ahead of an election um and the problem has been solved with the same solutions anyway and it's just you know it's just crazy season because we're like what like four weeks three weeks who's counting to the election.

37:26It's like a countdown to when I can finally relax or not, I don't know. But no, it's just a silly season, I guess. And for a state to... It's been a silly season for way too long. Yeah, for like a few years now. Decades, perhaps. I don't know. You know, we also have a state that is at the heart of the industry. They have to look like they're trying to address people's concerns without actually doing anything. So like the easiest approach is just to pass or against attorneys. That is the solution in such of a problem. Actually, it's interesting, Reese, when you were talking, I was thinking to the penalty provisions that are in the statute and the penalty provisions the lawyer doesn't go to jail the penalties are the judge can uh sanction the lawyer or report it to the bar associate it's like okay that's exactly what we're already doing yeah the good news is this the the the good news of course is that this law actually has no uh application uh once somebody takes it uh you know tries to challenge it because it doesn't use the phrase super intelligence which is as we know the actual term that we're talking about so it's a law

38:55Niki Black: about nothing no i mean i'm confused i mean it's like one of my colleagues sam moore lives in california and he's been ranting about bill 574 for a little while which is what became this law um you're all frozen so maybe i'm frozen yeah you hear you we can't i can't see you so well you all I look very intent on what I'm saying. So I'll go with that. And you have a smile on your face. You're laughing hysterically. And you're laughing. Frozen in a laugh. You got to laugh or you'll cry. But I mean, it feels like obviously like everything we were pushing against when they had those standing orders with AI.

39:36But does anybody know how this actually plays out in terms of like, what does it mean for a lawyer to have verified everything? like personally, every single lawyer personally or their team or their, you know, their associate

39:51Niki Black: actually confirmed. I mean, I don't know. It just all seems very wild and it's just disconcerting speaking to a frozen screen. So I'm going to stop speaking because I don't know if anyone can hear me. We can hear you. Okay. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I mean, yeah, it does. I mean, it uses the word personally. I mean, yeah, you could read that in different ways, but I mean, it seems to say you've got to look at it. It's got to be whoever signs it, right? Like that's what I assume that means. So I feel like that's more than lawyers are doing now, and not necessarily in a bad way. I mean, if you have a solid team and, you know, your associate actually does check all the things, now every partner that signs it is supposed to sign it.

40:36Which is what it is now, technically, right? If you're the one who signs it, you technically have put your name to it, so you're the one on the hook. You don't get to throw your first year ethically under the bus if you signed it.

40:53Niki Black: I don't necessarily mean first year even, though. I don't know. It's all just very reactive. Well, and on the bright side, maybe it's going to force senior lawyers to give credit to the junior lawyers for the work that they actually did. So there is a thought. Yeah. Put their names on it so they get things. That's a good one. I actually think that I like that. I like I also like in the chat how he's trying to steer people away from the merger, which is going to lose a lot of jobs in in Hollywood. So, you know, this is a nice, shiny headline for Newsom. I mean, there wasn't much more they could do there.

41:35Frankly, I wish that merger didn't go through, too. But I felt like California got as much as they were ever going to get because the feds were going to prevent them from getting any more. And as horrible as it may sound, the feds do have more power over antitrust than the states do. So I actually thought they did. I know people are mad, but I thought they did as good as they were ever going to get out of that. All right. Well, California is limiting lawyers' use of Gen AI in some ways, whereas some major law firms are just creating AI doubles for some of their lawyers. And Reese, you've got a story on that this week.

42:17Oh, yeah. You look surprised for a minute. Do I? I have a story now. I recall like I believe it was probably at the other conference that I discussed a new startup called like Twin AI or something that creates what they refer to as digital twins of attorneys to essentially like, you know, create a, I guess, you know, we can call them an avatar that has the attorney's judgment and knowledge. and this week we saw a new firm of I always believe I'm pronouncing these firms name wrong because I don't ever pronounce them out loud however the firm collaborated with Stanford's Legal Innovation through Frontier Technology Lab to essentially do the same thing and create AI personas of a few of its partners to help in training associates, to help as a drafting assistant, too.

43:33So technically, if an associate wants to have a partner review a draft, you can actually just ask its AI persona and you don't have to harass the partner at all, I guess. and also involved in identifying risks and contracts and suggesting edits. We always try to ask, like, you know, who owns these personas? What happens to them when the attorneys leave the firm? And there's no good answers or answers at all. It seems like a new area of AI in law firms. um and besides this firm um auric too was a investor in the uh twins ai startup so they are also using these um like um ai um avatars um and it's weird because you know i didn't at first you know assumed that like um ai was gonna you know really you know there were lots of job loss and industry would change jobs you know that'd be attrition for sure but like these um avatars you know are interesting because you're essentially just cloning somebody um to you know help them do more stuff so they aren't as stretched thin.

45:09But it tends to raise a ton of good questions that nobody has answers to. And we're starting to see firms really embrace this as a way to get the most out of their partners. And it does seem to have implications too because if you can really clone somebody and they can do twice the work, then you don't have to hire somebody at all. It could possibly speed up a true mission. There could perhaps be one day when our roundtable is done all by AI avatars. It may already be. I don't know. We knew that once. I don't know if you mentioned in your article, Reese, but somebody wrote about that and said, well, what happens when the client says, you know, Mr.

46:09or Ms. Partner, I don't want you to do it. I want your avatar to do it because that won't cost me anything. So it's all kinds of issues there. It was actually on 60 Minutes last week, I think, or two weeks ago or something. They showed this partner sitting there with her double on the screen behind her. It's not an avatar, but the way you can engage with it and get their advice and their information on something was kind of fascinating. On the flip side of it, though, in terms of like associate training, I mean, I see some real advantages. Because let's face it, you know, trying to get the attention of a partner who's really busy and is probably not necessarily terribly articulate about providing feedback can be hard.

46:59And if you can ask the twin anything and everything, every time you sort of get into difficulty, it could be a useful tool in that respect.

47:09Niki Black: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's super helpful. I was going to say exactly what you said. Like, I think that's super useful. And like all the conversations I've been having, I've had my own little mini tech circuit over here, like little conference circuit. That is not all the big ones you've all been at. But like, I feel like the biggest question that keeps coming up over here is like, how do we adequately train our associates? Not train them on AI, but continue to train them to be lawyers. Like if we're, if you're taking away all of the grunt work, which is good, but also there, you do learn some things from it.

47:42Niki Black: Right. and then they're just expected to perform at a higher task level from day one with no training how do we get them there and like i you know we have a lot of these not a lot but a handful of these stimulation kind of tools are popping up which i think are awesome but yeah i mean that i think that the training aspect of that digital twin thing could be really interesting are you trying to segue to joe's story this week i that yes a hundred percent kind of really totally read the law and that's exactly what I was doing. Well, it kind of relates to that. Oh, all right. I didn't know if you were going to do anything or are we transitioning?

48:24Take it away, Joe. Personal to you, Joe. All right. Yeah. So I wrote a story today that Reuters first broke about Ropes and Gray have now put out a new policy that every associate can take a hundred hours uh toward their billable target for bonuses and so on uh to fuck around with ai uh that's basically it there's no like it can't say artificial intelligence but we can say fuck around yeah right yeah yeah oh sorry yeah with si yeah good point uh they can do whatever they want to try and figure it all out

49:01Niki Black: I'm just going to fuck around and find out with artificial intelligence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's a billing code for that. F-A-S-I. That's what we're supposed to say, right? Anyway, the point is they can take 100 hours and do that now, which obviously in the big law universe, hours toward your actual target is a huge deal. It is what allows you to get paid at the end of the year. And so this is huge. Basically, you don't do things that aren't going to lead toward you hitting that target, even if they're important. So this is this is a good move. And it was being reported that so this is an extension.

49:43I think, you know, Steve wrote an article about this like a year ago that Ropes and Gray had already had a policy that allowed first year associates to spend upwards of, I think, 400 hours messing around with AI stuff. This now extends to everyone else 100, which I think is a sign, A, that they feel that the pilot policy with first years was yielding good results. So that's exciting. But also a sign of the times that they get that AI is not something that comes out of the box like an easy button that you can just hit. And I think a lot of folks, you know, this goes back to our earlier conversation about cornering the market.

50:27When ChatGPT came out, everybody's like plays around with it to do simple, stupid tasks for free and thinks that's all it does. And it does do some cool things there. And in a legal context, what it does is hallucinate and write bad copy. And if you want it to not do those things, you need to spend time fixing it. And that time can be intimidating. You know, we had this panel at 8 a.m. that I watched that Nikki was the moderator of where it was supposed to be like, hey, let's talk about building skills and agents. And the whole panel had to quickly pivot to, OK, so it's C-L-A-U-D-E dot A-I because nobody knew like how to get beyond step one because people need it's an intimidating.

51:15It's an intimidating process to get to that point. And so you give associates an opportunity to a low stakes opportunity, an opportunity that counts toward their bonus to take the time to figure that out. And I think that's great. I had a few other thoughts on it, which is not just that it's useful for figuring out how to, you know, build a personal style and build skills and figure out how agents and vibe coding works. But also, you know, one of the big topics coming out of ILTA I wrote about was the idea that when you talk to these firms, especially the big firms, they're buying everything. And so they have competitive competitor products under their own roof.

52:01That means you need to take time to say, do I really prefer Harvey or Legora? Do I prefer instead, you know, Claude for legal, like whatever it is, that's time too. And that's a use case for this extra 100 hours as well. And also, you know, back to the polycule, as I'm calling it, this MCP tubing. Yeah, you're going to use these same tools, but do you prefer your home base to be within Word where you access everything? Or do you prefer to begin in this other system to access everything? because even if you're using the same tools, it might matter where you choose to make your home base for all the MCP calls that happen.

52:44And that is something that's going to take time. And it's not something you're going to do. It's not a task you're going to do if you're worried that you're going to lose your bonus on it. And it's something that you will do if you think you're going to get 100 really cheap hours toward your bonus. So I think it's great. So I think it's a really good thing. I think it's a good thing, too. But I think I would also point out that it's one thing to say you can count 100 non-billable hours towards your quota. It's another thing to say, okay, at the end of the year, you know, who's more profitable?

53:24Who brought in more profit? Who billed more hours? And who collected more hours? and that's a temptation of particularly bigger law firms. So it's all well and good. We have this nice little quota for our associates and we're going to give them 100 hours. Now, the associate that actually billed and collected that 100 hours someplace else, are they going to be better, more strongly considered for advancement purposes? I'm not saying that Ropes and Gray is doing that. I'm just saying that that's knowing how a big law firm often thinks that I can certainly see some partners, you know, wink, wink, nod, nod.

54:03Yeah, you know, you can have 100 hours, but make sure you make that up someplace else, by the way.

54:07Niki Black: Well, it's like it's like pro bono, right? I mean, same thing. Like you get credit. I mean, because like there were I before Ropes and Gray, like there were three other big firms. I'm aware of that for a few years now I've had what they call innovation credit. Like I don't know if it's like 100 hours or something that count towards their billable. And I completely agree it is a benefit to the firm, because especially like a year or two ago when they were figuring out how to even implement AI, they benefited from like basically a sandbox for their associates figuring it out for them. But I had always I would actually I was wondering if more firms would do this.

54:40Niki Black: And I'm glad Robeson Gray has added its name to like the few, very few others I know that did this. but um yeah i mean i only see it as a positive but i mean i guess yes you can always question did any of this work actually really help and count but like yeah and the other the other thing too is you know that i hope that they're gonna sort of monitor what's being done because if you don't have a client that's looking over the bill it's easy to say i think that probably took me five i bet it was six i bet it was six hours i spent on it today so you know it's got to be and it's not just how much time you spent but what you got out of it and what you can contribute from it so as i recall i think that was part of the assessment that they were doing but it's been a while since i wrote that that article so and also kind of shows us how arbitrary the whole like billable hours like marks are for this is like what 1900 hours or whatever it is 2000 i was like okay well let's give you 100 for free just to mess around on yeah it's like okay well are those hours important or not yeah sort of like cloud credits

55:49Niki Black: that caught my um that part of the article really caught my eye about compensation because um when i was a young associate in 2003 i said to in a smaller firm 20 lawyers i said to the one of the partners that was a mentor man i'm gonna you guys don't have a web page you need a web page. Like, this is a thing that's happening, and I'll make a web page for you. And so he said, yeah, sure, you know, track it. And they bought Dreamweaver for me, and I made a web page for the website for the firm. And I do not think that that worked to my benefit in retrospect. I hadn't even thought about this until I read your article, Joe, but I did that.

56:30Niki Black: I tracked the time. I'd just come back from maternity leave, and then they promoted one of my colleagues ahead of me and told me I'd be promoted the next year. And then they also said the quiet part out loud, this one managing partner during my review, that if I hadn't taken maternity leave, they would have promoted me that year, which blatant employment discrimination said to the employment discrimination litigator in the firm. But either way, looking back, I, you know, I do think that probably the time that I spent creating that website didn't help. You know what I mean? Even though clearly it was this, something the firm needed and I think I provided them with a lot of value in retrospect but I think it's gonna matter a lot in terms of just because committee of partners suggests we're gonna prioritize that doesn't mean that the partners that are actually that you report to or that manage you think that that's a priority and so I wonder if there's also going to be disparity across the firm in terms of how that plays out with different associates as well but either way it I don't think it bodes very well for the associates one way or another.

57:32So for everybody that was wondering if we are real or avatars, I think Nikki just sort of gave it away by saying to say the quiet part out loud. I mean, it's that's the standard chat GPT, so we might as well admit it. I was going to say, they probably held the maternity leave against you much more than they held the website. That's for sure. That is very

57:58Niki Black: true. I was thinking about the same thing. I was like, yeah. Yeah. I did get my notice two weeks later, so there was that.

58:14Well, unfortunately, our time is up for this week, but we will be back. I think we'll be back next week. No conferences next week. I was going to be going to Smokeball, but I had to cancel my attendance there. I think somebody's going Joe, maybe you're still going. No, I also was trying to go and I can't make it now because of overlapping stuff. It's just, yeah, it's really unfortunate. Yeah, I wanted to, but everybody, yeah, a bunch of us are going to go. And it just like because of where it sits, which is, again, my call to everybody. There are other months of the year other than September and October.

58:53You are free to put a conference in a lot of them. We would love if you would. I don't know. You know, maybe it's good having conference season because we have, then we have a season where we can actually get work done as opposed to just going to conferences all the time. Yeah. I don't know, man. I'd be happy if there was like one every month and that was all there was. And then I could, you know, work three quarters of that month instead of I basically don't do anything in October. Feels that way. It feels that way. All right. Well, thanks to all of you. Thanks to all the panelists. thanks everybody for watching and sitting in the audience here today and to all of you who watch it on youtube and listen to the podcast thanks to you as well we'll be back next week along