8am is one of my favorite legal tech vendors. it has been historicaly focused on the unsexy back-office stuff that small and mid-size firms really need. Cash flow. Billing. Getting paid. Not trying to be everything to everybody. It puts on a great conference. But in today’s a legal tech world where money is pouring in, I wonder whether 8am will maintain its focus. Here is my post for Above the Law on what I saw at this year’s conferance and why I have a question.

I’ve been concerned for some time that AI will end up making us all sound the same. That’s a problem for those of us in the persuasion busines. How can we make our arguments stand out in ways that will resonate? There is also a training issue as many of the tasks young lawyers cut their teeth on vanish. Not to mention the impact on how we bill for what we do.

So a study by a creative non-profit for the ad industry that faces similar issues caught my eye. Here’s my Above the Law report on what it found and the questions it raises.

The Jesse Cole Keynote: Law Firms Aren’t Bananas. Or Are They?

You know me and celebrity keynote speakers at legal tech conferences. Sometimes they’re good. Sometimes they’re terrible. So I approached the keynote from Jesse Cole of Bananas baseball fame at the recent 8am Kaleidoscopeconference with a healthy degree of skepticism. 

I must be one of the few people in the universe who didn’t know who Cole is. He’s the founder and owner of the Savannah Bananas, the wildly popular baseball team. Best I could tell, he’s single-handedly trying to turn America’s pastime into something resembling a cross between baseball, a rock concert, and a WWE Main Event. He’s reinventing the traditional baseball experience with his own version of the game, called Banana Ball. It’s complete with unconventional rules, choreographed dances, outrageous promotions, and nonstop fan engagement. And that’s just for starters. And the fans love it.

The Yellow Tuxedo

When I heard all this, I immediately thought what could a guy like this could possibly have relevant to say to the legal community. Then he made his entrance. He didn’t stroll onto the stage carrying a bottle of water and a PowerPoint remote. He came bolting in from the back of the room, decked out in a yellow tux, yellow hat, yellow shirt, and even yellow shoes. All to the beat of Get Ready for This playing at full tilt. I thought, Oh God. Get ready for some more bullshit from a guy who knows nothing about what we do and is there to collect a paycheck.

Well. As the subsequent 24 hours at the conference demonstrated, I do have an uncanny ability to get things completely wrong. (Which, for the sake of all of us, I won’t go into). It turns out Cole had one hell of a lot of things we need to pay attention to. And yes, he spit out a bunch of platitudes. But he backed them up with illustrative and, I daresay, memorable stories. And make no mistake, he’s a damn good storyteller.

Every time I talk to older lawyers I hear how bad younger lawyers are. Don’t want to work. Can’t think. How much of this is just “the young generation is going to the dogs” notion and how much is true is hard to say. But it was refreshing to hear about a new program at Vandy’s Law school where students can use AltaClaro’s DepoSim tool to learn how to take depositions. Even more refreshing was to hear how the students responded. It didn’t sound like a bunch of dogs to me. Here is my post on my interview for Above the Law

I never practiced criminal law. But my son-in-law is a public defender and I’ve learned how hard they work and toil with limited resources. So when I heard about how the New Jersey PD program was using AI to enable 1,300 public defenders across 66 offices search a state PD database of 3,000+ briefs using natural language I was pretty excited. Here are my thoughts on the program for Above the Law.

An interesting book by Dave Eggers came out several years ago called The Circle. It was later made into a mediocre movie, but the book has become considerably more disturbing with time.

The essence of the book was the drip-by-drip loss of privacy, symbolized by the loss of integrity of the main character. She goes to work for a big tech company and stands idly by as more and more private information about people becomes public, piece by piece. By the end of the book, she has wholesale bought into the company philosophy: “All that happens must be known.”

Sounds a little creepy but there is some truth to her story: we don’t notice the loss of privacy that happens gradually. And we accept more and more intrusions by entities that can get anything and everything about us and do God knows what with it.

I was recently with a group of managing partners from smaller firms when the issue of working from home home. To a person they were convinced that being in the office was critical for younger lawyer training. At the same time, they are facing challenges obtaining and retaining younger lawyers who want the flexibilty to work from home. The discussion raised some hard questions about what training means and the realities of our digital world. Here are my thoughts on all this for Above the Law. I hope it makes those on both sides think some.

Neal Page: Sir, excuse me. I know this is your cab, but I’m desperately late for a plane, and I was wondering if I could appeal to your good nature and ask you to let me have it.

Lawyer getting into cab: I don’t have a good nature.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 1987.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing these days about the impact AI is going to have on the poor lawyer. You know the one. The guy who brought home over $5 million in compensation last year. Poor baby.

But what isn’t talked about is the impact AI will have down below. The administrative staff. The paralegals. Those in the marketing department. Those who labor in billing and collections to make sure Mr. Big gets his $5 million. All these people slave away in internal offices for peanuts with no clout or status. These are the jobs and the costs the AI vendors merrily trumpet can be eliminated and reduced. These are the people who can least afford to be marginalized.

And what are the firms doing about this issue? Eliminating these positions to cut costs. Conducting massive layoffs of staff. And hiring fancy legal engineers. Searching for directors of AI sometimes at salaries of over $400,000.