Law firms and legal departments face pressure to adopt AI, yet buying another tool does not answer the hardest question: Which problem needs solving? Dr. Maryam Salehijam, founder and CEO of Andarzi, joins TGIR hosts, Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer, to discuss how legal teams choose between existing systems, new vendors, and tools built for their own workflows. Her starting point is to observe the work, identify a useful outcome, and then decide what technology belongs in the process.

Salehijam describes legal teams paying for AI platforms while struggling to get consistent use from them. She urges organizations to examine tools they already own and ask vendors for more training before adding another subscription. A legal department’s use of ServiceNow for intake provides one example. The conversation also tackles shifting model capabilities, consumption pricing, and the cost of assigning an expensive model to a routine task.

What counts as a return on legal AI investment? Time and money matter, but Salehijam argues for measuring employee satisfaction as well. Repetitive contract review and document work consume attention lawyers would prefer to spend on judgment, business problems, and client relationships. She describes using anonymous feedback before and after a workflow change to learn whether people’s work has improved, while Greg raises the tension between hours saved and the billable hour.

The discussion turns to local AI models, data security, and the growing interest in AI-native law firms. Salehijam argues for decisions based on the task and the client’s requirements, including a direct conversation with clients about how their information should be handled. Greg presses her on whether smaller firms and large firms face different constraints. Marlene asks whether the emerging “legal engineer” role will endure, prompting a pointed exchange about technical skill, credentials, and what lawyers need to learn.

For teams putting AI into practice, Salehijam favors hands-on learning with peers, repeated use, and work product over a quick certificate. She also warns leaders to account for the time and effort a new workflow demands before promising immediate gains. In the closing questions, she reflects on a legal AI market with fewer new entrants than she expected and predicts more law firms and legal departments will ask whether owning a workflow serves them better than renewing another set of software seats.

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Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: Jerry David DeCicca

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Transcript

Marlene Gebauer (00:07)
Welcome to the Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert (00:14)
And I’m Greg Lambert.

Marlene Gebauer (00:16)
This week we’re joined by Maryam Salehijam, founder and CEO of Andarzi. Maryam started on the technology side of legal way back when AI mostly meant e-discovery and moved to the services side when the technology wasn’t ready and came back when generative AI arrived. Along the way, she held roles at LexisNexis, Axiom, Robin AI, and Junior. Through Andarzi, she helps law firms and legal departments figure out what problem they actually have and what to do about it.

Greg Lambert (00:46)
Yeah, I like the good old days of when AI meant e-discovery. So, Maryam, welcome

Marlene Gebauer (00:51)
Ha ha ha.

Greg Lambert (00:52)
to the Geek in Review. Good to have you here.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (00:53)
Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Marlene. It’s my pleasure to be here today to speak about my new initiative, Andarzi.

Marlene Gebauer (00:59)
So Maryam, we mentioned the places you’ve been in where most of us know you from, but you recently launched, as you said, your new company, Andarzi. So what inspired you to go out and build it?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (01:09)
That’s a great question. Well, it honestly came from encouragement from my family and friends. They all said we don’t know why you don’t start your own company. If there’s one person to have her own company it’d be you. That’s literally what it was.

Greg Lambert (01:19)
Stop making other people money and make yourself money, right?

Marlene Gebauer (01:23)
And I’m sorry, like if your family is already like involved in AI and they’re talking about that too.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (01:30)
Yeah, they said go for it. but really the reason I jumped in is because I kept getting calls from my friends in legal departments and law firms saying, “Hey, you’re in AI, right? And I said, “Yes.” And they said, “We don’t need what you’re selling because we do this other thing, but can you help us with our strategy? We’re trying to figure this out. There’s all of this pressure. If you’re at a legal department from your management at the company, the C-suite. If you’re at a law firm, it’s from your clients. We don’t know what to do with it and we don’t have the time to figure it out on our own. We need somebody to come in who we can trust to tell us what’s going on, where does AI make sense, where does AI not make sense and what should be our strategic plan for the next six months or year, right? What’s gonna happen to us as an industry and that’s where Andarzi was born from. And the name actually comes from the Persian word “andarz”, which means to give advice.

Greg Lambert (02:21)
Very, very nice. And so when they reach out to you with initially, what’s some of the common problems that they’re having that is causing them to reach out to you?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (02:33)
That’s a great question. So let’s talk about, for example, a decent sized legal department where they don’t have a huge internal engineering team inside of the legal department. Their main issue is they’re getting this mandate to become more efficient, spend less on law firms, right? Hire less. But they don’t really know what tools to choose from. Let’s say they wanna deploy a tool for contract intelligence. There’s at least two hundred tools out there. They all say the same thing.

Greg Lambert (02:59)
Sure.

Marlene Gebauer (03:00)
Ha ha ha.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (03:01)
They all tell you they’re the best and the pricing varies. How do you choose the right one for you? Right? The second issue is if you’re buying multiple tools, how do you keep on top of everything? How do you keep on top of the training? How do you get your people to use it? I have so many friends inside legal departments at companies that bought from the likes of Harvey and Legora, and they say, “Maryam, our utilization is not where we need ito be for this to make sense. Right? We’re really worried. We’re paying a lot of money, but not really seeing the savings or the efficiency we would hope to see when we went into this. And then, for the law firms who don’t have an internal chief innovation officer or really a team dedicated to figuring it out, they’re going, Well, if I try to buy a tool for every problem I have, I’m spending north of $300,000 a year. And that just doesn’t make sense for me so could I potentially build some of this myself? And I see a lot of conversation coming in of is this something we can build? And so that’s where I go in and say, okay, wait a minute. Before we make a decision, let’s actually figure out, let’s observe your workflows, where is there a quick win for you that you can have with your existing systems? Sometimes they really are underutilizing what they already have. And then where it makes sense we can make the determination between build versus buy. And guess what? If you want to buy I can help you With all the vendor selection, I can help you negotiate those contracts. And if you want to build, I do partner with two agencies that can come in and do the AI build for you.

Greg Lambert (04:23)
Very interesting.

Marlene Gebauer (04:25)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (04:26)
one of the things that when you and I were talking in prep for this, we were talking about how some of the firms are still focusing in on the prompt engineering that it’s still around the prompt around the chatbot. So what are you seeing, and what are you advising firms and other legal organizations to build and training on that’s beyond the prompt itself. What are you telling them to start focusing in on?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (05:01)
What I’m telling them is to throw everything they know about technology out the door because the speed at which Gen AI is moving is beyond comprehension. So maybe four months ago we could have said learn how to prompt that’s important, that is no longer a valid skill to have because the systems can prompt themselves. So the way I think about it is think about where cars started where you had to hand crank to get it going and it was really unsafe and there were so many things that could go wrong. To now we have self-driving cars in the shape of Waymos, not even a human in the seat. I mean, they’re also really sketchy if you ask me, but that transition took what 200 years? Gen AI is doing that kind of transformation within less than 12 months. So when it comes to skill set for law firms and legal departments, I really encourage all of my clients to think like they’ve never done before. It’s not like law school where you go to law school and you’ve learned. It’s very much every day there’s a new thing that’s coming out that’s gonna scrap everything you’ve learned about how you know how to do things. And you have to have that mentality to really stay on top of everything.

Marlene Gebauer (06:08)
Yeah, it’s really challenging because, you know, you’re talking about we’re talking about prompt engineering, right? And at one point, like maybe last year, that was actually a job. And now that is not a job anymore. And so for firms trying to plan for, you know, hiring, you know, allied professionals or even trying to determine what kind of skills you know, attorneys should have in their organization. It’s it’s really rather challenging. what kind of feedback are you getting?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (06:39)
exactly that they feel like they’re constantly behind. Everyone feels behind at all times, which is what I tell them is like actually you’re in the same boat with everyone else, so you’re not behind on anything everyone feels behind. So don’t stress it too much, but also don’t jump. I always tell people don’t jump into hiring people if you’ve never had someone do this for you. Start with a consultant, start with a contractor. If you are not a massive organization, if you are not a massive law firm, if you are not a massive legal department, you do not need a full Time person doing this kind of work for you. And guess what? A lot of your vendors will do most of the heavy lifting. So you just have to ask them. So many people don’t actually talk to their vendors. They buy the product and then they go and they start trying to figure out how to use it internally. And I go, no, the vendor wants to work with you. You’re just afraid of working with them because you think they’re gonna sell you more stuff. Just learn to say no and use your vendors for what they’re good at, which is teaching you how to use their tooling. so that’s kind of the advice I go in with. Again, it’s super practical, right? I’m like, don’t spend any money. try to use what you have try to go to the people learn to say no right yeah don’t spend

Greg Lambert (07:39)
You’re speaking the right language.

Marlene Gebauer (07:41)
Okay.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (07:42)
anything and that’s like one of the legal departments I love the most because they used to be my client over at Axiom Nutanix that’s their mentality as well they said before we buy a legal intake tool for the front door of our legal department well we have ServiceNow can we use ServiceNow for this and they engineered ServiceNow to do exactly what they needed to do and they did not have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a tool to do it. Right? And it’s that kind of mindset that I think is gonna make legal leave the stone ages where we were always seen as not technical people to come into, hey, we’re actually at the frontier of this general AI movement because it makes sense for our business model.

Greg Lambert (08:24)
that’s let me let me kind of read back what I think I heard here. because I think a lot of us are thinking, you know, AI yeah, it’s been around three and you know, three and a half years, going on fourth year now. but it’s still pretty new and we think that we need to jump into whatever the newest and latest and you know the startups are. But from what I’m hearing, you’re saying we’re probably not leveraging our existing relationships enough. Is that is that what I’m hearing?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (08:54)
One hundred percent. I’ll give you another example. I work with a big pharma company where they simply need to cross-check three data points across fifteen different types of document. just project at a time. They tried to use their own internal tooling and they found it wasn’t working well. But it’s because they were simply prompting it. They didn’t know how to set up some sort of vault within their systems, how to build a skill set, how to build the citation checker, how to do the charting. But their existing Copilot tooling could do all of that. They just didn’t know it could, right? So it’s an education piece that all I had to bridge is the education. Hey, this is how you can do it. They did it. Voila. Didn’t have to buy a tool with a vault function at thousands of dollars just to do something Gen AI on its own if you already have access to Copilot or Google Gemini can do for you.

Marlene Gebauer (09:47)
Yeah, it’s amazing that the you like sometimes we have so many products that we don’t know what we actually have and what it can actually do. interesting. So all right, I’m I’m very interested in this question here because all we’re hearing about is consumption-based pricing. Consumption-based pricing. Consumption-based pricing. now you’re saying tokens are becoming a commodity. So Okay, that goes a little bit against the grain of what we’re hearing and what not so much what we’re hearing, but what seems to be a big concern among law firms and like how are we gonna pay for this. So what happens, you know, to the vendors and their pricing when that all plays out?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (10:31)
That is a great question. And I actually had a like a mini debate with someone at the bar at running legal like the business because they were

Marlene Gebauer (10:36)
I bet you did.

Greg Lambert (10:37)
Yeah.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (10:39)
at one of the vendors that does token based pricing and they were talking about how great that is. And I said, That is a terrible business model for your clients and he said, Why? I’m like, There’s no predictability on their bills. This is one of the reasons people get mad at law firms, right? You just send them a bill and they go, oh my God. What is c

Marlene Gebauer (10:55)
Right, like w one time it’s super expensive, then the next time it’s gonna be not as expensive.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (11:00)
Right.

Marlene Gebauer (11:01)
And we’ve done this before, you know, we’ve done this consumption based pricing before and nobody

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (11:06)
Yes.

Marlene Gebauer (11:06)
liked it.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (11:07)
Nobody liked it. And I also really dislike this whole thing in legal that I see of like, oh my God, Claude for Legal is the winner. now it’s OpenAI. Let’s write articles about it. Let’s

Greg Lambert (11:15)
Ha ha ha.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (11:16)
move our skill set. Unlike everybody calm down.

Marlene Gebauer (11:19)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (11:20)
There’s no winners or losers yet. Let’s just not constantly make deterministic decisions. Again, that you d this is like never before. You cannot apply your same mentality. It’s either Lexis or TR. It’s either this or it’s that. It’s not like that. It’s not black and white. It’s very much gray. Even for the providers, it’s gray. They don’t even know what’s happening after time, right? So when it comes to tokens, we know they’re very resource intensive, right? From data centers, from the cost of compute, from the cloud. It’s very, very expensive. And certain tasks consume a lot more tokens than others. Certain models consume a lot more tokens than others. I also see this fallacy constantly where people are like, why doesn’t Lexis have the latest version of Claude for this? I’m like, because it doesn’t need to. You don’t need the latest models for everything, right? It’s that education piece where we need to really think about what is the task, how simple is this task, right? Or how complex is this task, and what is the cost of utilizing AI on this task for each project? Before we try to,

Marlene Gebauer (12:21)
And is it worth it?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (12:23)
is it worth it before we try to throw AI on everything? And then my friends who actually work at the Frontier Labs and the actual tech companies, so many of them are moving to local compute power where there’s basically no cost to the token. And that’s the other conversation we need to start having of okay, why not just do it locally? It’s actually more secure a lot of the times. It’s cheaper. and from a technical perspective, also not that hard. So how do we also in think about that as law firms and legal teams if our one of our biggest concerns is secure? Right? Before we just go spend more money buying stuff. So it’s a lot of those conversations of let’s first actually understand what we have available to us before we make a decision on what we’re gonna do with it.

Marlene Gebauer (13:01)
Have you heard any discussion about, you know, some of the some of the vendors are using you know their training on models that are like foreign models, like Chinese models. Like have you heard?

Greg Lambert (13:14)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (13:16)
oh my God, we have to get the eye roll. That was beautiful. You missed the eye roll.

Greg Lambert (13:18)
I was gonna say for the for the for the people that are only listening, you missed probably the best part of the show.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (13:25)
oh my God.

Marlene Gebauer (13:26)
So wha you know, what are your thoughts on that or what are or what are you hearing from your clients about vendors that are doing that?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (13:34)
Yeah, great question. So I think everybody wants to sound like they’re going against the grain because it’s cool, right? oh my God, we’re doing it this differently. It’s cheaper, it’s

Marlene Gebauer (13:43)
It’s like it’s cheaper. Okay, it is cheaper.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (13:45)
this, that. But actually, like this is the other thing where again some of the vendors are gonna hate me after this because I just say what I really think. Why are you trying to build your own LLM? You think you have more resources and knowledge and money than OpenAI or Anthropic? Are you kidding me? It’s never gonna be better. Like, it’s just those things where I’m like, so you’re gonna go trust a Model that hasn’t been vetted at all for our industry for these things. You’re the person vetting it, which doesn’t matter. I don’t care about your personal benchmarks. That’s like me being like, I’m the greatest. Doesn’t matter. my mom thinks I’m great. Doesn’t matter. Against literally companies that have so much money and resources behind them that they can surpass the GDP of a country. Like, let’s get real here. This is this is not logical, right? Why would you do that? So it’s a lot of those things where I go, oh my God, here we go again. Somebody’s like saying something that makes no sense. Like nobody has more resources than OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Maybe Microsoft, right? Maybe IBM, but right now, if you’re not plugging in OpenAI or Anthropic, I don’t really think you’re that serious about understanding Gen AI.

Greg Lambert (14:55)
I wanna dig a little deeper on something that you mentioned earlier and that was using local models. are when can you define that for me? Is that something that’s running like literally on your laptop or is it running in your cloud? Well can you define

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (15:13)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (15:13)
that a little bit more?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (15:15)
Is running on your machine, or even your phone has compute power, or you can plug in a GPU from NVIDIA or Apple. And So what happens when we need to process data, right? We need compute power. Now you can have compute power via the cloud, but actually the cloud ultimately connects to the data center, or you can have a mini version of your own data center connected to your device. Now, a lot of smaller law firms are already doing that actually. the one-person shops, right? Especially in The IP space because it’s super secure. Data’s going nowhere. Nobody’s seeing the data. But that only works if you actually know what models to select, what the task is, you know how to quality check. It’s not gonna be something you can easily use for general purpose things, like it’s not gonna replace your OpenAI or you know Anthropic subscription. But let’s say you’re constantly reviewing a specific type of contract where you know exactly what to do, you’re writing a specific type of document, it’s perfect for that kind of work because you know what the task. is you know what the model weight needs to be, how complex it needs to be, and you know what the deliverable looks like. So then it’s quite actually easy to do it yourself. The same is true for anything that contains like patient information, right? Medical records, timelines, easy to do it locally, safer. You don’t have to worry about HIPAA compliance.

Greg Lambert (16:30)
And are you seeing like smaller companies, departments that are experimenting with the with the local GPUs to run this?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (16:40)
Yeah, not and not just the small, right? Latham, I think just announced they bought a whole GPU farm to bring in house. So it’s happening at all levels and I will suspect that’s gonna happen more and more as we struggle with this concept of when do we wanna use AI and not only when, but how do we wanna use that AI. Are we getting our water in a bottle? Are we getting it through the tap? Are we getting it delivered via a truck? How are we gonna use it? What makes sense? for us and what makes sense for the specific task. So I really think people are gonna start thinking more efficiently also about where they’re gonna get their AI from and why.

Greg Lambert (17:20)
So I think if I look back at my predictions for 2026, I think one of the predictions was that law firms and legal departments were going to have to come up with the return on investment and the metrics of you know, we’re we’ve spent so much money in experimenting with AI, but at some point we’re going to be asked about how do we measure the success on that. So what we’d love to measure, you know, it’s like hours saved, money saved, I guess, but what do you think and what are you advising your firms and legal departments on what they should be measuring to show the return on the investment that they’re making?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (18:06)
I love that question. First of all, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Law firms measuring time saved.

Greg Lambert (18:13)
What could go wrong with that?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (18:13)
What?

Marlene Gebauer (18:14)
Yeah.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (18:15)
Absolutely like logical, everybody wants to do that at a law firm. Don’t worry about billables. Like again, it’s just those things where I’m like, what are we talking about here? but I actually have something that I say which is so against the grain. I talk about happiness. One of the biggest problems in our profession is not how many hours it does take, is that depression, anxiety, burnout. It’s insane and legal. Why are we so miserable? I’m pretty sure none of us went to law school to be miserable. and we have one of the highest rate of suicide.

Greg Lambert (18:43)
Mar Marlene did. She went to law school in Cleveland. So

Marlene Gebauer (18:48)
E everybody in Cleveland I want you to know that Greg said it, not me.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (18:52)
That’s so funny. No, Cleveland has a good law school. Come on now. I’m sure it was fun. Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (18:57)
At Cleveland? Yeah, it does.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (18:59)
but that’s like can we focus on what we really wanna do in legal, not the work we don’t wanna do? Who wants to review an NDA? Come on now. Who wants to do this? Who wants to redline the same provision in the contracts over and over again? Nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to do doc review. At some point you just lose where you’re at. So it’s just all of this work that I actually consider a poor use of the human brain. It’s not critical tasks. Let’s have these systems do these things for us so we can focus on what really brings us fulfillment. And by being fulfilled, we actually start to get more creative. And we start to solve the business problems and we starto be better partners, not just to our clients as law firms, but also to the clients of the legal department at a company, right? Because at the end of the day, it’s the business that’s your client. And we can become more business people than legal people, because so much of law right now doesn’t consider business, technology. And I think that transformation is gonna be good for our industry and yes it might threaten the billable hour but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna wipe out law firms they just have to rethink how they generate their money, right? And potentially the split of their revenue and where it’s gonna come from and maybe law firms start offering more of the managed service like Eversheds does or Flex by Fenwick does, right? Where they have the actually multiple streams that they can offer their clients outside of just billables for specific projects.

Greg Lambert (20:25)
Yeah. How I know this is a tough question to ask you. but you know it’s easy to measure dollars saved, it’s easy to measure time saved. when you talk about job satisfaction, if you talk you know, those sorts of things, how do you measure that and are there other industries or examples that we could look toward that would help us kind of wrap our minds around how you measure that and what it looks like.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (20:56)
Absolutely. So you can do the most basic old school way, which is employee satisfaction surveys, right? They’re anonymous. You can survey them before, then a year later. Or actually the company I partner with, what we do before we deploy on a project is we send out voice agents that are conversational, you talk to them. But it’s super anonymous. And people just talk to them about their workflows, what they’re frustrated with, what they like, what they wish they could do, what they wish they couldn’t do. And then we aggregate all that data and build a couple of solutions for them that we think would address the main things people are annoyed about. And then we deploy and then do the voice agents again to see are the problems solved or people happier, what’s going on. and data, you know, even though happiness is hard to measure, data can help you measure that, right? How do people feel? Do they feel fulfilled? What’s going on? I can tell you for in-house teams, the biggest pain point is often their workload. It’s way more work than they anticipated. They don’t have the headcount, right? And so sometimes they end up leaving their company and then that’s so expensive for the company to try to replace them. It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? That retention issue is huge for companies. And with all the layoffs, oh my God, additional mental load. So it’s about creating that safe space for people to do their work, but do their work enthusiastically and as efficiently as they can.

Marlene Gebauer (22:12)
I just think it requires sort of extraordinary leadership and courage and creativity to sort of implement that kind of change management on a large scale because it’s so much easier to just say, Okay, we’re just gonna raise our rates and we’ll just give you a discount and you know, that’s kind of what we’ve been seeing this model for years and years and years, rather than actually fix the model.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (22:38)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (22:38)
And you know, I know that we have always said, well, maybe this is the time and maybe AI is gonna be what does it but I mean what are you hearing in terms of you know from about this like from clients and like how they’re how they’re trying to trying to do this?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (22:58)
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think for a long time, businesses, right, they didn’t really know how to get legal work done without lawyers. Right? We were the gatekeepers, we had the knowledge, we had the know how. But now these AI models can go and give advice and I know people lawyers are gonna get mad at me, but a lot of the advice is pretty good. So a lot of the stuff it says and does is hmm, it’s pretty good. And so that grace that law firms used to have by their clients of well you’re the expert, you’re the professional, that’s going out the door really fast. And I think the reason the change might come now is because it’s no longer in our control how people get their legal work done. Companies are starting to do a lot of what they used to send to law firms in house. And so and I know law firms are still growing ’cause they’re increasing their rates, but is there actual work growing? I don’t know. and that’s where I feel like there might be a reckoning. Now, not for the work streams that you have to have a law firm, not for compliance, not for litigation, right? Certain work streams are safe. But if you’re a transactional attorney and the bulk of your client work comes from product counseling, privacy, commercial, labor and employment, just doc review, and not actual in court or anywhere else, you’re at risk.

Marlene Gebauer (24:15)
I wanna sort of go back to what you were saying before about kind of throwing AI at everything and that maybe we don’t need to do that. you know, maybe the fix is, you know, sometimes it’s AI, you know, sometimes it’s other software, a flexible legal team, kind of new staffing, or you know, no new technology. So how do you decide, which one a client needs or a multi you know, multiple of what they need based, you know, based on their workflow.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (24:47)
Yeah. That’s a great question. So I’ll give you an example of a client problem I’m dealing with. They have no matter management system. It’s an Excel sheet. And they don’t know who’s doing what work. I mean, that one you might be like, let’s throw AI at this. But before we do that, we have to actually see what are they tracking in their Excel? What do they want to track? Where does the data live, right? Does any of the AI tools they want to use have those connectors? What is their budget? How much time do they have for implementation and training? How easy does the workflow need to be? And then based on all of that, then we can say, actually, all you need is a project management tool, and you can go buy a tool like Notion. And Notion has its own built-in AI workflows. Easy peasy, everybody uses for project management. Or you might need something like Clio because you need to do more complex stuff, but that’s pretty expensive. Or maybe we can vibe code this for you. It’ll be yours. AI is sometimes inaccurate, so you need to be careful around that, right? So it’s very much about showing them the end results and how many steps it takes to get there and letting them decide for themselves what do they want to do. Because when you make the choice of what to do versus what I tell you to do, you’re gonna like that choice a lot more. Now I can guide you with it. but the other thing I always tell people is if you’re gonna build it, you’re gonna like it more. And they go, What? I’m like, yeah, because it’s your baby. And nobody calls their own baby ugly. So you’re probably gonna use it more. So

Greg Lambert (26:17)
Yeah, yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (26:17)
Ha ha ha.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (26:18)
it’s like I don’t wanna tell you to build. But if you build it, you’re probably gonna think it’s great. So that’s the other kind of like it’s just psychology at the end of the day.

Greg Lambert (26:27)
Yeah. Maryam, I want to kind of take what you were just talking about with things like you know, use Notion in order to do your project management and all. Are you dealing with any of the firms that consider themselves to be what’s called an AI native firm?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (26:48)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (26:48)
Cause when you when you talk about using products off the shelf like a Notion or a Cursor or other

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (26:54)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (26:54)
tools, if I were to try and use that at a large firm, I would get pushback from my security ops people saying, you know, those are not secure, you know, the information that you’re using is not ours, it’s our clients’ information, and we have to be very careful with that. So One, are you finding that the firms that are calling themselves AI native or AI native adjacent, I guess, are able to use these types of off-the-shelf tools effectively, securely? And do you think that maybe the larger firms are overly sensitive when it comes to using some of these tools?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (27:38)
Yes and yes. So overly sensitive

Greg Lambert (27:39)
Yeah.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (27:40)
for sure. Some of these law firms, I’m like, what do you think you’re dealing with? National security? Like, this is crazy.

Marlene Gebauer (27:46)
Yeah.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (27:47)
Like this is like the it’s like but also my question to law firms is have you asked your clients what they would prefer? Because guess what? Your client is throwing this the same stuff you’re holding near and dear everywhere. It’s on seven different Slack channels. It was copied and pasted somewhere. It’s on in some random drive. Like before we make such black and white decisions, let’s actually understand which clients need that crazy level of security. So for them we don’t put the stuff in the efficiency tools. And which clients would love for us to l use the efficiency tools. And guess what? If it’s a general counsel at a decent sized company that’s tech forward, they might want to get added to that Notion tab or any project management tool you use so they don’t have to email the partner and ask for an update and they can actually see how things are progressing, right? So there’s so much value we can add to our clients actually by having more visibility utilizing more tech, but we hide behind a security layer as if security’s so hard to figure out. At the end of the day, like outside of a patent litigation or really it like, you know, super confidential stuff, everything else we’re doing was emailed somewhere else at our client. So I don’t really know what we’re worried about. And like you can make things secure, but you don’t have to pretend like it’s the nuclear codes. It’s it’s a contract. Like no one’s like scraping the web trying to find that one contract. So again, it’s just sometimes I think we’re like scaring ourselves into staying in the stone ages for no reason.

Marlene Gebauer (29:18)
I wanna go back again. So we were talking about prompt engineers, right? And how that’s kind of gone by the wayside. Now sort of the title du jour is sort of legal engineer. And I

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (29:30)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (29:31)
I think it’s a little different in that with you know, with a legal engineer, this is somebody who, you know, does understand the technology and can use the technology and you know, build agents and workflows and things like that. But They also understand the law. you know, they’re generally they’re lawyers that are doing this. And but I’m wondering, I mean, is this something that maybe is also a temporary type of job? Or is this something that’s always going to be, you know, part of the fabric and in a support role, or is this something that, you know, a legal engineer is essentially going to become what, you know, like But a lawyer is, like that’s that’s what everybody does. you know, what should what

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (30:13)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (30:14)
should we should we be

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (30:16)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (30:16)
looking for? ‘Cause I imagine they have to know law, they have to know data and what’s

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (30:21)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (30:21)
important and technology as well.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (30:24)
Okay, I love that question. So my gut reaction to the term legal engineer is ugh. ‘Cause you’re not an engineer. Like, why are you calling yourself that? What is going on? I did not know false

Marlene Gebauer (30:34)
damn.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (30:36)
marketing was like on the table. “I’m a legal engineer.”. I’m like, and I took the course by Harvey, it was a joke. I’m like, this is the certificate. Like, this is not testing anything. This is what? and then people are like, I took it justo be like, what is this? It’s so easy. If anything, you should go through an official AI lab to get certified. But again, it’s wrong to call ourselves engineers when we are not engineers. We are not engineers. Engineers, we are not. I’m not an engineer. I’m a lawyer who understands technology, right? So you can call yourself a tech consultant. You can call it what it is. You are not an engineer, right? So that

Greg Lambert (31:13)
Yeah, but I can add another hundred thousand dollars to my paycheck if I call myself an engineer.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (31:18)
an engineer. It’s very false marketing. so again I really care about like keep it to your core but also this concept of well it’s a lawyer so they understand a lot. Do they? I’m sorry most lawyers are specialized in their practice. Try to get an employment lawyer to talk to an M&A lawyer about private equity deals. They don’t know what the other person’s talking about. The terminology is different everything is different. The mindset is different. So that’s also weird to say. I think what you need right now in legal, and this might be just because I’m biased towards my own company is people who can ask good questions, understand your problems, who then can go ask good questions to other people, understand their solutions, and then come to you and say these are the ways you might be able to solve your problems. Decide what problems you want to solve. By the way, any problem you choose to solve is gonna suck at first because you have to spend time fixing it. Right? Anything that’s broken doesn’t get fixed easily. So that’s what we really need, but I think the title is just getting marketed around to make it sound fancy for some reason. What we should focus on as law firms and legal departments is ensure that every single person on our team is actually certified to use AI tools. And again, an actual certification that is hands-on and results in a work product where they’ve actively built something. Not just something I can take on Harvey in fifteen minutes. That’s not a certificate. That’s marketing.

Marlene Gebauer (32:40)
You raise a really good point about it takes time to solve these problems because I think that is also in itself a problem that these are not easy things to solve for a lot of times. And so but I think that the demand is that these are solved very quickly and immediately, and immediacy is really demanded. So again you know, talking to your clients, you know, how do you kinda prepare them for the fact that like, look, this could take six months to figure out and if you know, we gotta stay

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (33:18)
Yeah, I yeah, I’m

Marlene Gebauer (33:20)
the course.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (33:20)
I’m super blunt. I tell them, I’m like, okay, you sound like you wanna Yeah. I’m like okay, sounds like

Marlene Gebauer (33:24)
No, you’re not.

Greg Lambert (33:25)
What? No.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (33:27)
you wanna solve your matter management problem. How much time and money do you wanna spend on solving that problem? And is that actually a problem? Sounds like Excel’s working for you. Like, what would happen if you solved that problem? You’ll have more time for business development? Okay, cool. So it sounds like it’s worth it. So by the way it’s gonna cost sixty thousand and probably seven months of engineering if you wanna build yourself. So it’s really

Marlene Gebauer (33:53)
Right, right, right. And you’re the SME and so you have to be in it through the whole thing and you know, are you willing to do that?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (33:59)
Because you want to build it. And then if you wanna buy it, guess what? You have to be willing to pay. You have to be willing to accept that the product sometimes sucks. You have to complain about your vendor like we all do, you know, but it’s more quick and after like a year or two you’re gonna say this solution didn’t work, we’re gonna replace it. I mean so typical. Everybody does this. Like nothing ever lasts, like other than LexisNexis or TR case law search. But like most things get pulled out and replaced and technology gets better and better product comes out. So again have to have that mindset of this is just the solution I’m using right now, and I might change my mind in six months to twelve months and do something else.

Greg Lambert (34:35)
Well what about and I found this description to be surprisingly effective when it comes to lawyers. when we talk about personal skill sets that you run into what’s called the J-curve, where when you implement a new technology or a change management that typically your skill set actually drops initially. before recovering and then going beyond where you were so it makes that J shape when it comes to improvement. do you use a similar argument to that to when you’re bringing in a new product, the change in the structure that it’s not going to be often up and to the right immediately. How do you how do you explain that to your customers?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (35:25)
Yeah. Okay, this is again, I feel like I’m gonna get blacklisted because of all my opinions. I tell people, I’m like, if your people don’t know how to use a computer, I can’t teach them how to use AI. So it’s like talking about a J-curve, but I’m like

Marlene Gebauer (35:42)
Ha

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (35:43)
Actually like you want your people to get more efficient, just sign them up for a typing class. They go what? I’m like I just saw them share their screen and type. Literally a typing class is all they need. And they go what? I’m like, yep, three months typing class. That’s their typing is what’s slowing them down. And they go, Are you kidding me? I’m like, no. This is not an AI. It’s like they can’t copy paste. They can’t use the short like it’s literally sometimes that bad. And so I always walk it back to like, hey, let’s actually see what’s happening visibly. Look at it. And then we’ll know, The reason you’re spending 10 hours on a contract is because you don’t know how to use Control-F. Like this is And it hurts to hear it, right? Because everybody doesn’t want to like people don’t want to hear that they’re worse at something than other people. But literally I’ve seen lawyers not know how to use a computer. And it is concerning. And then they wanna go use AI, which is even more concerning because then they really don’t know what’s happening. And so that’s when we run into they submitted stuff that doesn’t make sense. They used it wrong. Because they don’t even understand how systems work. So that’s where I go again, wait a minute. Like, who’s going to be touching this? And who’s going to be approving this? Because you’re about to set yourself up for failure. If you give people access to AI engines who don’t know how systems and softwares and API calls work. So it’s again, education is a big part of my company to make sure people don’t put themselves in the hot seat.

Greg Lambert (37:11)
All right, well let’s say that you found the magic firm that has people that understands computers, can type, can use Control-F to find things on a on a

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (37:22)
Ha ha ha.

Greg Lambert (37:22)
document. but there’s still even an the next step. So we’re looking at bringing in AI tools and I think we’re still thinking of them almost as magical, you know, because we don’t quite understand them. But how do you get your get people to stop thinking of them as a as a like a separate tool and just start seeing it as part of just the infrastructure and the way that things get done going forward? How do you go to that level?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (37:55)
Mm. That is a great question. And there’s like a lot of conversations in tech around unified interfaces. Basically you just have one system and the back end has all access points, right? And then there’s the conversations around B where people get their work done, which is why we see so many Word add-ins with lawyers. But to change the way somebody does work, like the way their brain goes and does the work, is really, really hard. And the only way you can actually do that is by repetition. So it’s about every day we’re gonna Have this many hours where we’re gonna all work together, right? Whether it’s sharing screens, being on one call, and we’re gonna have a pod lead that says, What are you working on? And they say this and this, and they go, Okay, I need you to try it this way, but they’re doing it in front of their peers. Why? Because peer pressure works. I know it sounds like everyone’s I don’t want to do that, but peer pressure works like magic. That’s why classroom settings work, that’s why asking people questions in front of the whole class works. So we need to bring back that methodology when we’re teaching people how to use some. something. Otherwise they’re gonna kinda listen, do something else, not really take it in. But if they have to prove themselves in front of their peers and we’re lawyers and we’re perfectionists, they’re gonna actually listen and do it and try to be good at it ’cause we all love to compete and show that we’re capable. So it brings back that law school setting into the AI department setting.

Greg Lambert (39:11)
I say we have to bring back the Socratic method to training.

Marlene Gebauer (39:13)
Socratic method I was saying the same thing.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (39:16)
It works! Like why reinvent the wheel? We know how people learn, so why are we trying to do it differently?

Marlene Gebauer (39:23)
So Maryam, we’re going to ask sort of a question of looking at the past and then Greg’s gonna ask our crystal ball question about what’s happening for the future. So tell me what is true today that wasn’t true a year ago.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (39:41)
Great question. What is true today that’s not true a year ago was that we thought we’re gonna see a lot more AI companies pop up in the legal space. A year ago we said that. I’m not seeing that. I’m not seeing too many new players. And I’m not sure if it’s because the venture capital firms don’t want to fund them or everyone’s watching the market. But I really thought there was gonna be an explosion of tools. But

Marlene Gebauer (40:03)
It’s interesting ’cause it’s like I see like a little but l little tiny like point solution types of things, but nothing big.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (40:08)
Yeah. Nothing major. Nothing big, nothing major. and so that was surprising to me, ’cause I thought we would see a lot more of it. And maybe everyone’s in the build stage right now and we’re gonna hear about it in 2027. That’s true, yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (40:20)
And then there’s a lot of buying. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of acquisitions too. Yeah.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (40:24)
So I think funding is drying up, actually instead of going up. And maybe it’s ’cause the frontier labs moved into legal. Maybe that’s what’s scaring the investors, but

Greg Lambert (40:33)
I was gonna say, ChatGPT just launched, what is it, Astra for Law? Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (40:37)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (40:37)
Astra, yes. So that was surprising to me. I did not see funding dry up so quickly. For new players. Now, the crystal ball moment, what will happen? As a good lawyer, I’ll say it depends. It depends on the market, it depends on the environment, depends on global warfare. But if I was just to look six months ahead of from now, I would say we’re gonna see a lot of legal departments and law firms ask the question of can we build something we own that can do what the vendors do, but cheaper or better? We don’t have to renew it every year, right? We can maintain it ourselves, it’ll be our workflows, and we buy limited licenses to the vendors for the people that really need it. Because right now the way legal tech is getting sold is traditional SaaS, right? Seat-based pricing, minimum a year. Often they’re pushing three years. They want multiple licenses. But if you look at the usage data, it doesn’t even make sense. So I think we’re gonna see more of that shift coming because right now the spend on technology is not, back to the ROI conversation, supported by the ROI versus their price point.

Marlene Gebauer (41:53)
Well, Dr. Maryam Salehijam, founder and CEO of Andarzi, thank you for joining us on the Geek in Review.

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (41:59)
Thank you so much, Marlene. Thank you, Greg.

Greg Lambert (42:02)
And thanks everyone for listening and if you enjoy the show, please share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn and Substack.

Marlene Gebauer (42:12)
And Maryam, what is the best place for listeners to learn more about Andarzi and follow your work?

Dr. Maryam Salehijam (42:18)
If they follow me on LinkedIn, I’ll post links to my website, andarzy.com, and also my courses on AI fluency via Maven.

Greg Lambert (42:26)
I feel like we’ve flipped the script here at the end, Marlene. So I’m taking your part. And

Marlene Gebauer (42:30)
We did. Like I noticed.

Greg Lambert (42:34)
and as always, the music you hear is from our good friend Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.

Marlene Gebauer (42:39)
Thanks, Jerry.

Greg Lambert (42:40)
All right, bye everyone.

Marlene Gebauer (42:42)
Bye.