On this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interview Thomas Suh, Founder and CEO, and Ken Block, Senior Account Executive of LegalMation. The company provides AI-powered tools to help litigators automate repetitive tasks and work more efficiently. The conversation focuses on LegalMation’s products, overcoming resistance to adopting new legal tech, and predictions for the future evolution of legal service delivery.
Suh provides background on founding LegalMation about seven years ago to help streamline the “scut work” litigation associates spend time on. The flagship product automates drafting responses to lawsuits, discovery requests, demand letters, and more by leveraging a firm’s historical data. LegalMation initially built an automation tool internally at a law firm before deciding to spin it off into a standalone legal tech company. The product found an early champion in the form of a corporate legal department interested in licensing it. Today, LegalMation serves large corporate legal departments, law firms, and insurance companies.
Suh and Block discuss common roadblocks to adopting new legal technology like lack of trust and skepticism. Suh notes the importance of identifying the right use cases where efficiency gains matter most. For high-stakes litigation, efficiency may be less of a concern than for high-volume routine matters. Corporate legal departments are often early adopters because they are focused on efficiency and supplementing personnel. Law firms still incentivized by billable hours may be warier of efficiency gains.
For the YouTube Viewers, Block demonstrates LegalMation’s Response Creator tool for automating drafting of responses to complaints and discovery requests. The AI leverages a firm’s historical data to maintain proper tone and style while speeding up document preparation significantly. Lawyers can still review and edit the AI-generated drafts before finalizing. Suh explains that because the AI relies solely on a firm’s data, it maintains consistency rather than attempting to generate random creative language.
Looking ahead, Suh predicts that the litigation process will become more modular, with different firms or providers specializing in discrete phases rather than handling a case end-to-end. Block emphasizes that younger lawyers expect to leverage more technology and are unwilling to slog through repetitive manual tasks, which will force law firms to adapt. Technology stacks and automation will become selling points for recruiting top young talent.
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Transcript
Marlene Gebauer 0:00
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal profession. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
Greg Lambert 0:07
And I’m Greg Lambert. So Marlene, a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned another case where someone submitted the brief to the court. Did they use the generative AI tools in? We also referenced, you know, again, once again, this is why we can’t have good things in the in the legal industry,
Marlene Gebauer 0:28
because I remember Well,
Greg Lambert 0:31
turns out that although the facts behind this somebody actually did submit a case, a brief that that had some hallucinating citations that were that were made up. I said it was the 10th circuit court, the federal court, and I was I was wrong is actually the 10th Court of Appeals. Here in Texas and Brazos County,
Marlene Gebauer 0:55
you’re partially correct. I was perfectly I got
Greg Lambert 0:59
I got the 10th part, right. 30%? Yeah. Well, apparently, I sent some people up in Denver scrambling, when they heard that at the at the actual 10th Circuit Court. And they reached out to me, and finally we figured it out to wasn’t them. It was my mistake. So sorry about that. I’ll try to be a little more careful the next time and not rely upon ChatGPT too. Write all my introduction there.
Marlene Gebauer 1:35
Well, thank you. Thank you very much for catching it for us. So we do, we do apologize for the mistake. But you know, enough of Greg’s apologies for past episodes. Let’s jump into this week’s episode with a couple of great guests from LegalMation. We’d like to welcome Thomas Suh, Founder, CEO and board member of LegalMation, a legal technology company focused on assisting litigators with AI tools. And Ken Block Senior Account Executive at LegalMation. Thomas and Ken, welcome to The Geek in Review are having us. Thanks for having me.
Greg Lambert 2:08
So I know we go back and Ken and I go back a good ways. But Thomas, do you mind just kind of starting us off by giving an overview of what LegalMation does, and a bit of the history behind why you started the company?
Thomas Suh 2:27
Sure, to keep it as short as possible, being ex lawyer litigator that’s asking for a lot. But so we are focused exclusively on automating a lot of the no other way to put it a lot of the scut work that litigators and legal professionals in litigation, do the cutting and pasting some of the digging up fire samples and information to respond to lawsuits or discovery request or demand letters, all those things that, you know, no one no one go to law school dreams about doing this not working. And the reality is that, that we all have to do that as the associates. And it was par for the course. And something that of course it can bill for obviously, you know, your your I don’t know what the rates are now for associates in New York, but I presume $500 per hours by not out of the out of the realm. Whether you’re in trial, or whether you’re cutting and pasting, you’re still charging for the same. The same rate. And so there was really very little incentive to do anything more efficiently. Well, we decided to back it was managing a law firm before this. And we decided to experiment with AI. This is about the the initially that the deal was drawn up about seven years ago. And the one of the one of the moments that really spurred us into looking into this was one evening, I’m walking down the hall and I see one of our associates working late at night. Now this was probably 11 o’clock at night or so. Some some attorneys here may say Well, that’s nothing.
Marlene Gebauer 4:25
It’s sorta late, maybe
Thomas Suh 4:30
Anyway, let’s just see what’s coming late. And I asked what are you what are you doing? And of course, he said, Well, I’m working on Discovery responses, and we have a case and this discovery we’re working on. So I said, Well, when is this due? And he said well, it’s you know, we’ll respond by tomorrow. And I said tomorrow, you still working on this and the client has to review most likely and you have to maybe go back and forth a couple times. And his response was very telling. He’s responsible Well, I hate doing this part of my job so much that I procrastinate until the very, very end. So I can’t say that was the moment, obviously, my co founder, James, really, ultimately came up with the idea for the company and some of the tasks that we’re going to automate. But that was one of those moments where I remember going back now, and asking ourselves, Well, that’s the kind of stuff that machines should be doing. Computers should be doing so that we can focus on higher value work. Everyone talks about it, but no puts into practice. So when you start to experiment ourselves, and we created a tool within the firm, to automate some of those early stage litigation tasks, so that we could elevate a paralegal and legal state attorneys and associates to do other type of work. And we had no intention of spinning off a new company, we’re lawyers, and we’re just doing fine. And there was no need to jump into a completely new sphere, where we’re not going through any sort of midlife crisis or anything like that. But we present this to our, one of our large corporate clients. At that time, they’d love what we’re doing. And we asked them, if we were to create this for you, would you be interested in being one of our licensees? If we were to spin it off as a separate company, of course, they said, We will be your partners right off the bat. And that was about six years ago. Since then, of course, now we’re in multiple large legal house departments, large law firms and insurance companies as well. And the rest is history, as they say, award, you give you the long winded answer. Very simple question. Well, here it is.
Marlene Gebauer 6:43
I was definitely a point six. Yes, before we jump into the LegalMation, the product, let’s get a little philosophical and discuss the bigger topic of adopting new technology in the law firm environment. And you know, this is, this is a big topic, a lot of people are talking about it, particularly with some of the Gen AI discussions. Now, I know you’ve experienced some common roadblocks when it comes to lawyers adopting new technologies. So you know, lack of trust, skepticism, those, those are awful, often big hurdles. So can you can you expand on why those mindsets are so prevalent in the legal industry? And what’s worked well for you in building the trust that’s really needed to overcome that skepticism?
Ken Block 7:39
Yeah, it is an interesting question. Because in my experience, and I’ve been selling software in the legal space for a very long time, all the things you mentioned are part of it. There’s skepticism, there’s we’ve done it a certain way for a long time, why should we change that? There’s the I know better than you, because you’re not a lawyer. And I am. You know, there are other things that go on in the firm that related to the partners that come into the back office, whereas there’s some fears and skepticism in there that we can talk about actually, at length, it’s a very significant part of it. And I think what you find is, it’s very personality based, because there are camps, that will never change, they’re not going to change. Some of it is age based, they’ve just been doing this for so long. They’re just not in any mode, the change they’re doing well, they’ve done well, you know, nothing’s gonna change, it would be a risk to do that. For them. It could be a risk to their income, it could be risk, their lifestyle, I mean, all those things are real, these are all human things come into it a lot. But then there’s another camp. And this is sort of the challenge. And where we’ve had to go find those that say, Well, yeah, life is comfortable. But yeah, we need to advance, you know, we need to do new things, we need to be thinking the, you know, if it’s not broke, break it philosophy, that those are kind of the people that we’re looking for, I’ve looked at my entire career, you know, how do you? How do you say, Yeah, this is all really good. But you know, somebody’s probably going to do it better than us if we don’t look at other ways of doing things. So I think that the challenge for us is finding those folks that are open minded enough to be willing to take a risk to some extent, but but, you know, a really controlled risk, which is I think, a lot about what we’re doing. It’s a very controlled risk.
Marlene Gebauer 9:20
Do you have a sense? I mean, just from your experience, do you have a sense of, you know, are there certain personas? Are there certain sort of types of folks that sort of fit that? You know, you know, if it ain’t broke, we need to check. You know, we need to try and break it. Are you are you finding sort of groups like any similar characteristics that you could share?
Thomas Suh 9:47
Yeah, I mean, if I were to cluster our client base, between the large corporate or insurance in house staff versus law firm I’m still very different. Because there’s different incentives on both sides. I think I’ll tackle the law firm sort of Persona first and I will give this okay, if I give shout outs to two folks, because there is certainly one person that I like to use as example it does Ron Chapman over at Ogletree Deakins, you guys may or may not know, Ron, he’s actually in Dallas. He is a very forward thinking, business minded attorney. And, you know, I hate to say that’s a rarity in our industry, because he thinks about the big picture. He thinks about the the, sort of the benefit to the client, which ultimately transfers to a better relationship with the client and longer term relationship, doesn’t worry about what the implications of efficiency tools can have on the rich in the short term, where he may lower some billable time where he may actually create more efficiencies, which go against the point six, point 1.2, as money noted, so that is a type of person that I think, has been quite successful. And it shows because, you know, I do know, for a fact, he’s a very successful attorney there. And he’s got great clients. And that’s the type of lawyer that if I were to, if our client and I had a case, a complicated case, in employment, obviously, I would go too wrong, because not only is he is he thinking about my business, or, or efficiencies, but that also tells me that he’ll think about the best way to solve my problem. And that’s what I really care about as a client. So that’s the person on the law firm site. In the opposite of that, in fact, Canada, we recently had a had a conversation, of course, I will not mention, the person didn’t say
Greg Lambert 11:59
it’s probably best, you don’t mention this one.
Thomas Suh 12:03
Yeah, on that one, I will not. But it’s not this is probably more the rule than the exception in this particular case. And this is a person who’s been very successful. The managing partner of this office, that was part of a larger office, and when we initially showed our tool, as a benefit to his practice, and of course, his clients. And we did a full demo of his he saw the outputs, and he was very impressed. He they have any questions about the substance. But immediately, he asked questions about well, but a bill for my time, my associates bill for the time and and how is this gonna work? So immediately, he went to where most lawyers go, which is, hey, I’m paid for my time. Bottom line. Right, exactly. And of course, you can sell you want and say, Well, you know, you could do more, or you could do other things with your time and so forth and so on. Don’t you have enough to do with your time as opposed to doing this kind of work? But I think folks are built a certain way, if you don’t see it right away. If you don’t see the benefits of a tool like this right away, I think it’s hard to change that behavior, that mindset. But like I said, I failed. He’s probably the rule, not the exception, whereas Ron, it’s certainly the exception. And but I think it’s going to change, it’s going to start changing as people realize that AI is not so we talk about AI now, still, in many ways as a, as a novel idea, or something that will wash you look into that. It’s a new tool. No one talks about, do we research online or internet? We’ll talk about oh, my mean, are you on the internet? No one says that today but remember
remember guys back in, you know, the mid 90s When Netscape and just started coming out, you know, people thought, Wow, you can like look at stuff and you can do some, some look at cool stuff. And you can buy stuff you can actually like do transaction online. People had that was such a novel thing. I would say, you know, give it a few years, no one’s got Hawk about AI, or automation or efficiency, they just kind of talk about it as Oh, that that’s just something that’s just part of our workflow. So you will change. I don’t know if it’ll take a generation. But you know, there is a saying, right, in the law, firm business, change will come one retirement at a time. And I think that’s true. I think we need sort of a fresh view of things. And, you know, we’ll eventually get there. That’s the law firm side, the the corporate side, I think it’s a bit different because now corporate, you know, you saw some of the retail announcements of a of a some insurance companies having to restructure and start laying off some professionals and that sort of thing. Well, what better way to To, to increase your efficiencies, then to use tools and technology to be able to supplement now the lack of personnel, but more so provide better value to your customers and to your to your buyers. So it all sort of meshed together and it’ll come together. There’s always some casualties of automation. But that also tells us that there’s new jobs that have been created and so forth. But not that may be a separate topic for another day.
Greg Lambert 15:31
I want to dig just a little bit deeper in because this kind of relates back to, you know, you’ve got this the spectrum of the way that people approach the problems. And then kind of looking at, you know, the typical story that we hear of a lot of tech companies, as they, you know, identify a discrete problem, but I want to twist it just a little bit. And that is, you know, sometimes the change, especially within a legal department or law firm starts with identifying what the problem actually is. And a lot of times, primarily, it’s a partner, or general counsel, that, you know, they are facing that discrete problem, and you finally find a way to identify that to classify it, to explain it to them. And I’m sure that’s something that you work with, you know, one client at a time. So I want to ask if you can give us kind of a specific example of a problem that you’ve sat down with, with one of your clients and talked about using the technology to solve that. And then how do you kind of build the, you know, the understanding of here’s the problem first, and then look at the technology to say, okay, ultimately, we can apply the technology to solve this part of the problem. You have you have some examples that you can use, maybe maybe can you want to?
Ken Block 17:12
Actually, I want to take your question and just sort of add a little twist to it also, which is, I think, in our case, what I’ve learned, you know, I’ve known LegalMation, for a long time been with the organization for several months. And what I’ve learned in a very quick period of time is that a vast majority of the people we’re talking to do not even realize that this is a problem, specific area that we’re tackling of automating complaint and discovery responses. For the some of the reasons we said earlier is that people just this is the way we do it, we’ve always done it this way, that’s it’s those people in the back office that start the process, like it’s just not even part of their mindset, to even think that this is a problem. And I think one of the challenges that falls on us is to really explain to them that, you know, it is the old way of doing things it is causing you to be slow the example Thomas gave earlier of his late night associate there, they’re just not thinking that there’s anything you could even do about it. And then you know, so we have to get their attention that there’s this thing that you’re doing that is it is it is backwards. There are better ways that you can do things, we have a very simple solution that is extremely powerful, that you can use, and you can implement in a very rapid period of time. That can be beneficial to the organization and to the clients to you whomever. You know, that’s sort of the first challenge that we have is to even get them thinking that way. And I think a lot of folks, and I saw it at the booth, you know, last week, I mean, there were some people that came by and kind of looked at it for a second. And then I think walked away and blew us off. I mean, they just you know, yeah, okay, right. But then there were some others. And there was there was one gentleman in particular that I’m thinking about, who I don’t think he Thomas, he really realized it was a problem was actually an associate from a large law firm came by our booth. This is just a really interesting story. He looked at the back panel of our display, which was very simple. I think it said three things on it. And there’s nothing to it, but the word response caught his eye. And he literally did the whole card tune thing with the head. You know, flipping everything. Walked out, I kid you not I mean, that’s what he did. He walked up to us, he asked us what we did we explain what we did. We gave him a demo. And as we’re going to do a demo in a bit. It’s it’s all of five or 10 minutes to really get a sense for what we do. He looked at us and said, Why isn’t there a line at this booth is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. But he wasn’t even thinking that this even existed till he walked past our booth. And then once he got it oh my goodness at any explain. I proceeded to explain the entire here’s the client I’m working with and here’s the work we’re doing. He gave us you know, he spit out the entire thing to us in two minutes flat and Thomas I looked at each other and said, Oh my goodness, if this guy doesn’t get started with this next week, there’s there’s something cracked in him. But the light bulb just all went on. I mean, it was just it was just fascinating. thing to watch happen, but that just, you know, that doesn’t happen every day of the week, we had to fly down, you know, to Florida, in the back of an exhibit hall, you know, to see that happen. So that was kind of a long answer to get there. But, you know, once we get them in there, maybe Thomas, you can take it from here, you know, once we get them, you know, rocking then, then then good things happen.
Greg Lambert 20:21
And I want to kind of see if I can direct us in a certain way. And you get this associate that’s, that’s doing the work that’s in that’s in the trenches doing this, that again, that’s how he’s always done it, how she’s always done it. And then all of a sudden, the light bulb me like you said, the light bulb comes on. And so that may may work really well to for that light bulb to go on on the associate. How do you then catapult that into talking to the powers that be? To explain to them this is this is a problem. This is you know, and here, here’s one way, you know striving your clients crazy, whether you whether they’re saying it or not. And here’s a solution to this issue. How do you get it to that next level?
Thomas Suh 21:15
That’s that’s a great question. The way I would ask her is the, the problem has to be recognized by the powers to be otherwise you’re you’re never going to get through. For them to even listen to what you have to say in this particular case, just piggybacking on what Ken said, this firm was handling volume, they started getting it is litigation arbitration cases. on consumer arbitrations, though there was high volume I, we have no idea that this many cases were being filed against this one particular client of theirs. And it turns out that because they wanted to earn the business, they were handling these on a flat fee basis. Now, when I hear flat fees, obviously, then the opportunities open up, because the law firms then should be thinking about how to make things highly efficient. Because if you were to cap your fees, or you you agreed on the flat fee with your client, it’s up to you to lower your operating expenses. So that you can you can increase your profit margins, that that should be a no brainer. In this case, and that’s what he was this associate knew that this was a flat fee. So the moment he takes this, and then in fact, we already have a follow up call set up already for next week, because he’s already spoken to the higher ups. And of course, think of it, you know, they already have a flat fee, the other client, now if they could lower, let’s say, their actual costs of the associates and servicing costs by even just 20% 30%. That’s directly to the bottom line. And of course, Equity partners know this pretty good person who may be on the on the bonus structure, I don’t know what the structure is, but the partner who is benefiting from this. That’s the one thing that lawyers understand is money and profit, and PPP and all the other good stuff. So I think the right use case has to be there, the incentives have to have to be there. But if you are a firm that handles very bespoke, you know, high end price fixing antitrust cases, efficiency is not the first thing on your mind, because your clients are coming to you for their bet the company cases, I don’t think they’ll care about you saving another 10% here 15% When they’re when their company is at risk of dying. So that’s sort of, it’s important to recognize that AI is not for everything, and it shouldn’t be for everything it is for the right use cases and the right practice areas and the right people as well.
Marlene Gebauer 23:46
Yes, so this is a really interesting conversation, I have a couple points to hit on based on it. So can you are saying that, you know, this, this associate that came by, didn’t even know that a solution existed? Until, you know, serendipity happened, and you happen to walk by and had the aha moment. And, you know, we and firms we before everybody, you know, we don’t do a great job of informing our, our people about solutions. And you know, before our listeners start throwing tomatoes at me, I know we try. It’s like I know, we try we give them food, we go to practice, we go to practice group meetings, we do it, you know, on onboarding, we try and get in front of them. But it’s that that never ending struggle that you know, this is not their job. And this is to support their job and to try and get that attention. So have you know, have you seen sort of good ways to do that or ways that you have seen that work?
Greg Lambert 24:57
Very easy question here can Well,
Ken Block 25:04
no, because I keep thinking about right answer i No, no, no. But I think that the analysis isn’t complete. Because there’s two parts of the story, right? I think you have to talk about both sides of the equation. Before you answer that question. There’s the you know, Attorney associate and the partner side of things that we just were talking about. And then there’s the part of the firm that does a lot of this work, because they’re also part of this equation. Significantly, in many cases, we’ve found they can make or break our opportunity in a heartbeat. And they can do it for very, I’m going to use the word selfish, but I don’t mean that in a very nasty way. But in realistic way, you know, there’s things that there’s most folks do either by perception or reality that they think that their jobs could be at risk, they think that the, they’re doing a lot of overtime work in this particular area. And they don’t want to lose that overtime, because that’s a significant part of their incomes. So, you know, and we’ve seen, you know, I know, one of our we did a trial recently for a law firm, where at the beginning of the process, the paralegals are extremely excited. And yet, somehow over the course of the next two or three weeks, they barely used it. And the only conclusion we come to at the end of it is that somehow they perceived all of a sudden, hey, wait a minute, what am I going to do with my time, if all of a sudden these discovery responses take, you know, an hour instead of four? What am I gonna do? You know, whatever I’m getting over time, you know, am I going to lose that income and can’t blame them, by the way, I mean, perfectly understandable. But it’s also a very big part of that equation. So when we, you know, go to onboard new clients, or we go to, you know, close an opportunity they have, there has to be comfort on both sides that, you know, from the management’s perspective, I’ll define management as partner associate, you know, that they’re going to get something good at this, but they’re also not going to create an enemy of the folks that support us every day of the week. You know, so they’re, it’s a balancing act. I’m not trying to be coy about how he answered. But you know, each situation we walk into, we have to figure out who the players are, and who has at the end of the day real power. And the example I just gave you, the real power was actually the folks that were the paralegals and legal assistants had all the power. And they put the kibosh on it ultimately. Right.
Marlene Gebauer 27:24
Alright, so that’s, that’s interesting, because that sort of deals with my second point, and it’s about inclusivity. And perhaps fear, you know, who are the decision makers? Like, it was interesting, you bring up the paralegals, because I was going to point out that, you know, generally, the decision makers are the folks at the top the folks who have control of the money, it’s like, okay, are we going to spend on this or not? You know, oftentimes, perhaps not all of the right, team members are kind of empowered to have a say, or to sort of think of, you know, think outside the box in terms of, of different ways of doing things. So what tactics have Have you found that are useful to get the right people in the room or in the even in the process, the overall process. And also get them kind of aware that there might be other ways of doing things.
Ken Block 28:29
You need leadership to be strong, and very communicative, and able to really talk about why it is they’re bringing in someone like us to do this function that they’ve all been doing for a very long time, they have to be able to communicate that, you know, the reason we’re doing this is, you know, we want to streamline this process and save some time, because we’d like to bring in more business might be one reason, right, we’d like to do more, or we have more, you guys are already working your tails off, and you can’t get it done. And then we’re behind. And then you know, we’re taking hits, because we’re behind this is a way that we can catch up on the work. And I just heard that from an insurance company last week. It just underwater and this will help them get like, that’s the biggest thing I think we’ve learned in the stories that I’ve heard is that when there’s someone who has, you know, a real clear vision of what they want to do, why they want to do it, and they communicate that vision to everyone that can be involved. project goes smoothly project goes quickly, everybody’s you know, ready to go. There’s no problem when that communication is not there. Then, you know, the people that are doing the work that again, the legal associates, the paralegals they can stop this thing they have all the power because no one’s helped them alleviate their fears, which are absolutely real 100% if they if someone’s threatening my income essentially, you know, these two guys from this company, we’re invest are coming in to take my money away. It’s not happening. It’s not happening. I don’t care what you know what anybody
Marlene Gebauer 30:00
says, But if someone gotta be, there’s gotta be an incentive,
Ken Block 30:04
100% incentive or just, you know, reality, here’s, you know, we’re all in this together, here’s what we’re doing it, it’s going to do things, this is going to be good for you in the long run, I’m gonna explain to you why, you know, this is going to happen, when that happens, these projects go very, very well, when that doesn’t happen, they don’t go at all. All right, that’s,
Greg Lambert 30:21
that was just insane. Just thinking about this conversation kind of pulling back just a little bit. A lot of times we talk about getting something in the door, especially sales cycle on for law firms, especially, is extremely long. But in I have a phrase that I actually haven’t used the last few episodes, but I’m going to use it here is that, you know, all problems are communication problems. Because, yes, you know, there’s decision makers who bring could have had the power to bring things in into, into the law firm into the legal team. So there’s that power, but you know, it’s the the users that can take a you know, it could be a multi million dollar investment, and turn it into shelfware. If that communication isn’t there, to explain, you know, here, here’s the vision that we have of why we’re doing this, here’s the output that we’re looking at, here’s where you play a piece, in accomplishing that goal, here’s the reward, at the end of the day, for doing that, if you don’t have that conversation, and you introduce not just a new product, but you introduce uncertainty into it, that’s when you have you know, the people that are actually in the in the trenches doing doing the work, cans, you know, sink, that that whole project, if you’re not careful, if you don’t have that clear vision of where we’re going with it.
Ken Block 32:06
100%, and I’m a guy who’s sold some of that shelfware over the years, and it was just, you know, disappointing to see that it just didn’t work out because all the intentions were there. But no one had set the expectations properly. And at the end of the day life is a lot about expectations. So that’s we need to do a better job of
Greg Lambert 32:24
want to talk a little bit about the response creator, which is one of the newer tools there that you have it at LegalMation. And I want one tie this into this conversation that we’re having about how this impacts it, but also kind of broaden it up a little bit and talk about, you know, the discussion of generative AI and in the concerns and the roadblocks that that you encounter when you bring in software or new way of doing things that create that downstream impact. So contain this in how how do you address this, as far as helping them kind of create that story to tell the people that are using this is why we’re doing it, this is the effect? How do you how do you approach that.
Ken Block 33:19
So with our applications, we actually have two approaches. There’s a lot of things that we do that are really smart productivity tools, I call them, you know, where we’ve taken some existing technology that works really well that people are familiar with OCR, and, and some other smart things that have absolutely nothing to do with AI in many ways, so there’s no, there’s something they can do without that we hope that, you know, makes them a little bit more comfortable. But secondly, there are, you know, some AI options, as Tom has mentioned, they’ve been around for a number of years now we’ve been, you know, sort of battle tested AI. But in our case, you know, we’re not looking at the the entire universe, you know, to create our AI tools, we’re not you know, bringing in a website since 2003. And all that stuff. You know, there’s nothing scary about it, only thing that we do with those AI technologies is work straight pointed at the client’s own data set and nowhere else. So you know, the approach we take is, you can kind of take this as you want to at your pace, if you want to start off just being very smart about how we, you know, turn, you know, complaints into fully answered responses. Having nothing to do with AI, we can do that. That’s fine. You don’t have to bring in that component to it if you want to ease your way into it. And then we can explain exactly what the AI component is. And again, it only works on the firm’s data set. So it’s not a scary thing, because everybody’s you know, having worked in the in the first wave of this stuff, you know, many years ago, and I think that’s when I met both of you, which didn’t deliver His promises in large part. This is not that this is a much smarter approach to it. And that’s the discussion we have with folks who have that concern Right, Thomas center if you want to add anything to that,
Thomas Suh 35:01
just just just a bit more. So one of the challenges, of course, with January I, as you’re familiar with GPT, and even the not just the ChatGPT, four and five coming up soon, they do rely on Large Language Models and information and data that is publicly available. And it’s sort of a massive amount of information, and it can distill for you a bunch of stuff. Our approach is certainly using the same general techniques, but focusing on just clients on historical data. So there are no religious nations. In fact, the system is never wrong, you cannot make up things, because it’s not drawing from any other source other than clients on historical prior responses and, and answers. So and I do want to give one specific example where this works really, really well. One of our large sort of a large part of our business is working with auto manufacturers, automakers and law firms that serve automakers with lemon law cases. And, you know, we’re in California and California is the biggest market for lemon law lawsuits for a number of reasons. And our system is able to be trained on a client’s own historical responses to discovery requests, RFAs, RFPs, and near auditories, as an example, and what used to take about three to four hours per set. Now, even with the sort of the process of using our tool and editing and reviewing is down to less than an hour. Now, that’s a huge difference, because there are 1000s of cases one, in fact, we’re on track for one auto manufacturer to get hit with. Boy, I want to say, maybe 3000 cases just this year alone. So you can imagine the savings that they’ll they’ll benefit from using our tool. And the law firms actually surprised that you may or may not be surprised, but one other automaker is a client because of their me law firm that approached us. And they have proactively actually reached out to us and to figure out how they’re going to serve the client better, because they understand again, the long term, you know, the long game here is to maintain the relationship to earn more business potentially from the same client with other matters. And so they actually came to us. There, they signed up, they worked with us to train the system, of course, the client is fully aware. But now that relationship has been really solidified. And that’s an example of the right type of cases where you have a lot of competition among law firms where you have to be competitive, you have to offer something different other than, hey, we went to the best schools and we have 20 years of experience, give us the work? Well, if you’re if you’re answering requests for proposal for a portfolio of cases, and all you have is your usual resume? Well, I think those days are over at the you got to bring some different angle. And technology is the great equalizer. And this is why now you have not just not just a you competing with another large firm that but now you’re going to be competing with smaller, more nimble law firms that can do probably as good or better work than you because technology allows them to elevate themselves and is served as a great equalizer. Anyway, another story, I kept dropping stories of clients without mentioning names, which I hope helps, but these are real life examples where again, the right type of cases, the right matters. And by the way, these high volume cases make up 80 plus percent of litigation in the in the country anyway. So why are we messing around with the point ones point twos when you know that a bulk of these cases eventually is going to come to you in the form of clients asking you the firm about what are you doing with tools? Or are you gonna be or the worst thing that can happen is they’re going to move to a work away to another firm that’s already using these tools. So your choice.
Marlene Gebauer 39:13
I see I love that story of you know, firms sort of taking an innovative approach to the client relationship and looking you know, not only at the the legal services, but but also looking at the business services and the the the process and sort of like how do we work together since we’re, you know, sharing these these documents, how do we, you know, work in the best way to make that as easy as possible. I think that’s terrific. Cool. Another exciting thing, and I think Greg, this is a first, we’re going to I think it’s the first we’re going to do a live demo for the YouTube viewers a little later. So I’m excited about that. But before we get to that, let’s hear about what the product does and the problem that you’ve set out to solve with response creator.
Ken Block 40:06
So the problem is that answering these documents responding to them, is, by and large, with very few exceptions, a 100% manual process involves things like copy and pasting from PDFs that come from the courts into a brand new empty document, or sifting through a maze of templates to try to find the one that matches the one you’re working on now, or looking in particular templates, where there’s a list of answers. It’s as long as a roll of toilet paper to try to find the one that matches up with the question that you’re looking at now. And some of these processes, you know, they may be quicker for complaints, which don’t tend to be as long but but you get into some of the discovery documents, some of those responses required number in the hundreds. And it can take days, it could take a day just to set the format of the answer up, let alone even answer the question. Right. So that’s going on every day of the week, all the days that ended why because because we know the working overtime on Saturday and Sunday in corporates in law firms, and you know, even service providers are doing this sort of stuff all over, you know, we just know that that’s just a fact. So what this product targets, is taking the process that they’re doing every single day of the week, often repetitively answering the same kinds of questions in the same style, and allowing technology to be smarter about answering those in a more automated way. It’s not an automatic answer that’s not answering and automatically filing we don’t have we’re not scaring anybody that way, you know, you’ll you’ll build the answer. And someone will look at it before it goes out the door, of course. But the idea is to, you know, set up the answer format, in some cases, maybe automatically drop the answer in to the right spot, because we know what the answer is going to be all the time that repetitive cases Thomas was talking about before, you know, we know what the answers are going to be, but we still have to answer them. And then in some cases, giving us the option to plug in language where we need to with just point and click kinds of things. You know, where you’re you are using some judgment because you need to, but at least you’re automating that process. And the language that’s being used is more best practices, right? It’s coming from the way the firm wants to answer it, or the way the client wants the question answered. Or maybe it’s tailored to a particular attorney style of answering I laughed out loud a few weeks ago, when our one of our trial customers, the paralegal said, Well, I work for two attorneys, they both answer the questions exactly the same way, except the attorney be like citations at the end of there’s, and that person current process has to go find the template of the one with the citations and the one without them and drop them in? Well, in our world, we can, you know, tag it and make it easy. And they can just point and click and, and do that sort of thing. But that’s real life that happens all the time. So so that’s the problem that we’re the problem that exists. And that’s the problem that we’re addressing and trying to solve.
Greg Lambert 43:06
Now, you had mentioned and we talked over over the past couple of weeks about this, in that the way that response creators is set up is one that works with your with your history of documents that you that you’ve used. So it kind of picks up that tone of how the firm responds to these types of matters. And you’re using the AI to do it. Now one of the things I think a lot of people are very concerned about, especially with with some of the creativity that they’re seeing, and some of the generative AI tools, for better for worse is that you know, on some of these things, you you don’t want to necessarily be all that creative. You want it to fit your format, you want it to give a standard answer. But at the same time, you don’t want it to look like you’ve just cut and paste something, you know, you want to be able to have that ability to kind of use your your own judgment, your own creativity. So how do you set this up so that it can learn and adapt over time to fit those needs and keep that speed of reaction of responding, you know, at an acceptable level?
Thomas Suh 44:38
Probably the one thing that’s good about our system is that creativity that you talk about, you know, cuz I don’t have I’m sure Greg Marlene, you guys have both experimented with ChatGPT at least a free version or perhaps you have a your firm less than some of the other paid versions. But you run the same query for the same documents they ask it to summarize, let’s say you know some document You get a different answer every time. And that’s a problem for lawyers. Because it’s unpredictable, right? So we don’t have that problem, because the system will simply pick the best answer from the existing database of prior already present all the pre approved and served responses from the past. So you’re not going to have that issue number one. Number two, will the system continuously learn? Absolutely. And that’s the, that’s the difference here, where the wished we we can onboard a client in a month or two or less, depending on the workflow with just a seat Sebold call a seat set, which is a smaller sample of historical responses. And then when users start actively using the system, remember, that becomes essentially training data, because we capture everything that typing every keystroke is capture and that we store, which we then use as training data to propagate back back propagate to the Data Warehouse. And that becomes new response options from which the system can choose from so it’s never making up stuff. It is just it is a it is picking the best options from an existing set. And for legal, that is what lawyers and paralegals need, they need that sort of predictability, that consistency, right lawyers freak out when they can’t predict what’s gonna come next. So that that’s been that’s why, again, it’s not for every case, right? It is for the more higher volume matters, which comprises again, most of the litigation volume in the country. So that’s why it’s been quite successful for us. And we’re very excited about that it had it was quite painful actually to develop the system, it’s very difficult. In I think it’s going to require, it’s always been fine tuned and improved on. And one thing, though, what this allows, then, at the sort of higher level, it allows some corporate clients to say, hey, you know, here’s what we’ve noticed, once you sort of put this up, and we’re testing, you’d note, we’ve noticed that our old outside counsel has such variations in their responses for the same request, or for the same allegation in the same jurisdiction. Completely inconsequential, but because we’re all artists, Greg, absolutely.
Speaker 5 47:30
Yeah. And
Thomas Suh 47:33
we like to sort of, you know, create our own sort of responses, because it’s, it’s, it’s artistry, well, at the corporate level, that’s a problem. Because oftentimes, you may land ledges and trouble. And so when you want this system like this allows you to create sort of that consistency across the board to pick perhaps the best answer or the the pre approved answers that shouldn’t be used for certain allegations, without all the extra tenuous things or, or also remember, human, you know, human, let’s, let’s face it, a huge part of our business, because we’re service business, there’s a human element where, look, I don’t function as well, at four o’clock in the afternoon, as I do at eight o’clock in the morning. So I may rush through some of my answers as an associate, I know that, you know, associate me mean, you tried to rush quickly through doing their work, because they have happy hour coming up in 15 minutes? Well, I mean, let’s face it, and machines, like I care about that. So there’s a lot of benefits to, to that option, as opposed to relying on the current state of affairs.
Marlene Gebauer 48:42
So if lawyers are concerned about losing the human touch in the process, you know, either based on quality concerns, or maybe even based on sort of education and learning concerns, you know, you kind of have to do the scut work in order to learn this stuff. You know, how do you reassure them that, you know, AI generated documents, you know, will be of the same quality, and that, you know, people doing the work are still going to learn, as part of the process, you know, where, you know, where does human Review and Editing, you know, come into play in that regard?
Ken Block 49:24
Yeah, no, that’s an excellent question. So, you know, in terms of the learning process, I think we can look at it a couple of different ways. Some of these cases, some of the, you know, the points that are made, you know, they are virtually identical every single time particularly talking these high volume cases, when you see the same stuff. The person is going to learn in about three answers exactly what he’s supposed to he or she is supposed to answer every single time. You know, whether I point and click and drop the answer in, or I manually type it in. The learning curve is pretty quick with those sorts of things. So anytime it comes to something that’s not of the cookie Have a variety like that, you know, then you’re going to have the opportunity to either put in a nuanced answer, or you are going to type the answer in automatically. Because remember, one of the great benefits our system is that we create the answer format in the first place, which in itself is a drudgery, right? So we’re, by speeding up that process, you know, we’re opening up a space for you to answer it in several different ways, as you’ll see when we get to the demonstration. So, you know, the learning comes in different ways and learning advances over time. And it’s generational. As Thomas mentioned earlier, I don’t think that you’re gonna lose anything, all you’re gonna do is speed up the curve with things that don’t merit taking a whole lot of time on, and give you the opportunity now with more time to learn and spend time to things that you do need to spend more time on that. That’s, that’s been my take on it.
Thomas Suh 50:46
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, 90, what is it mid 90s, we were not given access, first year law school, we were not given access to Westlaw or LexisNexis. Because the school’s philosophy was, hey, you need to learn how to go to the library and pull up your the books. And of course, you know, you’re happy to do that until you realize that the shepardize insert was missing because your classmate took it. And they were reading it somewhere down the hall. And they forgot to put it back.
Marlene Gebauer 51:20
So forgot. Yeah.
Thomas Suh 51:23
Yeah, forget that. Exactly. So I mean, that literally, I remember professor saying, no, no, no, this this this side, this is like a supplement. Yeah, I can help you this, this, this West Law stuff can help you later on. But right now you have to learn to do book research and
Marlene Gebauer 51:37
learn the structure, you gotta learn the structure of how organized Yeah, so the answer
Thomas Suh 51:41
is no, we know that do we? Actually do we’ve committed malpractice? If you wasted clients time to go to the library and do your research in the old fashioned way, without using Westlaw or using Westlaw or LexisNexis? exclusively? That’s just one example. It may not be a perfect example. But you get the idea is how much are you learning from cutting and pasting or going back to old samples and trying to do your sort of the, the matching process that you have to do let system do it for you. And then when you get a draft and you read through it, you understand, you’re gonna understand why that response was there. And that’s, I mean, that’s how you learn. I
Greg Lambert 52:22
know, when I was at WWL, I heard a really good quote, and again, I wish I can figure out who it was it said it so I could credit him with him. But the quote was, you know, law firms are rushing to be second, especially when it comes to technology, no one wants to be first, but they don’t want to be the last either. So now that you guys are out there, you have a product like response creator, that is in the hands of, you know, a number of competitors to to, you know, the people that want to be second, what’s been the response so far that you tell them? And what you know, can you give an example of a story where you can share in terms of the metrics, that in the efficiency gains that people that have implemented it, or are bragging about?
Ken Block 53:14
Yeah, there’s a lot of stories, I mean, I’ll start and Thomas will fill in, I mean, the benchmark I use when I’m talking to folks who want to learn more about us, is to assume an average of 30 minutes per document prepared saved. By itself, just call it 30. Some complaints may be shorter, some discovery documents may be longer, but let’s do some math and call it 30 minutes faster. So depending on your perspective, you know, if you’re in a large you know, insurance company, and you’re doing hundreds and hundreds of these things, I mean, we just did a calculation for a prospect a while back that it would save them six bodies of time in a year at 30 minutes and they looked at me and said You’re nuts. 30 minutes is too light. But you know, I don’t want to I don’t want to make it too crazy cuz six was crazy as it was. You know, that that’s where I start. But we’ve done some other studies, you know, that that make it more specific, that actually makes us confident that 30 is light, but it’s it doesn’t make people think we’re nuts, that kind of thing. And maybe Thomas, you want to tell a specific story.
Thomas Suh 54:17
Yeah, I typically use more percentage savings, time and efficiency as a starting point. And that’s 50 50% or more 30 minutes is of course, Ken’s referring to some of the very high volumes, sort of auto part crash cases, you know, very routine type of high volume cases. But I will give you one example one of the large pharma company that was starting to get some lawsuits in one of their products. These complaints tend to be rather long, they’re not the typical, you know, four page complaint for slip and fall case or or accidents. Some of these complaints were 190 to 300. Allegations paragraphs. I don’t know what that translates to pages. But for this far a couple of these share that one of the EMLA 100 firms that they engaged was taking was billing about 10 hours to draft an answer for each complaint. And they want to see what we can do well, we got their prior samples. And just as a test, we ran it through, we sort of created the Astra tool for them. And even though the system wasn’t able to answer all the paragraphs, he was able to ask for, let’s say, 80%. Because the training data would that would that would give me too much into into the weeds. But ultimately, what now they were able to do is from, from the 10 to even 20 hours of billable hours that they were paying, they’re unloading the firm just for the answer. Their in house counsel could do this in an hour. Because they saw it says the system would spit out a draft like the fully drafted answer with each allegation answered, and then a few that were missing, of course, they were very unique, so that they have to go in and but even though review time, if you could just really quickly review. It wasn’t it out, it’s a complete game changer. That’s, that’s less common than sort of the bulk, other type of cases that we handle. But that’s an example of the power of a system like this. It doesn’t matter how long it is, it might take a little bit longer to process by another minute or so by our system. But that’s the type of efficiency that you can gain on one extreme. And then the other extreme, of course, even if you save 30% of your time, on your high high volume matters. Well, you multiply that by the number of cases, the big picture is actually very significant.
Marlene Gebauer 57:03
So we are we are at the point in time where we come to the crystal ball question. So we ask both of you to sort of peer into your crystal balls and see what challenges are changing in the legal industry is going to happen over the next two to five years. So Thomas, I will start with you.
Thomas Suh 57:26
A boy of acid is made different ways and I shift quite a bit. But I think the core position that I have remains, which is it? I always thought because I did. I was at a law firm. I always thought to myself, you can take the lifecycle of a litigation matter. There’s no reason why one team, one person or one firm should handle everything from A to Z. Now 30 That’s contrary to what everybody would say, which is Wait a minute, you need to know the fast from the beginning all the way to trial. But if you really think about what you can do, and can you modularize the practice of law, can you modularize the cycle of litigation as an example where one firm or one team only does depositions. One team does only written discovery one Kim does he does initial pleading stage and one team does the expert depositions as a separate sort of, and then one team of course, that’s the trials. I think that is possible. And I think that not only creates some efficiencies and obviously savings that come along with that, but I think it gets its gives you the best results possible. An example is you know, I had a partner who was fantastic, have written and work right there. m&s J’s, and they’re, they’re depleted pleadings and everything else that they did was just like poetry. Fantastic. But you put it with followed up for trial and it crumbles. Why is it the person who’s gonna take the case all the way through and that this is why you do have examples where you have the parachuting trial attorneys come in sort of 2030 days before the trial, the biggie up to speed and Nick is still driving case. That’s just one example of what you could then apply to the rest of the litigation lifecycle. So on top of that, that’s part number one. There are big chunks of that then that can be handled by a non wall firm entity, right? We already have the LSPs trying to legal service providers and you have, you know, they gotta be new law firms that would be that are gonna be owned by non lawyers, as you know, the a lot of that is already coming to reality in Arizona. So you’re gonna have such options. If you’re a client, you have so many different options to handle your cases, especially high volume cases. That I think if you’re a law firm, I would be more think came about specialization, as opposed to a full service and law firm, which has worked until today. But I don’t think it’s going to be as lucrative going forward or really a smart going forward.
Marlene Gebauer 1:00:15
I like that very much that is super disruptive. So I hope I hope we get a lot of feedback on that. Ken, what does your crystal ball say?
Ken Block 1:00:26
Yeah, mine is probably a big, bigger picture kind of thing. I think a lot about what Tom said before about generational and I think about the younger people that are coming in now and what their lives had been like for the last, let’s call it 25 years, something like that. And so my perspective is having three of those children in that age range. And watching what’s going on with things like the the real resistance to return to the office, and you know, the desires of these kids to live a more quote, normal life and still want to be lawyers and still want to do those things. And also demanding technology to be part of what they do, they don’t want to do the grunt work, they think they can figure it out. Like I said, earlier, I see it three times, I’m good to go. All my kids are like that, I don’t need to, you know, practice this, I know what it is, you got you told me I got it. There’s an element of BS to that, of course. But I think in large part, this is the way they are they know they don’t, they’re not going to go through all this stuff that a lot of us have a slightly older age went through in the past, where yeah, you’re gonna, you know, you’re gonna do that for a year and get your 10,000 hours and all so they don’t have the patience for any of that stuff. Because they think that the technologies that help them get where they want to go much faster. And I, I’ve even said years ago, I was in another place and I challenged our marketing person to go find me all the law firms, they could were the managing partner was in their early 50s, at latest. Because they’re just going to be more technology. You know, it’s not, I’m not being nasty, better ageist about it. The fact is, they’ve been exposed to more technology in their lifetimes, and can relate to what I do, versus someone who just hasn’t. And I see that trend happening, you’re going to see these younger people in those positions, and they’re going to demand a LegalMation Come in, or all these other technologies. It’s not an if and they’re going to look at the firm more than ever and say, Okay, what is your technology stack are using this are you using that you’re not using that, that’s fine, I’ll take the offer from the folks across the street, that’s a better gig, even if it’s for less money. So that’s what I see over the next year is gonna be interesting to watch with these, dare I say kids are going to do and they’re going to want to happen, you know, in this profession, and others too, but this one in particular,
Marlene Gebauer 1:02:40
one retirement at a time. That is true, much faster
Ken Block 1:02:43
now, I think than before.
Greg Lambert 1:02:47
So for those who are listening on the audio platform, if you want to see a demonstration at LegalMation, you can head over to the YouTube channel to see more. And for those of you that are watching on YouTube, now you’re in for a treat, we’re going to do a little bonus content here and do a do a demo.
Ken Block 1:03:09
Okay. So we’re going to demonstrate two aspects of the system. Here, we’ll give you an example of processing a complaint response and also a discovery response. And just for completeness, we also do some pricing data analytics as part of what we do that kind of flows from it. But let’s let’s walk through a complaint response first. So if I’m working in the system, odds are I have responsibility for certain state or I’m only barred in a certain state, we happen to support about 33 states on the complaint side now, which represents most of litigation in the United States. So we tend to cover just about everybody, but you will only see the list that is relative to what you do. So for this example, what I’m going to do is I’m going to process a complaint from the state of Florida. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to take a document, it’s going to go into my database. There we go. I’m going to open that document, and I’m going to process it and we can have the system be prepared for different kinds of practices, depending on what the firm does. In this case, it’s an insurance claim. So I’m going to process and what the system is doing is two things right now, number one, it’s going to take that PDF, and it’s going to OCR that, and it’s going to begin the process of completing it and turning it into an answer format. The second thing it’s going to do is it’s going to prepare a confirmation page of the main details of this case, literally for confirmation. And part of the reason for that is it is as good as OCR has gotten over the years, as long as I’ve been doing it, it is not perfect. And we want to make sure that there’s certain pieces of information that are correct all along. We also use some of this information to extract out because it can be used for other analytical purposes. So here if the firm is using a matter management system, they can put in a matter number, whatever their format is, and then we’re gonna roll down the page, check the jurisdiction, check the captioning, you know, all the different things that are important if we’re delivering service that makes sure all of that information is correct here on the lower side, we can assign an attorney and all those interesting things takes a minute or two worth doing. pages aren’t exactly perfect again. So OCR just needs to be checked up on normal part of the process. Now, when we click go, we’re now going to create the answer format. So the way the screen is laid out, as Thomas and James and our colleagues have done as attorneys is they’ve tried to lay this out as attorneys tend to work. So what you see first off in the left hand side, this is the complaint itself, and its original format, you always want to be able to refer to that, and it’s side by side with the right hand side, which is the answer format. And here, we’re going to show a couple of examples of the how the system can be used and to the firm’s preferences. So in this case, what we’ve done is we’ve actually automatically replied to the allegations, one through four automatically, these are fairly generic in the way they’re presented, you can kind of glance here at 123, and four. And so you know, we would again, in a high volume situation, we often will answer these in exactly the same way. In this case, this client that were put together, sees the questions, they’re answered in a certain way. And the answer is fill in themselves automatically. Again, nothing is set in stone, if I want to make an adjustment to allegation number three here, the response, I can come in here, and I can change it any way I want to. In some cases, perhaps maybe we don’t have an answer for that ready made on the situation. And so I’ve got a blank spot number five, that I now can fill in. And so here’s where the options come in to for our clients. Number one. With the answer now formatted in all of about 30 seconds, I can simply start typing, I can certainly manually enter information, I can copy and paste from other documents, I can do things you know quite easily, anytime I want to that’s always available, format it up, make it look nice. The other thing that we can do here to make it even faster is we can use our virtual assistant on the left hand side where the answers have already been canned, they’ve already been written. For this particular situation, you can just drop them in. And again, I’ll just pick one here for just for example sake, but point click Add drops the answer and and this list can be customized to the user’s preferences with this gear box here, we can go down and we can update add to we can create additional answers, you know, that are specific to the way that they’re working with their clients or with the attorneys they’re working with. They can make this look exactly the way they want to in accordance with whoever the best practices are. And they can add in anything they like. So once those answers have filled out, you may have noticed that the system does keep track of the responses that were expected and the ones that we have completed. The other thing we may want to look for to see if we want to add any definitive defenses into this response. Well, we’ve got a list of affirmative defenses available also in the virtual assistant. And these will look familiar to the audience for sure. Let me just pick a couple of these here just to illustrate how the system can work. And you see, what I’ve done is I’ve I as I’ve entered the man, it has dropped them into the proper place for affirmative defenses, it has numbered them consecutively as you would expect them to be and place the text. And again, you can come in here and you can edit, we may need to fill in a name or a date or something like that. But the the form and the basis of that defense are already in place with the proper language. But then we can also do other little things that I think may sound trivial, but I think are actually quite interesting and just get rid of we’ll call them annoyances, which are what happens if we decide in review that we don’t want the second affirmative offense. So we want to be able to remove it quite easily. And what you’ll see the system has done is it’s removed it, it has moved up number three into number two’s position and change the heading to second affirmative defense. It’s a little thing, but it’s a little thing that slows things down as we’re preparing them in the manual world. So if we’re satisfied with where we’re at with this particular complaint, was simply click go, the system will process the answer. And it will be available here in this download screen. So we can open up as a Word document, we can edit it again, we can forward it to another user if they’d like to look at it and have a final confirmation sign off. And of course, this is a list of all of the different complaints that we’ve created so far. So that’s the process of creating a complaint. The second part of this is to create a discovery response. And the process will be virtually identical. So one of the things we refer to a lot more talking to folks that are interested is the idea that if there was turnover in a particular office, and we need to train someone new, by the time I’m finished with this, I’ve shown it once I’m going to show it again. You’re pretty much trained. Greg and Marlene, you’re already ready to go. So here for discovery, this will be an RFP. I’m going to select something from the state of Texas. I’m going to drop this file in to the spot. It’s going to be an asbestos case. Personal Injury. I’m going to click Go the processes I Danika this one will take a little bit longer because a little bit more to it. But again, in the scheme of things, the speed with which we’re going to create this answer format is a fraction of what is needed in the manual world, we’re going to do the same two things, we’re going to open up a confirmation page. So we’ll make sure that all the bits that are scraped off of the basics of the case are correctly cataloged, we may need to enter a piece of information as well. So we’ll do that in this example, just to show how that works. And then we’re gonna go proceed to the answer format. So here again, I want to put in a matter number 123, dot 456, whatever the matter format is, we can integrate this with the matter management system as well. We’ll go here, we’ll confirm all the bits and pieces, maybe something’s missing, I don’t have the responding party will be able to plug that in. Maybe I want to add in the particular attorney, so we’ll add an attorney there bar number will come up, their contact information will come up because we’re going to need those on the response format, we’ll put that out, we’re going to click go. And it’s now going to create a similar but slightly different format. So again, here on the lower left, we have the original, that was been processed, we always have that to refer to.
Again, on the right hand side, we now have the answer format. In this case, nothing has filled in by itself, we’re going to answer these one at a time. So let’s again walk through the answers and the options of how to do this. The first is to simply manually enter information once again, or copy and paste whatever you need to from a different document. And we have multiple clients that have licensed our software just to do this just to get to this point only. As Thomas mentioned earlier, as we were talking, you know, the idea that just creating the answer format saves a dramatic amount of time, let alone the answers. You know, they simply avail themselves of this option, and it’s a winner for them. Second option over here on the left, again, we have some objections that are already written, you’ll notice some of them are in green, which means we’ve seen these kinds of questions before. And what we’ve seen in the past is that these are the objections that we tend to put in for those things. It’s not required, it’s not automatic. But they’re there and available as a suggestion if desired. And again, it just fills in the answers automatically right here, we can go to another one. And maybe there’s some other responses we would like for this particular one. And again, we can drop in whatever we want to there, we can again here customize as needed for the particular person who’s using the system, maybe they’re working for different attorneys. And the answer is slightly different. Or maybe they’re working for a client who has a very specific way that they want those questions answered. So we can group them by an attorney, name, a client name, what have you. And then when they come back in the system, they all know what the Filter icon looks like. And then you can just simply pick the answers that are applying to one of them this case, that’s one of the ones I picked. Alright, so they always have the ability to really customize this to the way that they work. And then with discovery, we have another option that’s available here. Let me make this a little bit bigger. This is our response library. So what we’re able to do here is this teach the system using a seed set of documents from the firm only, our software is only looking at the documents that are within this firm’s repository itself, as they’ve provided to us to see if we’ve answered these questions before in these kinds of situations. So when I click into this particular one, it’s looking out in the database to see if we’ve answered it before you can see here real quick producing and all that good, too late. It’s all playing us. It’s the same language over here. And in the past, we’ve answered this question in this way. We can also tag those questions and answer pairs, you know, this one’s related to relative to furnaces, or turbines or products or what have you, you can always refine that a little deeper. But once you’re satisfied, this is an answer you want. Click that answer, drop it in, again, customize it if you want to delete but you want to nothing final about this, it doesn’t automatically create a final version, it sets it up and is ready to go. We again keep track of answers that we’ve completed versus how many are left to be done. It’s great if you need to stop work for something else, and then come back in. Once we’re finished, we click go. And it processes this document right here. So the process is very similar for complaints and discovery again, for training purposes. You know, it’s not a lot to do to learn to use the system, the legal part of it and what has to be done. Well, that’s got to be that’s got to be communicated either from the client or from the partnership or whomever that’s going to happen regardless. So picking up this tool and using it right away, is possible. And then compared to the many of the other legal technology applications have been involved with for many years, that have taken months of planning and sometimes years to roll out. This is not that this solves a very, very specific problem creates a very, very big opportunity and allows folks to jump on it and start using it in a very, very short period of time. That’s my demonstration of those two functions.
Marlene Gebauer 1:14:51
That was very, very interesting. And oh my gosh, I can see how it would reduce the time immensely. I’m just by using Right,
Ken Block 1:15:01
right. Yes. Is that not the fastest software demo you’ve seen?
Marlene Gebauer 1:15:07
That’s like, that’s like perfect. Just like, you know, it’s like, I think we’re like, what? Under 10 minutes on that.
Ken Block 1:15:12
And that’s what I tell people. I think I’m out of my mind. That’s right. Soup to nuts. Great.
Greg Lambert 1:15:19
Ken and Thomas, thank you both for taking the time to come in and talk with us. Give give the demo. So that was great. Thank you.
Marlene Gebauer 1:15:32
And of course, thanks to all of you, our listeners for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter, LinkedIn, and MBA Bauer 66 on threads.
Greg Lambert 1:15:49
And I can be reached at on LinkedIn or at glambertpod on Twitter or glambertpod on threads. Thomas can if someone wanted to continue that conversation, learn more, where’s a good place for them to find you online?
Ken Block 1:16:04
They can go to our website. There’s a communication tool there they can see us on LinkedIn. Both Thomas and I are there. You can email us directly I’m ken.block@legalmation.com
Thomas Suh 1:16:14
or Thomas thoughts legalmation.com Kham Kham remain the main contact.
Greg Lambert 1:16:20
reached out to Ken
Marlene Gebauer 1:16:23
at least initially. So yes, listeners, you can also leave us a voicemail on our Gigan review Hotline at 713-487-7821. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.
Greg Lambert 1:16:38
Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, can Thomas talk to you guys later? Yeah, yeah.