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Transcript
Introduction:
Welcome back to Let’s Get Personal, a podcast from Bella Law. I’m your host, Chris Dibella. Today our guest is Mick Coyne, he’s director of technology at the Mass School of Law in Andover. We’ll be discussing artificial intelligence, it’s pitfalls and practical applications in the legal profession and elsewhere. But this podcast is special in another way because we are both hosts and guests. Mick hosts his own podcast for the college and is interviewing us for that while we do our thing. So let’s get to it.
Chris:
Good morning. Welcome to the Let’s Get Personal podcast, another episode. I’m so happy to be joined by Professor Mick Coyne. Great day for you today talking about AI and technology in the law and let’s get right to it.
Mick:
Sounds good. So let’s get to a little bit of your background, Chris.
Chris:
Sure.
Mick:
You’re a personal injury attorney, but you have a total general practice. I noticed one of the things that you do is rideshare accidents. That’s got to be a new one for you. Right.
Chris:
I mean it’s definitely the landscape of personal injury has evolved with rideshare with these scoters and e-bikes and anywhere accidents are happening, we’re on it. So The Rideshare has definitely evolved with Uber and Lyft playing a very big part of transportation in around Boston and it really brings a lot of different liability questions in terms of whether or not the driver’s on the clock with an Uber ride or not, whose liability insurance is going to cover. Uber does require their riders, they have their own insurance policies. So it’s had a couple unique aspects to it that we don’t experience in a regular motor vehicle accident. But yeah, definitely different than 10 years ago.
Mick:
So with the Rideshare Boutique practice and stuff, like I was talking with Wade earlier about all the different types of technologies that you are willing to essentially try out or pioneer, did you feel like you were kind of ahead of the curve in this general market in the Merrimack Valley and in the Boston market on rideshare litigation? Just because people aren’t that technically savvy in the law?
Chris:
I’d like to think generally, we pride ourselves in being at the forefront of all technologies and using them to make the best customer experience and also utilizing them to break into different areas like rideshare. So we’ve definitely engaged with different technologies like our smartphone apps and things that will allow people that were just in a rideshare accident to hop out and document the scene, take pictures of their injuries, pictures of the accident scene, communicate with us very seamlessly. So we wade in our office and myself really do look at all emerging technologies on a regular basis and see how it can play a role in our office.
Mick:
Well, I think that that’s also something that we’ve seen at the law school at Massachusetts School of Law is that since Covid and maybe even just a little bit before covid, as technology and the law continue to converge, you start to see the need for law practices that can be technically savvy and be ahead of the curve. Because a lot of times we’re using old case law to explain what happened in the current case, and it’s like fitting a square peg in a round hole. It just doesn’t work sometimes.
Chris:
Absolutely. And I’d also go, since the pandemic, I’d say people’s behaviors have changed. So I’d say a lot less people want to come into the office. So you have to be equipped with the ability to make Zoom meetings and Microsoft team meetings and just utilizing technology. They still want to see us and they still want to be able to meet the team and feel comfortable and have that level of trust. But I think so many people are used to not having to travel the places that they used to commonly do before. So you really have to make sure that you’re engaging in all the technologies for all the different types of people that come into your office. The different demographics, obviously the younger demographic is using, they use their smartphone exclusively to communicate. So we are seeing that a lot more clients text message where we used to email a lot of people. So it’s amazing how things, the landscape has definitely changed.
Mick:
And I think what you actually mentioned a really interesting point about meeting them where they are,
Chris:
You
Mick:
Could continue to hope that that chat bot on the website brings in the same amount of clientele. You could hope that the billboards do what they do, but you’ve got to kind of make the law practice function in a way that the person in 2024 functions and you brought up the smartphone. I think a combination of covid and ubiquitous smartphone use has really increased people’s technical literacy. The problem is that they don’t understand the trouble they’re getting into because of the contracts they make with their phone or the purchases they make with their phone. Or like you were talking about, they’re trying to get a rideshare, they’re trying to get a Lyft or an Uber, and maybe they don’t know that they’re supposed to take pictures right away. So instead of you just having just advertising out there online on your website, you’ve also got to educate your potential clients about how to establish these claims.
Chris:
Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And we’ve actually incorporated even social media advisory documents that we go over with a good, because everybody, a lot of people, not everybody I do for the business, but a lot of people live every aspect of their life online.
Mick:
Online
Chris:
When they go to the gym, when they go to the doctors, when they go out to eat, when they travel,
Mick:
And they just don’t realize,
Chris:
They don’t realize actually their divorce action with some of these
Mick:
Posts, right?
Chris:
They’re divorce, they personal injury when certain things I tell clients, they could be taken out of context. You may be going to the gym just to utilize the sauna and steam room to loosen up your muscles because the soft tissue accident’s been killing you and all they see is that you’re out in front of the gym and they’re going to question you on that and they’re going to try and poke holes and your theory. So we like to be in troll and control of the narrative, and the less that we’re putting out there that can be misread or misunderstood, and the more we can shape that picture and dynamic we prefer to. So it is very important this day and age for people to really understand that everything and anything is discoverable can be used against you. Even just recently, I had a talk with my wife who works in Boston and things that, so Wade and I were talking about AI when it joins the Zoom, and a lot of them will transcribe everything.
And in some ways that’s a great thing to have. It literally will transcribe, summarize, give you line items that you can click into that area of the whole Zoom meeting. You can actually search the meeting. And so copilots or Microsoft teams will allow, you can say, Hey, summarize this meeting and bring me to the most relevant parts. But there’s certain businesses that don’t want that transcript. Of course not. And that becomes discoverable. So certain things that benefit and people find very valuable also increase your legal liability. So you really have to look at both sides of the coins on everything before you decide to implement it.
Mick:
Right. Since we’ve kind of just reached the surface there of ai, let’s talk about it. How would you define the way that you are utilizing artificial intelligence right now in your law office, in your law practice?
Chris:
It’s funny, when I was just, I’m engaged in a business growth company out of state and I’ve been going for years and they had really introduced artificial intelligence, which I think a lot of people still don’t even know really what it is. And it’s really just this deep machine learning that’s now doing what we thought only human beings could accomplish type of critical thinking. And one of the ways that it was explained to me at the beginning was if I say to you old, what do you think the next word is going to be? It could be anything. What would you say if I said old? Give me any word, old hat, right? Some people say old man, old woman, old hat could be anything. If I said Old McDonald, what would be your next word? How to farm. So that’s kind of what the large language model of AI is. The more that you give it, the more it can predict what that next word is as it’s creating content or deciphering things. So the more it has, the more certainty it has on predicting what that next word or paragraph or whatever should be. And so I went to an AI conference and I was blown away by the amount of stuff that was out there. And actually the guy that was teaching it was updating his slide presentation that he had given last week because things had just changed that rapidly,
Mick:
I believe it.
Chris:
And they’re still continuing to engage really rapidly. So we’re constantly revisiting the sources that we have to really educate ourselves regularly. We use a lot of it in this practice, but we’re constantly trying to update and modify and see where things can get better. We constantly take meetings. I mean, we get inundated with existing vendors that we use for different software. I mean, Microsoft has copilot and they’re constantly making updates to what they do, but there are so many benefits and ways that you can reduce the mundane tasks of your staff and really put out a better product in some ways than you previously were. But you also have to be aware of the potential pitfalls and educate yourself on those as well.
Mick:
You actually just did a great high level overview there of the 1, 2, 3, right? You’ve got the piece of technology that’s aiding you. You’ve got the human oversight, and then you’ve also got the balance of efficiency, but also making sure that you still use that human skill
Chris:
To
Mick:
Create even more maximum efficiency now that they’re using the AI instead of doing the more mundane task. And I think that that’s what a lot of people would love to be able to use AI for. Now, the counterpoint to that is what are the ethics of it? How do you make sure that you’re using it ethically, that it’s not actually just totally usurping jobs? How do you make sure that it’s not breaching other people’s rights? In order to have Old McDonald had a farm? You’ve got to put in an awful lot of information so it can actually learn that the thing that comes next is had a farm. And these days what you’re seeing is these large language models, especially open AI and some of the other larger AI companies, they’re under fire for how they’ve trained their models because they’ve taken all these copyrighted works and they’ve taken all this literature offline and they’ve just dumped it right in there and said, okay, figure it out.
Now you’ve read all the Game of Thrones novels, now you’ve watched all the Harry Potter movies, you probably know everything about how to write a really great movie film series. So you can see that it has the ability to take in a lot of stuff, but it has to be trained on something that somebody’s already authored, somebody’s already produced. And that obviously leads to implications for well then do they take some cut of the ownership of how the thing was developed? Does the AI company have to compensate the authors or the rights holders? And then lastly, like newsrooms, because we talk about how it could replace human capital in a lot of industries, at what point do we start to see that the quality of the machine production doesn’t match the idea quality or the initial idea quality of the individual? And I think that that’s why you’ve got to keep that ethical balance of having a person piloting the artificial intelligence.
Chris:
Well, I mean, I don’t know how long you have, but we could spend a lot hours talking about just that topic. And I think there’s a lot of people, Jeffrey Hinton, he was, they call him the godfather of ai. He was at Google until about 20, 23, about
Mick:
He was one that says, we’ve got to,
Chris:
And he
Mick:
Kill this thing, or else
Chris:
He exited Google with massive concerns for the direction and regulation of ai. And we talk about it in the office quite a bit, but I mean, a lot of parallels to Oppenheimer with the atomic bomb, but it’s not going anywhere.
And the problem is a lot of world leaders are saying that whoever’s in control of the future of AI is going to control the world economy. So if we just think that we’re going to dramatically slow it down and we’re going to act like it’s not coming or that we want to really regulate it and slow the whole process down, other countries are not, and we’re going to fall behind in other ways. So there is a balance even to that we have to be cognizant of because I think that there’s a lot of good that can come out of it, but it’s scary. I mean, just this morning, Wade and I we’re looking on something online. So Google has its own podcast, and the way they do the podcast is people upload documents to it and you can say, talk about these documents, explain the highs and lows of whatever is explained in that.
And one of them uploaded something saying that you’re not real essentially to the podcast because it sounds, and I can send you the link, it sounds like two people talking, the inflections, the humor, and it’s all AI generated off of what’s uploaded to them. It was the realization by AI in a conversation with another AI realizing that they’re not human beings. It is bizarre, and it is going down a path that I don’t even think we know where it’s going. I don’t think Altman knows where it’s going. I think we’re just along for this ride, and it’s going to have a lot of amazing benefits in the health field and in lots of field. But I think it’s going to have a lot of devastating impacts. I mean, we saw what move and manufacturing did out of Detroit, right? And I think we’re seeing a lot of industries getting shaken up. I mean, we saw the dock workers negotiating into their contract, the amount of take the automation, the automation,
Mick:
Take it right off the table.
Chris:
And we’ve seen Hollywood, same with Hollywood, that lack of use of AI in writing scripts and movies. So I think all of these industries are worried about the direction and safeguarding people’s jobs, and I feel like the government’s always reactive to this stuff, and hopefully they’re going to look at this more seriously and give it some real thought on how we need to move forward with it because it’s not going anywhere.
Mick:
Yeah, I think you actually make a handful of really good points that are mega global observations. The first is the comparison. Oppenheimer AI in a lot of ways is like every major technological development, the world’s seen the railroad space race, the internet. There’s this pro and con that we weigh well, we have to progress forward. We have to see what’s up there past the moon. We’ve got to open the internet for everybody and open the discussion to the world so we can actually see how the internet could be used. Every great innovation, eventually we get to the point where we say, do we regulate it or do we just turn it loose on the world and see what happens? And in this class, in the e-commerce class that I teach, we talk all the time about the early 1990s or the mid 1990s as being this inflection point for when the internet stopped being just a thing that the government used for redundancy of communication. It became a commercialized thing where we could buy stuff off of eBay and look things up online. But in that period of time, we’re thinking about all these great ideas that we can exchange openly, this idea of the open internet and the free exchange of information. But what happens is there’s a soft underbelly to all the great utopic ideas that we have, all the hopes that we have for ai,
All the different ways that the internet has been misused in the last 30, 40 years. And we’re right now just starting to figure out how to protect kids’ privacy online, start to figure out how to give them their own privatized social media accounts. And when you think that it takes them 30 years to let the genie out of the bottle and figure out what kind of havoc it’s going to release on the world, is that the kind of approach you want to take to ai? If all you’re saying is, well, it’s either us or China, it’s us and Russia, or we never get there. Well, the devastating effects on society have to at least be debated by society before we just rush straight ahead and blow ourselves into the sun. You mentioned copilot, a couple other ones that we’ve talked about in class, and I’ve spoken about with your staff, spell book ai, Claude co-counsel, you mentioned Altman, who runs open ai, that’s a GPT powered lawyer facing ai. Alexis and Westlaw now also have their own ais, and that’s an ethical dilemma for the school because administration’s trying to figure out the same thing that we’re just talking about right now. It’s going to happen no matter what. It’s inevitable. So what do we do? Do we stop our future attorneys from figuring out how to learn this thing here in the lab
Just in the name of academic integrity? Or do we make sure that they’re completely competent on this technology by the time they graduate law school, that they’re actually able to harness it and use it to benefit their clients in a much more efficient and cost effective way? That’s a robust debate right now at school between the professors that really recognize it’s coming no matter what.
And the professors that want to say, listen, how am I supposed to be able to tell whether or not this is authentic work? We deploy the spellchecker, the plagiarism checkers and AI checkers for midterms, finals, research papers, things like that. But there were so many assignments and so many different classes that to check every single one for any kind of AI assistance. And every now and then we get a Grammarly get flagged, and it’s like we let them use spellcheck, we let them use Grammarly. How different is Grammarly than GPT? It’s really not that different. It’s just a more primitive version of this thing that’s going to be substantiating your work product. So which integrations do you like the most and how do they benefit you? In this law office,
Chris:
There’s quite a few. I mean, you have some of your more mundane tasks. So copilot, which integrates, so Microsoft is a big backer. They probably next to Google have invested probably more than anybody into ai. And they have through their suite of products, your Excel, your PowerPoint, your Outlook. They have AI integrated into it. And what that allows you to do from the very basic is let’s say you have, I don’t know how your outlook looks, but I get hundreds of emails every day, and you literally can tell Outlook through copilot. Take a look at the emails in the last month from Mick and summarize them for me. What topics did we talk about? Or I know I talked to Mick about this. Find me the emails and what was said about it. It can summarize and hyperlink and find all of these things very easily and respond to it in a way.
So you can type out an email response and you can say, make this more professional, make this more conversational. Make this something that a teenager can understand. So it’s digestible to different age groups, so it can help you draft content that way. We also through Microsoft Teams, and there’s other ones like Firefly that we kind of touched on a little bit earlier. If you’re in a lot of meetings like I am, I’m in a lot of Zoom meetings, they could be with potential people trying to sell me on something. They could be with clients, they could be Zoom actually has its own ai. They can have an AI transcriber. Now you’re going to get the permission to use it from whoever you’re on with. They have to know that it’s in there just like you would if you’re recording a Zoom. But they’ll transcribe the whole Zoom experience.
And then what they’ll do is they’ll give you a summary. They’ll give you action items. So they’ll say, you know what? During your conversation with Billy Joe and Harry Billy said he was going to do these three things. You were going to get Harry these three things, and it’ll create lists and you can send emails right off of that. It’ll also give you a summary where you can click right into that portion of the Zoom where we talked about that. Certain people also use it to track meetings. So if you have five meetings in a day and you don’t want to go to them, you can have your AI go to it for you. It’ll summarize it, it’ll get action items for it that you were given, and you’re literally appearing for five meetings in something that you’re able to digest in 20 minutes.
Mick:
I got a question about that. When do you think that’s appropriate to do? Now, I know you said you’re going to get permission from the other people on the meeting. Hey, can my AI take the notes and it’s going to record the meeting, but you wouldn’t as a personal injury attorney, you wouldn’t just have the AI take the meeting and take the notes when you can’t make it because you want to make some of that personal connection. When is it appropriate? Is it just with other associates? Is it with partner? When do you deploy that particular time saver?
Chris:
So that’s a great question. So in our office, anything that’s client facing, we want a human being on it. We want a staff member because whether it’s telephone call, zoom in-person meetings, we want to keep that relationship. It’s a relationship that’s very important to us. At our office, our slogan is every case is personal. It’s not very personal for just putting you on an ai.
Mick:
So
Chris:
Anything to deal with our clients intakes, follow-ups, done in person or by a human being. I have not personally attended meetings through an AI only, but if I’m dealing with a vendor and they’re quoting me all these prices, and a lot of times they’re promising you the world, and then by the time we sign up, we didn’t say that. Well, guess what? I have a transcription of what you said. So there are certain experiences dealing with vendors that I found it to be very helpful where I can find different things that were said that were going to get done at a certain price point or different services that I can discover very quickly.
Mick:
And you know what? That’s actually a great point because you’d mentioned this in your talk with the students last week on campus with Trustee Broadhurst. At some point you’re going to get to the moment where you need these other services to help your law office, whether they’re marketing, whether they’re SEO, whether they’re, like you said, vendors for technology or for other services. And doing the business of the law practice takes you away from getting business
Mick:
Your law practice. And that was something that you and Arthur spoke about for a long time, about if you get stuck doing the books, if you get stuck doing the clerical work, that means you’re not actually out there pushing flesh and touching clients. Right?
Chris:
Right. A hundred percent. So I mean, we’ve definitely looked to gain an AI or not, even if it’s just technology based, anything that will make the client experience better and anything that kind of reduces any bottlenecks within the process of the client experience and how we service the client. So if there’s anything that can reduce the mundane tasks or streamline them, we try to incorporate them right away. So we do take time to try and see where those bottlenecks are and address how we can fix those or alleviate them. So turning the tables a little bit, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background, and I’m going to have a couple questions for you.
Mick:
Sure. So I went to Providence College for undergrad. I majored in economics and music there. After that, I played in a band for about four years, and we toured the east coast. We opened for Ben Folds five, what was the name of Manchester Orchestra we’re called the Ringer soundtrack. But that actually gave me an awful lot of experience that I kind of needed in the world. And when you’re younger and everybody tells you that you should go to law school and you say to yourself, I really have no interest in this. I got a totally different idea of what I want to do. It’s always kind of in the back of your head that if this doesn’t work out, they’re going to be like, well, you should have just become a lawyer. So it’s not that it didn’t work out, it’s still going well. But at some point along the way, I realized that I could do both or that I would like to do both.
So gradually over time, I started taking some classes over at Massachusetts School of Law and I would work all day and then go to class at six o’clock, which is really how a lot of our students go to school. And I took an internet law class in my first five or six months there. And it was then that I realized that there was something in the law that was really interesting. And for me, because I think for a lot of people, especially creative people, the law is a very black and white thing, and I don’t really see the world that way. I don’t like to see the world that way. And it felt really rigid kind of growing up in an environment where everybody either wins or loses or if you don’t know the answer, you look back at an old case to figure out the answer to a new problem. So all of those things to me kind of put me on a different path. But eventually I found my way back to the law once I realized that everything from entertainment to music to internet was all meeting here,
Chris:
And
Mick:
There were no answers for any of it yet. So for me, that’s where the interest actually came. It wasn’t because I liked the law or I liked reading really long cases. It was because I realized somewhere in that first year of law school that there was this whole area of the world that there were no laws and nobody knew anything about them to write the right laws that would protect everybody from technology. So that’s basically how I became very interested in internet law and technology law. But before that, I spent a lot of time designing flyers, doing websites, all these different types of computer related things. It was only when I got to law school that I could kind of smosh those two worlds together. So now I do the website for Massachusetts School of Law. I run their podcasts. I do a lot of computer training, a lot of Westlaw training and a lot of Lexus stuff.
And I teach the e-commerce and Cybercrime podcast in class with Professor Olson, who’s another one of the technology techy kind of professors. So that’s kind of how I found my way into the law. But at the same time, I think it was really the recognition that these two things were kind of careening towards each other, the law, entertainment, and the fact that the internet was kind of in between all of this, that the law really hadn’t figured out jurisdictional problems with the internet, hadn’t figured out exclusive rights problems of the internet. And then you had a bunch of major players like Google and YouTube and Apple, Napster, even all kind of fooling around in the dark trying to sort out who was going to be at the top of the mountain. So for me, it was all of those things kind of converging that brought me to the law and technology in the law,
Chris:
And AI is only exacerbated all of those concerns or continued
Mick:
Every single one of them from the music rights to the compositions that the law students turn in to. Even I was talking with staff earlier about how we support our professors and how they find out that some of the work is inauthentic when they suspect it. So we’ve had to really, especially we’ve talked about since Covid, it’s accelerated, the need for everything to kind of get technologically supercharged. It also allowed our professors to kind of see how technology could really make their work much more efficient. So it’s a little bit of an easier sell these days than it was pre 20. But at the same time, it’s always tough to get lawyers to adapt new technology, I’m sure. Oh yeah. I mean,
Chris:
New lawyers, staff members, how at the forefront of the school and the student’s mind, do you see ai? Is that something that kids are even aware of incorporating already?
Mick:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. They were asking us for an AI policy really before we were ready to draft one, and we have honor code and you sign it when you are admitted, you sign one before you take every midterm and every final. And basically what it is, it’s an authentic work kind of affidavit. So even though it doesn’t specifically mention chat, GBT or spell book or Gemini, the implication is if you didn’t do the work and you used technical or colleague means to substantiate it, then it’s not your original work, and therefore there could be problems with evaluating it. So we are trying to kind of balance the need to educate our students with how to be competent on AI because like we’ve talked about, it’s coming no matter what. It’s inevitable. So what do you want? Do you want to have attorneys that don’t know how to harness the thing and end up costing their clients tons of money because they just don’t know how to be efficient? Or do you want to make sure that you arm them with this tool, with this weapon and make them competitive with the other lawyers that are going to be graduating with them?
Chris:
One of the things you just made me think about when I came back and I started trying to implement some of the AI pieces here in our office, a lot of the staff was resistant. I don’t know if you found this with faculty or people at Masco Law, and the biggest thing that I heard early on was, well, it’s like you’re cheating and people didn’t want to cheat. Now, this is different in a school setting than an office setting
Mick:
Because
Chris:
When you’re writing an email, you’re drafting a letter, having it sound the best that it can, the client doesn’t care where it came from. If it sounds professional and it’s better written than somebody, that’s a different context for a student handing that into a teacher. But once we were able to train staff to the benefits, they’ve completely embraced it. And one of the things that I preach to them, which was told to me is that you’re not going to be replaced by ai, at least not right now, but you’re going to be replaced by somebody that uses AI because there are a lot of powers and efficiencies and things that you can do. So if you’re interviewing and you have this skillset to use, which new employers, new law firms, new law schools are going to want, and you don’t have it, you’ve never heard of it, you’ve been resistant to it, you’re going to put yourself at a disadvantage.
Mick:
Absolutely. You actually made this really great point that a lot of times we fail to kind of recognize is 15 years ago, the United States Army didn’t have a drone operator position. Now it’s one of the most filled positions for the United States Army. And in a lot of ways it’s similar. You do not want to produce an attorney that doesn’t know how to use this thing at this point because everybody else is going to be able to, and ultimately using ai, the person that is the, we call it the operator, the person that is the translator or the operator of that makes themself indispensable at whatever company they work at. So learning how to harness it in law school and learning all the bells and whistles, how to use GPT, how to use spell book or how to use Lexus or Westlaw’s ai, it makes you indispensable and makes you the person that’s not fireable because then you can explain how to use it to everybody else in that law office. So they always need a pilot
Chris:
Just for the analogy of our office, and I’d love to hear how Masco Law is handling it, but I remember I’ve been in practice 20 years now, and I remember going to the courthouse and the older attorneys would have these books that they kept every date. And it was very important for me because staff back in the office that, well, if I just put a court date in and they’re taking a call booking me, I don’t want to double book. So I would put something in my phone and it would immediately go back on the exchange server to the staff. So if they were on the phone and made a consultation call, they knew right up to the second. And one of the things that I’ve definitely found, because I do talk to hundreds of business owners and law firm owners across the country, is that as with a lot of things, as with a lot of our parents that struggle with the phone or don’t want to learn the way to use something, there is a resistance to this new technology, but yet you have this completely other demographic which is coming into the law schools that that’s the only way they learn or communicate or read is through these devices and technologies.
So it’s definitely been right now a battle of different generations, although I will say my father who’s in his eighties loves TikTok. That’s
Mick:
Cool. That’s very cool.
Chris:
So there are roles in these things and everybody’s becoming educated, but some more quickly than others and some embracing it more quickly. How does mass school law, because I know that you have a dynamic group of people there, how do you address the different people that come into the school?
Mick:
As you were asking the question, I knew exactly what I wanted to say because I think it’s the thing that makes our school special is we’ve got a huge diverse swath of students. We’ve got people that are 23 years old that just walked right out of undergrad. We’ve got people that just decided that they want to add a law practice to their real estate practice and they’re in their fifties. So what you get is this really incredible cross-pollination between people that are coming out of undergrad with the way that they learn at university now in 20 23, 20 24, and people that haven’t really been at an undergraduate setting for close to 20, 30 years, getting the benefit of mingling and co-mingling with all these different generational and different personal backgrounds and professional backgrounds. And what it does is, especially when you put them in firms, when you have classes where there’s firm work, so everybody gets a small group and that’s their firm for the project or for the presentation or for the motion, what you find is that you’ve got one person that’s got experience as a law enforcement officer.
One person that’s got experience as a computer technician, a nurse that’s probably 20 years older than everybody else, and then one 23-year-old kid that knows how to use two or three different platforms. And all of these experiences kind of come together in a way that really, in a way that the people that they might not be comfortable using something like Google Workspace or hopping on a Zoom or like, Hey, GPT, can you outline this for me? They watch somebody that is comfortable doing this from a different generation, and all of a sudden they realize this thing that they heard about on the news or they read in a magazine, it’s not so scary and they can do it. And just seeing it, seeing their colleagues do it, it really aids them in believing that they can do it too. So I think we have a really unique atmosphere and unique population that lends itself to different generations trying on for size, what’s comfortable for each other.
In fact, I’ve even seen 22 and 23 year olds that all they do is they just take notes on their computer, but they see an older student come in and just drop a dictaphone on the podium and go back to their seat and sit and listen to the whole lecture without taking notes. So we see a lot of that cross-pollination where somebody might try a different learning style because they’ve seen it work for somebody else, but I think that it is definitely a melting pot when it comes to what works for everybody. It’s not always the same thing, but we try to make sure we deliver some of that stuff in different ways. Some students are auditory learners, so we try to deliver it just as audio. Some students are just visual learners. We try to deliver it as a PowerPoint. I think making the communication digestible to that entire swath of demographic is also important.
So it’s not just about them feeling like they can share their experiences and their talents with each other as it comes to technology or personal and professional experience. It’s also that willingness that no one’s going to shun them because they haven’t learned it yet or they do it a different way. In fact, we see it go both ways on the street. We see the younger students adopt some of the handwritten notes even it’s like, oh, is that working for you? Writing it out by hand, it’s like, yeah, I wrote it out 20 times. It’s like, okay, I’m going to try that. So it’s a really interesting dynamic we have.
Chris:
Yeah, and I love that. I know Masco Law very well. My brother went there and a lot of people I’ve worked with very closely attorneys throughout the years that have gone there. And I love that about MACO Law also because it’s opened up the legal profession of people that might not otherwise have found their way into it, and it’s allowed people to get second careers or jump right into their first careers you’re talking about. And I think it’s also brought a lot to the legal profession because people now become lawyers after 30, 20 years in another profession, and they’re hitting certain areas of law with a completely different perspective
Mick:
Than the
Chris:
Person that jumped
Mick:
Right out of law school. Such a great point too, is that I think a lot of times if you walk right into law school from undergrad, you’re kind of like in the wheel
Chris:
In
Mick:
The sense you’re going from high school to college to law school. But a lot of our students come to us with a lot of personal and professional experience. They’re a real estate agent, they’re a nurse, like I just said, they’re a police officer. They’re in a car for 12 hours a night and then they come to class during the day. We have totally different and disparate types of people that all come together and have one mission is pass the bar exam and go help their community. But it is always interesting to see how they get along and how they help each other with their different abilities from their own generation. So very, very, it’s good to hear that your brother has also got a lot of benefit from the education here,
Chris:
And we’ll bring it back full circle and maybe end on this from the perspective of MA school law, do you guys talk about, or is there a discussion about where is AI going and how does Masco Law incorporate that? Is that ongoing? Yeah, definitely ongoing.
Mick:
And believe it or not, some of the leadership is definitely more amenable to having students figure out how to learn it, how to integrate it into their preparation, to their drafting, into their motion work. But it’s really the one L that seems to be kind of like the sacrosanct area because they need the one L to learn how to read a case without just pulling a brief offline from Quimbee. They need the one L to understand how to write a thesis paragraph and a conclusion and what we call a track. You probably haven’t had to write one of those in a forever, but there are certain fundamental skills of A one L that all of the full-time faculty feel very strongly about making sure that they leave the one L with, and that there really are not a lot of shortcuts
Chris:
To
Mick:
Those handful of skills like how to brief a case, how to read so many cases, but remember all the fine details from each one, right? You probably remember that from law school. It’s like you’ve got seven cases for contracts, six cases for torts, three more cases for criminal law, and you have to have them all done for Monday.
The volume, that’s another talent of a lawyer is they really need to make sure that the one L student understands that you’re going to have a volume of cases this big to read and you have to actually remember, or at least make notation enough that you can articulately explain each one of these instances. So there are certain skill sets in the one L that the full-time faculty believe you can’t shortcut that stuff. And there are other ways that I think students can integrate AI into their one L coursework that is helpful but doesn’t allow those shortcuts. I had one L student show me recently that he bought an AI reader for his iPad, and what he did was he was able to get a license for one of his textbooks, put it into the iPad. So it was a ub, it was a digital format.
The screen reader would read it back to him, but all he had to do is train the reader with maybe 30 or 45 words that he would read the sentence. So now what he’s able to do is have the screen reader read the textbook back to him in his own voice, and then it can produce an MP three of it as well. So if he wants to just take a certain segment of it and listen to it in his car on his way home via Bluetooth, he can do that too. And this student is in his fifties.
So I’ve had lots of different permutations of how students utilize and leverage technology in ways that are totally acceptable that don’t violate that honor code. And you can be a one L and figure out how to integrate AI into your workflow. But I do think I was spooking with one of your other attorneys about this earlier. Well, I wouldn’t tell you to use something that you were already uncomfortable with. So what do you already use? And for us, we use Google Workspace at MSL, and a lot of students are very proficient with Google Workspace. So when we do give them the AI tools for Lexi and Westlaw and Google, they’re the ones that are pretty much on board with the suites that they’re used to working with. That way their productivity doesn’t change. They already learn how to essentially use the platform or use the service, and now they’re just adding a widget or they’re adding an add-on into it. That’s just an AI bot. So in a lot of ways we do want to make sure that they have the understanding and the acumen to use it, but there’s just this feeling that the fundamental skills of the lawyer, you’ve got to kind of have solid before you can start to have the computer
Chris:
Ride shotgun. I would agree with that wholeheartedly. I mean the one L, I mean I feel like it’s a sacred rite of passage anyway for any lawyer, the Socratic method, but to everything you were talking about with all these cases and briefing them, it teaches you critical thinking and it teaches you how to anticipate arguments on the other side, and that’s necessary. If you’re standing up in court, there’s no AI right now that’s going to help you do that on your feet.
Mick:
Well, you also need a lawyer to help you. It’s like, Hey, listen what you just said, no one’s going to be helping you with this. There’s not going to be an AI sitting next to you at co-counsel table. So you have to have somebody that has earned their trust, tell them not to take the shortcut and why you don’t want to take it because they don’t believe that they’ve spent the last four years at undergrad. And they’re like, yeah, okay. You’re just another teacher telling me don’t take shortcuts. I’ve gotten this far already. I think I know what I’m doing. And then they hit the wall in one L because you just can’t cram all of those elements and all those cases in for midterm. And like I was telling you guys earlier, I’ve got to get back today to do the first midterm for this fall one L class. They’re taking their civil procedure midterm tonight, starting at four 30, right? Do you remember your first civil procedure midterm?
Chris:
Yeah, I do
Mick:
Nebulous stuff, right? Brutal
Chris:
Subject
Mick:
Matter jurisdiction. Federal jurisdiction, don’t it? Yeah, you don’t miss it, right? How many days to file? So yeah, that’s what they’re dealing with tonight. And I’m sure all of them were hoping that they could just install their ExamSoft today and no problem. Take the test on the computer problems with that too. So we use testing software essentially to determine whether or not they’re taking the test without assistance or with assistance. We have them take the test in the room. So we actually do deploy an AI when they take their tests through the monitoring software that is able to tell whether they’re reading a cheat sheet off screen, all these other different kind of tells the bar examine in Massachusetts uses it. We found that as soon as we adopted it and started using it, our bar scores went up. Our students seemed to be much more comfortable taking the bar exam on the computer from our best guess. It also removes the need to decipher what those illegible writings might look like in the essay format. So we train them on ExamSoft now, but we’ve also seen a lot of benefits, a little bit more insight as to where they’re having trouble and where they need to improve.
Chris:
It’s amazing how much it’s so much a part of our life and you don’t even realize it, right? It’s in these smart cars that people are driving now. It’s in these chat bots that we’re talking to people when we call customer service and they’re talking right back to us and they’re asking us additional questions. It is in so many more areas than I think people appreciate, and it’s only going to multiply from there.
Mick:
And it’s exciting, but it is terrifying too. What mean at some point they’re going to be running things and we’re not going to be able to
Chris:
Get
Mick:
A person on the phone to say, Hey, I can’t start my car. What am I supposed to do? Right.
Chris:
Well, I think that’s the scariest part. The future is so uncertain and even these brilliant, brilliant physicists and everybody that helped create this or played a role in it, they have a great deal of caution and fear and they know a lot more of it than we do, and that’s a little scary. Yeah, agreed. But also exciting. Very.
Mick:
Alright, so we’re getting close to the wrap up. So what I would love to be able to tell the students is here’s a great example of where Chris’s law practice was able to leverage technology, leverage AI leverage some element of forward facing, futuristic efficient technology that greatly enhanced a client’s return or the help that you were able to render to the client, but also the way that you were able to do it either efficiently or most cost effectively.
Chris:
Yeah, I mean, like I said earlier, we use it a lot in client experiences and marketing from a client perspective, or at least from a staff perspective in terms of reducing the mundane tasks. You can literally go through a contract. Now, the one thing I will caution and that I tell everybody is know the product you’re using. Some of these products have bank grade privacy, some of them, everything that goes into the AI is used to teach the AI and it goes out into this public cloud. So you really need to know what type of platform you’re on. Now if I’m doing a deposition and I’m not entering any client information, but I just say describing an incident, very vanilla, give me some deposition questions, then there’s nothing. There’s no privacy concerns, there’s nothing going out there with anybody’s name, location, parties involved. But you can get really good information and they could outline topics to go into.
Just really good ways to outline and create things that you should be thinking about that you might not have otherwise thought. And I’ve used it in preparation for depositions, for responding to different motions you can take. So one of the other concerns about AI is their hallucinations. So AI is only as good as the context like the case hallucinations. That’s from all the sanctioned attorneys. Exactly. So what you don’t want to do is just ask chat GPT to write you a motion, right? Because they’re going to make up cases. But what Lexi and Westlaw are doing is they’re now using AI within their world of cases, which we already use and research within and say, find this, find that, interpret this, interpret that. So if you’re doing it within the context of a world that has already been scrubbed, that’s much different than just using it within this unknown world of where it’s going out to grab it.
So you really need to know where it’s pulling from, what information you’re putting into it. But I’ve definitely taken cases in a motion in opposition motion and pulled all the cases out of that and uploaded them to AI because they’re already public record and they’re out there. And you can also use ’em in secure platforms and just say, what are the strengths and weaknesses of these cases? And it gives you ideas for how you approach your motion and your response. But even just from a very vanilla place, we have used it just for client correspondence, correspondence with insurance companies. You could just say, Hey, draft a letter again, without the client information, you’re just saying draft. How do you draft an introductory letter asking for the policy limits? Or how do you create different things without specifically addressing a specific case or a specific client and they create these frameworks that you can then integrate.
We also use them heavily in training within the staff. So if there are different things that we want to talk at a lunch and learn that we hold here in the office about how to educate them on a platform within something that we use, it’ll create that whole walkthrough for the person giving the speech on that. We are also using it, I’m doing a lecture for the chamber of commerce and we put together a PowerPoint using ai. Talking about it gives you different safeguards that you want to go into different topics, but it can really help give you the framework for anything you can think about in marketing. You can go into so much of the content that’s on your website that Google looks at. You can use it to develop different marketing strategies. What are the best ways for a criminal or a divorce lawyer to get business? You can ask it and it’s going to tell you in really good suggestions. And when you have four good bullet points, you’re going to say, alright, tell me more about bullet 0.4
Mick:
And
Chris:
How do I make that into a workable plan?
Mick:
And
Chris:
It’s going to give you that. So it’s great for idea generating. I just caution people that you have to be very careful of your client information, what you’re putting it into. There are a lot of programs out there like Microsoft and other ones that we’re already working within. So you had mentioned there’s certain research like Westlaw that your students are already working in and they have add-on AI functionality. There’s a lot of trusted products like the copilot through Microsoft that are using AI and they’re using it to simplify. Now, a lot of people don’t know or don’t have a great depth when it comes to Excel, but you may have an Excel spreadsheet and you may use the AI within that to summarize it for you or to actually tell it what you want the Excel to look like, but you don’t know the codes and formulas to do it. You can write it out and it’s going to create one for you. You can also put in a picture and say, describe this picture for me. You can also give it text and say, create a picture with this could be a diagram. There are so many things out there that I want to say sky’s the limit. The extent of your imagination is really what you can use it for. And there’s so many applications. Just the biggest things are really just be careful of where and how you utilize privileged client information.
Outside of that, there’s so many things and applications that you can use it for who gets final cut. What do you mean by that? In terms of
Mick:
The entertainment world and the podcast world, we call it final cut. Who gets the final edit? Who’s the last person that gets to see the thing that AI put out before you send it out?
Chris:
That’s a great question. So we have, depends on what that cut is for. So we have different departments. So for example, Wade who runs all of our marketing, we may take this hour long podcast and we may chop it up into 40 different viral clips. It’s going to tag it, it’s going to give all the language related to it, it’s going to close caption it, it’s going to do everything. Now that still just like a product that we’re sending out a new letter, a new training module, it’s going to depend on the department and there’s always layers of review. There is in everything in the world, in any industry, you’re going to want to have a first, a second, a third, but you want to have a policy in place, a procedure and how that’s going to get addressed. Because quite frankly, we’ve done podcasts put it out and things are spelt wrong or things are, they use different words because different words have different meanings. You do have to go over it even for the easy things that we would think can be done on that. And you just have to make sure that it’s scrubbed and reviewed. And what it does is it turns what you’re doing into less content creation and more editing and review
Mick:
Approval, an
Chris:
Editorial position, right? That’s right. But everything, even if somebody has written something that would go through multiple layers. So that really hasn’t changed for us because whether it’s being written through an AI component or by a human being, they’re going to go through multiple editing layers before it’s finally ready to go out. So I think that’s very important. No matter what you’re doing, you’re just either streamlining that, making it faster. I can tell you just from a marketing perspective, we are able to put out 30, 40, 50 times the amount of content that we used to put out in a shorter period of time because it can be done so much quicker.
Mick:
And like you said, this one podcast, we’re here for one afternoon, the three of us, but it’s going to give you a month’s worth of content, minute and 30 seconds on Instagram.
Chris:
It also can know the different platforms have different functions. LinkedIn might be more of a teaching platform where Facebook is more of just sharing personal anecdotes, tiktoks more of a viral thing so you can kind of shape and teach it to put out and create clips specific for these platforms and things that would’ve taken hours and hours for us to review and edit. Well now it’s creating a ton of things that we’re reviewing and edit individually, but it’s taken that big middle piece out completely.
Mick:
Very cool.
Chris:
Yeah, it is fun. I can’t wait to see what else we can do with it. We are trying to constantly reeducate ourselves, learn stuff, try new things. I’m getting inundated with so many AI products regularly and we don’t implement most of them, but I educate myself on what’s coming down the pipe.
Mick:
You got to know what’s out there. You
Chris:
Got to know what’s out there and what’s coming. And I mean, I think at some point you don’t want to try the fledgling company, but that’s going to be very quickly gobbled up by a Microsoft or a Google and implemented into theirs if it works well.
Mick:
Absolutely. Alright, thank you very much for having me today. It was great to come down to the law office. The Massachusetts School of Law really appreciates you giving them your time. Our students are going to love this podcast, whether they listen to it today or next week or next month or a year from now, but I’m sure a year from now everything we talked about will be completely obsolete and we’ll have to do another one that is really, I look forward to seeing you again hopefully in a couple years, but hopefully not any sooner than that because that’ll mean that this whole thing has just gone to complete SHIT.
Chris:
And I think this is something we’re going to have to do over and over. I think whether you’re doing it with your students, we’re having this conversation, which I think is a great exercise. I thank you for joining us and I also welcome any of your students that may have watched this. And I honestly mean this. Don’t hesitate to shoot me an email, give me a call.
Mick:
Be careful. They kept you an hour after you left field and I, yeah,
Chris:
As you can tell, I love this stuff. You
Mick:
Did. I think that’s why I was like, I’m getting ’em on the podcast guys. Don’t worry.
Chris:
There’s so many. I’m also a pay it forward type of guy. I’ve had so many great mentors in my life and I do want to pay it forward, and I think there’s a lot of great applications that can come out of this technology as long as we’re smart and we’re using it wisely. And I’m happy to share any experience I have with your students. Thanks
Mick:
Very much. We appreciate it. And thank you for sharing. Thanks for your time.
Chris:
Same here. Thanks, Meg. Thanks.