Pioneers and Pathfinders

This week, we are replaying the latest installment in our virtual roundtable series, titled “Understanding the Legal and Commercial Challenges of Disinformation and Deepfakes.” For those who may not be familiar, a deepfake is a type of synthetic media where images, videos, or audio may seem real, but have been manipulated or generated with artificial intelligence. While some synthetic or manipulated media have legitimate applications, the ability of deepfakes to exploit and spread disinformation poses various commercial and legal threats, which organizations must be prepared to address. Our panel included Catherine Porter, Chief Business Officer of Prove; Hon. Paul W. Grimm (Ret.), professor of the practice of law and director of the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke Law School; and Puya Partow-Navid, partner at Seyfarth.

We discussed a variety of topics, including the biggest risks of deepfakes that organizations must tackle for consumers, the impact of deepfakes on courtroom and evidentiary rules, the legal frameworks in place to protect against deepfakes and disinformation, and technological solutions and best practices for businesses.

Today’s episode of Pioneers and Pathfinders takes a slightly different approach. We are joined by Tony Thai, a returning guest, who is the CEO and Chief Engineer of HyperDraft, a contract automation software platform for various enterprises. We’re also joined by Byong Kim, Senior Director of Technology Innovations at Seyfarth. He runs Seyfarth Labs, which is a tech R&D team that leads the way in applying emerging technologies to the legal profession. Earlier this year, the three of us led a highly curated roundtable at Seyfarth’s New York office for in-house counsel, innovation leaders, and Seyfarth partners, where we had an open conversation on best practices for the implementation of AI and automation. This was a confidential conversation, so we didn't record it. Today, we won’t be talking about specific people or comments made at the roundtable, but we thought we'd go over what we had learned from it and how we see the progression of AI and automation in the industry, as well as best practices.

We discussed how generative AI is often treated like a "solution in search of a problem," how organizations are approaching implementation of the technology, potential security and confidentiality concerns with using generative AI, and advice for legal professionals starting to use this new technology.

Our guest this week is a leading thinker on the application of generative AI in the legal profession. Dr. Megan Ma is the associate director of Stanford’s Law, Science, and Technology Program, as well as the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics—better known as CodeX. She also teaches courses in computational law and insurance tech. Dr. Ma has a background in a variety of fields: She majored in political science and economics, has master's degrees in health law and economic law, and earned her PhD in law. Additionally, Dr. Ma is an advisor to the PearX for AI program, and serves as editor-in-chief for the Cambridge Forum on AI, Law, and Governance, as the managing editor of the MIT Computational Law Report, and as a research affiliate at Singapore Management University in their Centre for Computational Law.

We had a fascinating conversation about Dr. Ma’s lifelong interest in linguistics, how "empathetic" large language models can be for users, how generative AI could change lawyer mentorship, and her thoughts on the future of technology in the profession.

This week, we're joined by Nicole Clark, founder and CEO of Trellis, a state trial court research and analytics platform. For several years, Nicole was an attorney in private practice, handling business litigation and labor and employment matters. The idea for Trellis came from her experience doing research for complicated summary judgement motions. Nicole worked with software developers on an early version of the tool, collecting state trial court data and creating an extensive database of tentative rulings issued by judges in Southern California. As Nicole's practice flourished from using the database, she decided to turn it into a scalable legal analytics platform that would help democratize access for state trial court data. Outside of her work at Trellis, Nicole shares everything she has learned over the years about legal analytics with other legal professionals by authoring articles for ABA Journal, New York Law Journal, Texas Lawyer, and Santa Barbara Lawyer. She is also regularly featured as a legal expert in Southern California Record, and has appeared as a guest on podcasts produced by Above the Law and Corporate Counsel Business Journal.

In our discussion, Nicole spoke about her transition from practicing law to developing Trellis, her experience starting college at 16, how lawyer engagement with tech has changed in recent years, and her advice for those considering making a leap to business.

Today's guest is Ted Theodoropoulos, CEO of Infodash, a cloud-first legal intranet and extranet platform. Ted has over two decades of experience in the legal tech industry, having led the development and delivery of innovative solutions for law firms. Over the course of his career, he has worked as a database engineer at Microsoft, senior vice president of Bank of America, and president of Acrowire—a technology consulting firm. At Infodash, he and his team help law firms leverage their Microsoft 365 investment in order to stay connected with their employees, their clients, and their work in the new age of remote and hybrid work. This year, Ted was named ILTA's 2024 Innovative Leader of the Year.

In our conversation, Ted discusses his experience at ILTACON 2024, what new legal professionals should understand early in their careers, how he has been using generative AI in his personal and professional life, and his vision for the future of Infodash.

Today's guest, Lourdes Fuentes, is the founder and CEO of Karta Legal, a legal operations and law firm management consulting firm dedicated to transforming law firms and legal departments through efficiency. Lourdes has over 30 years of experience in the legal field, focusing on insurance litigation, legal technology, and legal operations, among many other areas. As a practicing lawyer, she took an interest in eDiscovery and document digitization at a time when these processes were still very new. Having gained years of experience and knowledge, she shifted her focus toward improving the delivery of legal services for law firms and legal departments. In her work, Lourdes utilizes curated design thinking, Lean Six Sigma, and Agile project management tools and techniques tailored to the management of the business of law and legal processes.

In our wide-ranging discussion, she talks about the origins of Karta Legal, the challenges of encouraging lawyers to embrace technology, how her thoughts on generative AI have changed over time, and her advice for those starting a legal tech business.

This week, we’re speaking with Dr. Kirsten Davis of Stetson University College of Law. Dr. Davis began her legal career practicing in the areas of litigation, employment, and taxation. After a few years, she decided to pursue education, becoming a professor at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, where she focused on legal writing. It was during this time that Dr. Davis started her PhD in Human Communication. Today, at Stetson University College of Law, Dr. Davis is a professor of law, Faculty Director of Online Legal Education Strategies, and Provost's Faculty Fellow for Generative Artificial Intelligence and Higher Education. Her research and scholarship focus on legal communication, law and rhetoric, professionalism, professional identity, and professional ethics, and she is currently working on issues at the intersection of generative AI, legal education, and legal practice. Additionally, she is a consultant, trainer, writer, and blogger on various topics in the legal profession.

We had a lively conversation about her experience becoming a law professor, how she has adapted to generational changes among her law students, why we may have a "process renaissance" in legal education, and her thoughts on how generative AI will affect legal education in the near future.

We're delighted to welcome back Bridget Mary McCormack, the former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. She is currently president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association-International Centre for Dispute Resolution (AAA-ICDR), a nonprofit that provides arbitration and mediation services to individuals and organizations that wish to resolve conflicts out of court. Former Chief Justice McCormack joined the association just as generative AI was exploding onto the scene. Knowing that the technology would have a deep impact on the legal profession, she worked quickly with AAA-ICDR leadership, as well as futurists and technologists, to determine an innovation strategy for the organization. Additionally, former Chief Justice McCormack is a strategic advisor to the Future of the Profession Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She also co-hosts the podcast 2030 Vision: AI and the Future of Law with Jen Leonard, a previous guest on Pioneers and Pathfinders.

Today, former Chief Justice McCormack discusses why she joined the AAA-ICDR, change management at a venerable organization in response to generative AI, the future of online dispute resolution, and rethinking lawyer formation.

We’re joined today by Dan Rabinowitz, founder and CEO of Pre/Dicta, which offers litigators AI tools that can forecast litigation timelines and provide accurate predictions for outcomes of motions. Dan has had many different roles in his legal journey. He started as a litigator at Sidley Austin LLP, and later became a trial attorney at the US Department of Justice. He then served as general counsel at a data science company, and went on to be associate general counsel, chief privacy officer, and the director of fraud analytics for WellPoint Military Care. With all of these experiences, Dan took a deep interest in the innovation and technology side of legal work. Wanting to focus on data analytics in particular, he ultimately decided to leave practice and develop Pre/Dicta.

In today's discussion, Dan speaks about the behavioral science factors that can help forecast legal outcomes, the information Pre/Dicta provides lawyers in a given case, how he became involved with behavioral analytics, and the need to think outside the box in the legal world.

In this week’s episode, we're speaking with a legal tech entrepreneur who operates at the intersection of generative AI and access to justice. Today's guest, Kara Peterson, is co-founder of descrybe.ai, a free legal research tool leveraging AI to make complex legal information more accessible to professionals and laypeople alike. For several years, Kara worked in marketing and communications at various organizations, including Suffolk University Law School. She continued this work in the public health space for a decade, serving as Executive Director of Communications at Boston University School of Public Health and Chief Communications Officer at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In these roles, she became further interested in access to justice. She would go on to create descrybe.ai with tech software engineer Richard DiBona, as a way to help people overcome the cost barriers to legal information they may need. This year, descrybe.ai is a finalist at the American Legal Tech Awards for both the AI category and the Startup category.

In our conversation, Kara talks about what makes descrybe.ai unique and the problems it aims to address, how her hometown influenced her access to justice work, and her advice for legal professionals considering using generative AI.