& emerging technology and issues regarding technology
The Computer & Technology Section makes free CLE available to attorneys as a service of the Section and the Texas Bar. This CLE is entitled: “To Chat GPT or Not to Chat GPT – That is the Question”
Speaker: John G. Browning
Course Number: 174206926
The recording will be available until 10/23/2024.
MCLE Credit: 1 hour of participation with .25 hours of ethics.
You can find the video here.
With Summer comes the ‘fall.’ Every year I fall, even more into the fanboy network. It’s expensive. It’s painful. It’s a problem. It’s also, like summer, an opener into amazement. While I’m not sure I can really afford any of these new toys, my mind starts to swim w/ ideas for use cases, as it does every year around spring and again at WWDC. Here are some highlights and links.
Apple Vision Pro – The long-awaited Apple version of virtual and augmented reality headsets, this makes me think “You idiot…why haven’t you really been playing games like you did when you were a kid, with that other virtual reality headset you asked for, for your birthday a year or so ago.” This thing is a monstrous $3,500.00 and has the ability to operate like a gaming platform, as well as a TV screen and laptop, replete with something I’ve tried but never really grabbed onto in past devices – that of gesture controls (think of the weatherman each night talking about ‘our overall weather pattern,’ with the flick of wrist and pointer-finger, moving swirls as he/she stands in suspended reality). What I don’t think I like is that you have to connect it to a battery pack by wire. Meh. It also has “Eyesight” (control of transparency or opaqueness changed by an attached crown, so that you can control what you see in virtual v. real environment), claimed more interactive meetings (I’m skeptical anything can make meetings truly interactive w/o virtual jousting; think about how attorneys and parties have become more brazen when protected by the zoom screen); Gesture control by hand gestures is what I’ve waited for, for years, is complemented by eye movements and voice control. They call this “spatial computing.”
When setting up Vision Pro initially, it creates your own ‘persona’ a 3D image of your likeness, which seems to allude to the creation of something I’d thought of many years ago when I had the great (pre-Facetime/Skype) idea for “virtual visitation,” specifically potentially holographic appearances, currently being tested at a very high cost elsewhere. There’s more including more of the five senses, but I’ll hold back for the moment, lest you think I’ve gone off the edge more than already.
14” M2 MacBook Air – A new bigger addition compared to the 13” MBA, with 2 USB-C ports, MagSafe port for charging, and a headphone jack). This will start at $1300.00.
The regular MacBook Air will get discounted to $1100.00 starting point.
Mac Studio and Mac Pro – Standalone boxes with massive memory and that can support up to 6 Pro Display XDR displays. The Studio starts at $2,000.00 but the Mac Pro, starting at $7,000.00 will have the M2 Ultra chip, which claims to support 24 separate 4k camera feeds, 8 Thunderbolt 4 ports and 6 expansion slots.
iOS 17 adds some new functionalities.
Contact Posters allow you to create and share a photo and text to display when calling a contact.
Also, when you miss a call, Apple will start to auto-transcribe the voicemail as the caller is recording it with Live Captions (beta with iOS 16). This, in my opinion, is potentially huge, especially if that transcription is saved. This is simply a push in efficacy as Apps like Otter and others have allowed the transcription of voice to text for a while now, and this was telegraphed back in September 2022.
Also available is the available to leave FaceTime voicemails in the form of short video clips. In theory, this is not new because you could always record yourself, it’s just baked into the process of the FT call now, like leaving a message. This, however, could be awkward, especially in those late-night calls that we know are coming in some of our cases. Every day I thank the good lord that none of this existed back when I was twenty-something, though I still have that Peter Pan complex and dream of going back. But that’s another story.
There is also a new safety feature called “Check In,” for notification of family, etc. when you safely arrive at your destination. You’re invited people can track your route, cell levels, and battery and alert them if you veer off course from your landing place. Not to be negative, but I wonder if there will possibly be bad actors stalking or tracking others with this technology, as Apple had happen with Airtags over the last year or so, causing Apple and Google to work together against this type of harassment and abuse.
NameDrop, a new way of sharing contact info with others, allows you to customize the Contact Poster and info you share. I did notice this functionality, however over the last several months in iOS 16. I now have the ability to pick what information in a contact card I can share with people, including info in notes (previously notes would not transfer with the sharing of info).
In my tests, the note info is turned off by default and all numbers, emails, etc. are turned on, though I can share a contact’s info with someone else now without disclosing their Cell number. This is significant, given the conflicting intersections of mass cell use as ‘only number,’ as well as cell phone spam and people (me) wanting to be able to control who has this cell number or that cell number.
In addition, there will be a Journal, which is the ‘Sherlocking’ or mashup of various technologies such as what we’ve seen with apps like Day One Journal. It will provide a multimedia way to preserve memories in a more structured way. Think of it as digital scrapbooking, taking words, pictures, etc., and creating a slideshow but in a journal format. For family law attorneys (or even others), the most obvious use case would be for the client to have a simpler way to pull together screenshots, pictures, texts, etc., to create a timeline for you and/or for the Court.
Look for additional movement towards gaming, widgets (making Mac more like iPhone), increased video conferencing presentation effects (‘news anchoring’), Profiles in Safari similar to Chrome, Safari ‘pw-sharing’ and editing, as well as Apple Watch tweaks for health (especially mental) and exercise/activity; Also, just like the dichotomy b/w Frankenberry and Count Chocula, when we were kids, there will now be a Snoopy watch face for those that didn’t exactly cuddle up to Micky or Minnie Mouse. I love Snoopy.
I live on the iPad and iOS 17 is to make it cooler even with interactive widgets (v. static buttons), more seamless handling of PDFs, though I already handle these with Goodreader and other Apps, I presume this is to attempt to out MS Microsoft in the sandboxing arena by trying to get people to use Files more. The ability however of live editing over a Facetime call b/w two Apple devices sounds pretty cool and provide me with a nod towards the still-best true collaboration on documents of Google Drive.
“Adaptive Audio” and “Conversation Awareness” might force me to splurge on the new AirPods Pro, enabling auto lowering of music (translation: ironic-mom won’t complain about my TV being on too loud) and reduction of low-frequency noises like an airplane engine while allowing better speech recognition at higher frequencies (translation: Mark is getting older and nothing works as well, including these damn ears). Claims of improved background-noise reduction over phone calls would be awesome if true, especially if it makes it a better user interaction for the other person (there has always been an issue with noise reduction being a selfish functionality, more for me than for them).
AirPlay and SharePlay improvements are going to be something, when the parents catch on, as they will increase the ability to stream audio and video from iPhones and iPads to another compatible devices, such as TVs in hotels by scanning a QR Code and sharing of a car’s music with iPhone users (although this does not defeat the purpose of teenagers – to get you to listen their teen crap via Bluetooth hijacking of the car speakers).
All in all, aside from the augmented and virtual reality moves, it may not be earth-shattering but, as time keeps strolling along, this integration, convergence, and mashup of functions hums just as fast. For us strollers and hummers, it’s gas on the fire; something that reminds us of summer, and the ‘fall’ embedded first in my adolescence.
And as we creep up, all we want more and more, is more of our lost youth. This is not a bad summer start.
Mark I. Unger
Mark I. Unger is a former Chair of the State Bar of Texas, Computer & Technology section and sits on a number of volunteer boards and committees related to law and/or technology.
Disclaimer or Reclaimer:
No Chat-GPT-faux-neuron-LLMs were used or harmed in the writing of words in this piece.
It’s been 3 years since I last had the physical ability to last see the many techie lawyers, consultants, entrepreneurs and vendors at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago and drink in the elixirs of TECHSHOW.
It’s been a long three years. That drought came to an end this past March 1-4, 2023
and the water did not disappoint the thirsty.
The presentations were very fluid, so much so that it was difficult to spend any significant time in the Expo Hall. The fast and furious meetups with the vendors of legal tech that we could get to highlight the many acquisitions and mergers that occurred in the legal tech space over the last several years.
Several announcements preceded TECHSHOW, the majority of which appeared to come from Bob Ambrogi, the veteran impresario who was presented at the opening startup pitch competition with the very deserving award for a lifetime of achievement and promotion of the legal tech industry and TECHSHOW.
This trend of acquisition is somewhat ironic as compared to the pre-2008 crash period in legal tech; during which economic depression gave way to a super-infusion of startups in the practice management space (Clio, Rocket Matter, MyCase, etc.). Much of what seems to be occurring is the buy-up of players in sub-markets, which was a part of the pre-2008 ‘big-law-vendors’ playbook, where the two biggest law vendors would buy up software companies for their market share. However, to counter this irony, the new buyouts tend to be more in line with folding the tech into existing platforms.
Several of the biggest splashes over the last three to four years came after massive cash infusions of VC money into the existing Practice Management System coffers.
In addition, the infusions now appear to be two-fold–with companies being bought not just for their tech but also for the re-branding of some to create umbrella companies and the buy-up of brands within those brands. Thus, there are now several companies that own and/or are positioned to own different Apps within the penumbra of their ‘rights,’ so to speak.
If this trend holds, look for the top 4 or 5 (in my opinion at least) in the startup pitch competition to possibly come into play, something that is not lost on those seeking the winning ticket. In another twist of irony, the winner of the startup pitch competition was Universal Migrator, which claims to be able to move a law firm’s data from any of approximately 60 different case and practice management systems to any other system.
If these companies and vendors represent the process, the large number of speakers certainly stepped up with the substance. While there were many I didn’t get to see but have certainly followed, including Regina Edwards of Facebook’s Lawyer On The Beach (LOTB) fame, there were many others that competed in sometimes overlapping manners for our attention. This is perhaps a problem that TECHSHOW organizers faced in the past and that had subsided but seemed to make a reappearance, along with the continued problem of materials being relatively unavailable ‘en masse.’ This for me is perhaps like dancing on the head of a needle as TS continues to be a re-education of both my right and left brains.
The first keynote featured Jack Newton (celebrating 15 years of Clio’s launch) doing a Q and A with a number of very visible startup leaders in the recent three years. Those included several startup pitch competitors of past years, all of whom have dynamic personalities with a very high degree of integrity with regard to their products. Erin Levine (a prior James Keane award winner) launched Hello Divorce several years ago and was one of the first to really propel DIY divorce forward. There are now numerous competitors in the space and I’d expect more, if not hybrids of some lawyers seeking to optimize their efficiency. This optimization is no more apparent that with Kimberly Bennett, who co-founded Fidu, one of my top 4 in the startup alley/pitch competition this year and the third-place winner in the competition. Fidu is a platform created to allow attorneys to focus on flat fee arrangements by taking advantage of automation within the practice of law.
In addition, Jazz Hampton completed the trifecta of keynote panelists, having also come from a law practice background and also with very personal reasons for doing what he does. He created Turn Signal, which is an app that anyone can have on their phone, and if pulled over in a traffic stop, with the click of a button call up an attorney for advice on what to say and do or more importantly what not to say and do. The price point is approximately $60.00 per year but they will not charge anyone making less than $40k and have marketed to companies as an employee benefit.
While the call for speakers and decisions on the same are typically finalized in the summer for the following spring, the unexpected and massive infusion of Chat GPT, reignited the AI in legal discussion but this time in a way that could be obtained by the masses (intermittently unless you’re on a paid account). There are probably several hundred integrations not the least of which is Google’s Bard and Microsoft (into Bing), though many of these are just really smart people trying to figure out how to add automation into their own products by the AI within ‘chat’ (Open AI).
One of the speakers was Pablo Arredondo, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Casetext, which I believe could be positioned with their new product CoCounsel to counter what I expect to be a massive amount of Chat GPT generated legal work product, either by at
torneys simply sending a query and then dumping the output into their documents; or by pro se/self-represented litigants doing something similar. The ability of Judges and even attorneys attempting to counter this will be significantly tested. I write this, one word at a time while on my first of two flights to get home but I intend to run a query in ‘Paul Bunyan’ fashion and see which indicates a better woodchopper. Arredondo was shepherded into this role and presentation by Steve Embry, Chair of the LPM Section of the ABA, who humbly lauded his efforts and highlighted Arredondo’s theoretical jump. Arredondo spoke in historical terms of Walter Pitts of the1940s and early theories of neuron mapping, at one point analogizing “if you want to be smart, do what the smart thing does.”
When transitioning the argument to lawyers’ space he mused “ours is a castle built with language.” By several analogies, he brilliantly wove a pathway (neurons and all) to show us that contextual search will perhaps be everything down the road. When explaining that perhaps Chat GPT shouldn’t be used for anything important right now, he offered “I’m from northern California so there’s a place for hallucinations but it’s not really for litigation”
One of my favorite people (and perhaps the most knowledgeable legal tech presenter I know), Chelsea Lambert, reappeared this year again and presented on a very hot topic as demographics change— that
being a guide to succession planning, alongside the very knowledgeable Texas family lawyer, Jordan Turk. This topic is incredibly relevant right now and is the focus of our Texas State Bar President and LPM committee, planning multiple presentations for the State Bar Annual Meeting coming up in June. Their presentation was a great mix of rules, laws (mostly California and Texas, though applicability could cut a wide swath), and practicality, touching on the four C’s of client management and three options for planned transitions and exits from practice. Hit up one of them or me for materials, if desired. I’m sure it would be obliged.
In the vein of seeing presenters close to home, I was thrilled to be able to attend “No Code, No Problem, with Austin, Texas attorney Alex Shahrestani and Tulsa, Oklahoma attorney Trevor Riddle
In what I previously termed a ‘mind-bending creation’ of spreadsheet backups while pulling via keywords from Gmail using Chat GPT, Alex and Trevor walked the entire audience through a how-to workshop; they combined the use of Zapier with Gmail and Chat GPT to create a Zap in this fashion. While much was above some of our heads, the concept was analogous to all kinds of use-case workflows, and its practicality after the front-end work was illuminating. While Alex focused on the Google steps, Trevor complimented the same workflow on the Microsoft side.
In a heartwarming twist, Nefra Macdonald, expanded the “Client Centered Law Firm” approach by adding some additional more human-centric accents, citing Julia Cameron’s book “The Artist’s Way, A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity,” something that I think ought to be more widely implemented in our business space.
She went on to talk about first order thinking (a more knee jerk reaction) and second order thinking (where one would consider a more deliberate range of options and ask us about the longer-term cause and effect of decisions). She referenced getting to the root cause of problems as they come up and how flexibility is not a luxury. She then continues on with the extension that flexibility and sustainability might also be in conflict; where being too rigid might prevent you from solving problems and being too flexible might result in too many single points of failure.
She rests on the philosophy that one should diversify to eliminate single points of failure (i.e. one place in your law firm that could end you). She goes on to liken anti-fragile law firms as being ones that think about creating good environments, where fewer people would leave for the work-life balance that has recently become more significant in the last several years.
All of these enlightened points are clarity waiting to happen in our minds. While I question whether this is an actual extension of the original client-centered theory or more of a self-fulfilling and holistic approach of her own, the effect is a warm wrap in an ever-increasing cool business world where too rigid decisions increasingly appear to be in potential conflict with the bottom line. Either way, I’m grateful she stands apart among the crowd.
Please note that there were approximately 80 sessions/talks and the few referenced above are not even a smattering of the knowledge that was presented. But, if you are interested in what else was covered, see www.techshow.com for the complete schedule.
And remember, ABA TECHSHOW will be back again next year, starting on February 14th. You might even be able to make it a valentine’s weekend, replete with legal tech presents for your significant other if you’re like some of us and legal tech makes your heart throb.
mark i unger
by mark i unger
Before big events, I like to look for the ‘feel good’ get-together. Back in the day when going to Newport Jazzfest there was the Friday night concert by the headliner at the International Tennis Center. Ask me sometime about how Diana Krall sang to me (and maybe 999 others) and stopped time in my world.
At ABA Techshow, it’s the startup pitch competition, hosted by none other than Bob Ambrogi and sponsored by Clio.
Startup Alley is occupied by the is the top 15 startups after massive voting, seeking to garner attention, mass-clapping, and excitedness from those first to have arrived at Techshow. It’s quite literally like the ‘Shark Tank/AG/American Idol’ of legal tech. I’ve always be something of a Mark-Cuban-wannabe, searching for my lost youth and still somewhat rubber-bandy agility of the reinvent-the-wheel mentality. I’ve met many really great people on their way up. Previous years’ offerings were impressive, and this year looked to be no exception. In hindsight, they didn’t disappoint.
Ambrogi wrote about the top 15 here: Your votes are in: here are the 15 finalists you chose to be in the 2023 start up Ally at ABA TechShow. They include a few that have been making waves over the last couple of years while we’ve been in pseudo-exile and a number of which are fresh out of the box.
Listed in order of votes cast, they are:
Calloquy Platform is a remote litigation platform that proffers to be safe, secure, and efficient for meetings, mediations, depositions, and arbitrations; and boasts to be coupled with licensed court reporting providers. I haven’t drilled down yet on their platform, but given the number of zoom mediations I’ve done for others, there is an actual need for the siloing of offers/counteroffers/and evidentiary documents.
LegalEase Citations is a data entry platform that touts itself as a bluebook citation generator for easy legal citations.
Parrot is an all-in-one platform for depositions, specifically remote depositions, and claims a “90-in-90” mantra– that being that after deposition, within 90 minutes, you’ll have a deposition transcript that has a 90% accuracy rate (though the actual rate has appeared at closer to 94%); they sync audio and video and while this has been done before and continues to be done, Parrot telegraphs future focus on keyword search, exhibit sharing, and collaboration.
Docgility is an AI-powered contract acceleration platform that claims to have an 80% faster contract execution. That’s a pretty significant claim and supports contract review in all of the following languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. It supports Word and PDF formats, redlines, and document edits.
Catylex Contract Analytics is another contract review tool designed as described to get through the “trough of disillusionment” with reviewing contracts. This description alone in a presentation was enough to make me wonder if this would be scalable into other legal practice spaces.
Jurisage, a Canadian offering, offers several claimed key functionalities in an attempt to solve the age-old problem of legal research stress —
EsquireTek attacks the very real-time and money suck of discovery with the tagline “Discovery Sucks Donut” (and they’re offering killer swag to prove it). This was one of my top 4 players as I believe this is a significant access to justice issue potentially, at least in Texas, where, since 1.1.21 there have been mandatory certain disclosures, but that has not slowed the post-covid launching of additional discovery. In essence, all discovery questions go into their platform for true collaboration between attorneys, staff, and clients. I’ve played with various ways and manual workflows for this, but this claims to solve some of the lack of efficiency problems. There are checkboxes and objections that can be inserted via a few clicks and it allows for the upload of customizable objections etc. While it’s unclear how often these objections are checked or updated, the solution is a strong promise. My workarounds have included fill-able forms, google forms, and text-expander for standard objections, though these require more manual work. Interested to see a real use case on this one.
Universal Migrator was the first-place winner and promises to migrate a firm’s data in our out of over 60 platforms/ case management system. While this is not a problem as ubiquitous as discovery as mentioned above, a firm’s data is the blood in the law office’s veins. How it flows is significant. How it’s used and usable is life itself oftentimes. This massive claimed ability made it one of my top four.
CitRight claims that it “helps you save cases from online legal databases and makes them available right where you are — inside Microsoft Word.” This is a nice concept and takes advantage of being a conduit from your legal research platform to your legal document, pleading brief of otherwise.
Fidu was co-created and pitched by the very impressive Kimberly Bennett (also a speaker this year at Techshow) and provides a platform for the automation of workflows by creating a very usable client portal so that an attorney or firm can leverage flat fee billing by massively increased efficiencies. This was one of my top 4 without question, given the very real and actual need for alternatives to the billable hour. In Texas, unless the Courts allow for Attorney’s Fees to be measured other than by the hour, there will still be the need (when Attorney’s Fees are being argued) to contemporaneously record the time. However, this potentially makes efficiency the benchmark to getting people help with legal representation, thus I think overall it is the greatest objective need in our current environment. Fidu came in third place out of the fifteen offerings and was easily one of my top four.
DecisionVault — Also one of my top 4, and coming in second place, Decision Vault claims to take information much better than the existing apps for collecting information into a firm’s CRM database in order to “Simplify intake for your clients & automate the data flow in your practice” and also offers a client portal for seamless use.
CaseYak is a case estimator platform, currently in four states and will be in four more by next month with further expansion planned. Limited to personal injury law for case value estimations, I’m unclear how this provides the claimed ‘access to justice’ it did but is impressive to be able to collect state judgment data and then evaluate over 53 data points to then apply within a machine learning model (AI) to give attorneys an estimate of what the case may be worth.
Truve is a data platform to take the pain out of an average law firm’s management of spreadsheets in order to evaluate firm performance (KPI’s) etc., of which the average number of spreadsheets is estimated by them to be 14, an average number of KPI’s to be 120 and average amount of time spent maintaining these spreadsheets to be between 8 and 10% of the time.
Case Chronology, led by board-certified orthopedic/spine surgeon John Shim, this is a medical platform that focuses on the chronology of a patient/client’s medical problems while being tested in litigation. Dr. Shim, from Florida, currently built this out in custom form and is now moving towards standardization of timelining the patient, with the immense ability to link to all source documents necessary to support the conclusion. This includes medical records of all kinds and is essentially a chronology creation software with records integration. In my time of creating timelines for litigation, smart documents, and indexes with links to all supporting documents, this to me is very significant. It is limited to case types like medical malpractice or personal injury and the like, but the ability to create “dynamic timelines” is something that is truly compelling.
10BE5 claims to maximize efficiency and automate substantive legal work in capital markets. While this application is somewhat limited to my space, its implications are certainly impressive, if it is scalable.
The journal’s editors and contributing authors have put together a fine edition of our Section’s journal, “Circuits.” This issue has the following features:
• Message from the Chair by Pierre Grosdidier
• Letter from the Editor by Sally Pretorius
Featured Articles
• Examining Heslin and Lewis v. Infowars and Alex Jones, by Judge Xavier Rodriguez
• Service of Process via NFT: A Novelty or a Natural Next Step? by Hon. John G. Browning
• FAA Drone Regulation Survives Constitutional Challenge, by Pierre Grosdidier
Short Circuits
• Featuring Lisa Danley, Dawson Lightfoot, Brett Burney
Circuit Boards
• Highlighting Facebook evidence and Metaverse
You can download the latest copy of Circuits here.
