The Future of Law, Understanding the “Big Picture” in a Changing World

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Managing your law practice can be challenging, marketing, time management, attracting clients, and all the things besides the cases that you need to do that aren’t billable. Welcome to this edition of the Unbillable Hour, the Law Practice Advisory podcast. This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guests and host Christopher Anderson here on Legal Talk Network.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Welcome to The Un-Billable Hour. I am your host, Christopher Anderson. And today’s episode, I had to figure out where to put this one in the main triangle, if you remember the main triangle about law firm businesses that we have to acquire new clients. We call it acquisition produce results that we promised to them and that’s production, and then achieve the business professional results for the owners. This one’s kind of about the results, but it’s also about production. And so we’re just going to call it about everything in several episodes that we’ve been doing recently, actually, we’ve been exploring concepts and ideas around the future of law, and today we’re going to explore that from a couple of different points of view. And one of them is going to be ai, which we’ve talked about a couple of times, but I’m sure we’ll have a different take on that.

And the other one’s money, which we haven’t talked about, financing in particular. And that’s something that indeed I’ve been seeing just exploding onto the scene lately, and it’s something that I think we all need to be paying attention to and to focus our attention on. That is our guest today is Dan Lear. He’s a long time friend and colleague who’s been in this space almost as long as I have, but he is the vice president of partnerships at InfoTrack and has also nurtured a personal brand right Brain law. Dan knows the business of law. He is a lawyer, he’s a legal tech advocate and has been for a long, long time. Like I said, he’s working at InfoTrack now, but prior to that he’s started a FinTech business. So if he’s talking about finance, you should listen. And also served as director of industry relations back at avo. Prior to Avvo, Dan was also a technology lawyer. He worked with companies large and small in the Seattle area, and he’s still there, which is why he uses Windows apparently. So Dan, with that woefully inadequate introduction, welcome to the show.

Dan Lear:

Thanks, Christopher. I don’t know if that intro was woefully inadequate. It felt kind of properly adequate to me, but I’m excited to be here and excited to be chatting with you. And I mean this sincerely, you and I have known each other for a while. I’m a fan generally of what you’ve done and really interested in the work that you’ve done. Always been a big fan of The Un-Billable Hour, so it’s fun to be chatting with you.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Thank you, Dan. Yeah, exciting for me too. So the first thing I actually want people to know because get into info tracking and a couple other things, but I think the audience would like to know little bit about Right Brain law because that just sounds cool and I’ve known you in that brand. Can you explain to folks what right Brain Law means to you?

Dan Lear:

Sure. And the big caveat I’ll add is that my website is currently under construction, so if you go to right Brain law.co, you’re not going to see much a whole nother conversation, but if I can, I’ll try to make this interesting and of the appropriate length. I think there’s a fun winding story here, but hopefully it’s not too boring. When I was practicing, it became pretty clear to me that that was not the way I wanted to spend the rest of my career. And that’s no disrespect to so many amazing practicing lawyers, just wasn’t a great fit for me. I ended up actually on the advice of a career counselor reading a great book that I still recommend and love very dearly called A Whole New Mind written by a fellow who’s a former lawyer named Dan Pink, who also more in the business of law also read a great book, which I highly recommend.

Called To Sell is Human, he’s written a bunch, but to Sell is Human was another great one that I liked, but in a whole new Mind, he talked about kind of the distinctions between the hemispheres of the brain. And I’ve since read a bunch of other books on this topic. And Pink’s description is it is definitely an oversimplification. I don’t know if it’s so oversimplified as to be inaccurate, but what I’m about to share, take it to some extent with a grain of salt. But anyway, his whole premise of the book was The world is moving from a very left brain, analytical, logical type of work and type of approach to a more holistic type of approach. One that uses both your left brain, and this actually relates a lot, I think, to the AI piece if we want to go there. And the right brain is more creative, more non-linear, more holistic, more big picture.

And he lists a bunch of things. Laughter, I can’t even remember anymore so long ago that I read it, but I had been really frustrated by what I felt like was the fairly narrow approach that law school and then a lot of legal practitioners took to the way that they did their work. And I was again, probably maybe indicative of why I ended up in a less traditional role. I was more interested in looking at the legal system as a system and thinking about how it could change. And so right Brain law was really born of this notion of legal felt so stuck in that left brain way of logical and analytical and it was like, Hey, can we bring some of these other ideas into that conversation? So totally lifted from Dan Pink. But yeah, it’s been a brand that I think has served me well. And like you said, it at least piques people’s interest. And so yeah, it’s been kind of a place that I’ve hung my shingle in terms of when I was doing some independent consulting and some writing, again, website currently down, but a lot of the stuff and things that I was thinking about live under that brand.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Well cool. Hopefully this episode will be out there for the ages and your website will be back up when they come look for it. So we’ll still give them the information at the end. Alright, well I think that’s really fascinating. And then just quickly, you’re at InfoTrack now serving in a role with them as the VP of partnerships, but what are, just for the listeners who don’t maybe know, can you just tell what it is and what you do there, why you’re there?

Dan Lear:

Yeah, definitely. And I’ll try not to make this an advertisement and maybe even kind of tie it back to that. So what InfoTrack does is we are, and again, this is partly related back to sort of my thinking about the industry, what gets me excited about working here is we are trying to digitize the litigation services space and we focus specifically on court filing and service of process, taking a more digitally forward firm, you’re working away in whatever case management system you might use, be it Clio, my case file line, whatever, it doesn’t matter, Smokeball. And then if you want to initiate litigation, you’ve got to leave that ecosystem to go into another, hopefully you live in a state where there’s the electronic court filing system and submit all that information and then you got to come back and remember what you did over there.

And it seems to us that those two pieces ought to be better integrated. And so that’s really our mission is trying to bring those two pieces together so that you can continue to work more efficiently out of the place you spend your time. And then from a service of process perspective, it gets a little bit more complex. We got to figure out how to actually deliver a thing to a human in the real world, but we figured out a way to tie all of that together as well. And my role in specific is I work very closely with our legal case management partners, clios, the my case, the file Vines, the smoke balls of the world, both in establishing relationships with those companies or facilitating those so that we can work more closely and again, tie all of those processes together.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Perfect. Well that makes a lot of sense. And so yeah, definitely in the tech space and definitely bringing man everything, it amazes me, and I’m sure you see it as well in my own law firms and in the firms with whom I consultant do work, the number of disparate pieces of technology that are only sometimes loosely if at all, knit together. And I thought your explanation of you’re doing all this work in your case management and then you have to go out to file it with the courts and serve it with people and jumping around and context shifting and between those and what can get lost in the translation and how the formatting it doesn’t go and all that stuff is, it’s a burden for a lot of firms. And so to see that we’re trying to do something to work, to knit that together and make it more streamlined for people is really, we need a lot of all across the industry for sure. You’ve written your website might be down, but you have been writing and most recently you’ve been writing about AI and outside funding and their impact on legal services. Let’s talk a little bit about that. What do you see as the impact of these two, what most people would think about as quite different technologies and how they’re having an effect on legal services today?

Dan Lear:

And folks can follow along on LinkedIn. I’ve been writing a bunch about this if they want the details. I think it’s like linkedin.com/in/dan Lear. I did get one of those back in the day. I did get one of those vanity domains, so it’s pretty easy to find me. Yeah, Dan Lear in Seattle Legal Technology, you’ll find me pretty easily on LinkedIn. And Christopher, I want to sort of set this stage at a high level, but then I actually want to turn the question back on you because listened to a few of your episodes and generally have a sense of where you’ve been taking your audience on. Everybody’s talking about ai, we can talk about money at least a little bit as well, but I’d love to get your sort of take on these ideas. I mean, I think actually in terms of immediate impact on legal, I think that money is the one that’s more likely to have an immediate impact that we can come back to that one.

Let’s talk about, let’s stay with AI for a minute, but I think both of these represent fairly significant systemic changes in the way that both legal work gets done, and I think legal services can be delivered. Actually, the argument that I’ll make around ai, this is kind of at least where I plant my flag or at least orient the conversation, is this great article from the Atlantic from a number of years ago called The Free Time Paradox in America. And this predates sort of the AI revolution where it sort of starts out by saying that back in the fifties, I think it was John Maynard Kane’s famous economist said, we expect that by, I don’t know, the year 2000, the end of this century, that Americans will be working like 20 hour weeks, 30 hour weeks and enjoying this incredible sort of abundance of all of our technological innovation and business efficiency. And the article goes on to talk about how different kind of strata in the economy are working different amounts. But the short answer is folks like US professionals are actually working more, not less.

And if you’re super freaked out, and again, I feel like there’s a ton to talk about ai, but like I said, where I began the conversation is the vision 60, 70, 80 years ago was that these technologies were going to relieve us of work. And somehow as human beings, we’ve managed to make ourselves more busy. And I actually think if you look at the progression of human productivity over time, it’s almost certainly gone up. And so what we’re betting about AI is that this is somehow going to reverse that trend. And maybe that’s true. It is possible that this is a game changing technology, but I sort of just feel like we’re still just apes scratching around in the dirt trying to meet our basic essential needs, and somehow we’re going to figure out how to keep ourselves busy and continue to exchange goods and services. And it might change the way we do things for those who harness it. It might make things dramatically easier or more efficient, but I’m not convinced that it’s going to rid us all of our jobs. But I’d be curious to hear what you’ve been talking about with your audience, how it’s come out, whether or not you’ve engaged with these topics at all. I think it’s a really interesting topic.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, I think so too. But so let’s use that since you mentioned the exchange of goods and services, let’s take a moment here to allow the people who make the exchange of this good and service for our listeners and get a word from our sponsors. And we’ll be right back with Dan Lear ripe Brain law and VP at InfoTrack. We’ll be back in a moment. We are back with Dan Lear. Dan is the VP of partnerships at InfoTrack, right brain law and overall really, really familiar guy in law firm business and technology. And we’ve been talking about artificial intelligence, and Dan just passed the question back to me and Dan, the show’s not about me. No, I love answering this question. And I think to some extent, we’re all tea leave reading. And Dan, have you read or do you follow Ray Kurtz while at all? And the singularity

Dan Lear:

With him? Singularity, but no, not in any great depth.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Oh, good. So I’ll bring that knowledge. Yeah, by all means. So I love Kurt Swill and he, about a decade ago wrote a book called The Singularity is Nearer, and then this year, on the beginning of this year, released the singularity is nearer. What was interesting about it is that he’s a futurist, plain and simple. Well, I shouldn’t say plain and simple because he’s a brilliant fricking guy. I mean, he knows economy, economics, he knows physics, he knows there’s a lot of stuff. What was particularly interesting about it is that in his original book, what he talked about is that we’re really, really bad at predicting the future because as human beings, we take a snapshot of a relatively brief period of time and then we extrapolate that linearly and the future is not unrolling that way and never has. And so that’s a mistake that we make because in the short term linear works when you lay, and we’re going to get a little geeky here, but when you lay it, if you have a parabolic curve, but you zoom, zoom, zoom in, and you lay a line on it, it looks like it fits.

But then when you zoom out and you extend that line, it doesn’t fit at all. The line goes straight up to the right and the parabolic curve curves and hockey sticks to get almost vertical in the long timeframe. So he talks about that, we’re really bad at that. And then he writes this book predicting all sorts of stuff. So I’m waiting for the decade book to come out. He announced that a couple years ago, and I’m like, how far off will he have been? And the answer is not very. So he, because the premise of his book, and I think when we think about AI and what the changes are going to be, we have to keep this in mind, is that the pace of change is exponential, but the exponent of that pace is also exponential. So this technology is improving at a double exponent rate.

So 10 years, today is a hundred years in the 19th century, and tomorrow it’ll happen in a year. And in 10 years from now, that’ll happen in one year. And particularly the big change that’s happening now, and this is not a future thing, this is happening now, is that AI is writing ai, and AI is designing the new chips. We’re about to launch into three dimensional computing, which is going to change everything. And so all these things are happening at an accelerated pace and the pace of acceleration is actually accelerating. So to your question, Dan, I think that the answer is that this very well may be a paradigm shift because we are approaching, and the whole point of the singularity is that we are approaching a point in time when a single computer will be able to, for all intents and purposes, mimic the computing power and structure of the human brain. And then not 10 years later, a single computer will be able to mimic and replicate the computing power of all human brains combined in every single computer. And what the singularity means is that just like in a black hole singularity, so we can’t see past that moment. That’s where it all breaks. And it’s not that the world breaks or it’s just we can’t see. We go through this singularity and what changes is different. And I like to combine that thinking and in your question then I’ll shut up. But what I’ve found to be one of the, and it’s sort of a throwaway comment in the movie, the Matrix

Dan Lear:

One of my favorites, so I’m glad we’re going there.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Awesome. But in that the architect discusses that this is the seventh time they’ve built the matrix. And that the first time or first couple of times, they built it as a utopia where people didn’t have to work and there was no pain, and it was heaven basically, right? There was no pain, there’s no sickness. People just lived a perfect life, and the humans rejected it. It wouldn’t work, and the matrix collapsed because the human minds wouldn’t accept that. And I think that goes to your question about work, Dan, I really do, is that I think there’s something inherent about us that needs to strive, that needs to work. Listen, I’d much rather be a worker, even a professional today than Bob Krat hovered bent over a desk without being allowed one candle a day to warm his hands in the time of Scrooge. That was a professional’s life back then, the life of a clerk, the life of a lawyer was not.

It is cozy Today I get a chair that’s made to support my back so I feel better and all these things. And so work is not what it was, and work will not be what it is. But I think it continues because people need to strive. Utopia doesn’t work for us. And because AI is us, and this is sort of the point of kurtzweil, we’re building it in our image and we are going to augment it. I mean, think that I really am going to shut, just think about it. Nobody can see this is audio, but I’m holding up an iPhone. People talk about, oh, there’s going to be this computer brain interface and we’re going to merge with, this is what Kurt Ball writes. We’re going to merge with the technology. Well, we already have, right? When I’m having a conversation at the dinner table and somebody says, oh, the king of Thailand, who’s that? You pick this up, you pick up this phone and you type it in and you figure it out. Or now you ask chat GPT and get a much more detailed answer. But we’re already augmenting our brains with this technology, and it’s just going to continue in an ever rapid rate. That’s my perspective on the question of is it an inflection point of work in two minutes?

Dan Lear:

I love it. So I want to respond and toss out one more idea and then ask a couple questions. Awesome. I mean, I know you’re the driver here, but are you good with that?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Absolutely.

Dan Lear:

So first off, if I want my introduction to Ray Kurtzweil, what do I want to read?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Oh gosh, I should pull up his bibliography. I mean, I think it’s okay to start with the singularity is near. I wouldn’t start with nearer because I don’t know the journey of reading near because I only read near a few years ago. And then nearer is a better journey just going into nearer skips a lot of the rationale and explaining it to me. It also validates, right, it’s like he didn’t know when he wrote near 10 years ago that nearer would be spot on, that he would’ve been spot on. So I think it’s a great journey, but I’ll pull up the bibliography here in a second. But he’s got a lot of other older books that are actually excellent as well.

Dan Lear:

I’ll toss another book out to people as a recommendation. Homo Deus by Yu All Noah Harari or Hariri, I think, I dunno if you’ve read that. Sapiens is his book that’s kind of really well known,

Christopher T. Anderson:

But Homo Deus.

Dan Lear:

Yeah. And again, I’m not going to go into great a depth here because this one, it combines a bunch of ideas that we’ve been talking about, but also could potentially take us in a very different direction. One of his premises or premises about that book and is the whole point of humanity, is to process information faster. Which again, I am not as religious as I used to be, but I came from a religious background. So that sort of blew my mind. And then sort of trying to combine that with what are we all doing here? Really fascinating. So just kind of along this thread of what’s happening to society, the human computer interaction, he talks a lot about technology. Super fascinating. So I’ll toss that one out if you want to, or if your readers really, really want to blow their minds to sort of bring it back to more tactical stuff. Christopher, do you have an opinion? You sort of hinted at this, but I want to make sure that our listeners here aren’t just listening to two random guys philosophize about ideas that they think are interesting. So I, I’m a workaday attorney running my own firm, a solo firm or a small firm. Do you have ideas? And if you don’t, that’s cool, but I guess the question that I would ask is, in light of all of this, what do I do?

That’s what you’re on the

Christopher T. Anderson:

Show to answer.

Dan Lear:

Well, okay, but my answer to that question is I don’t think it’s going to be that big of a change, and so just keep swimming. As Dory would say on Finding Nemo, I think

Christopher T. Anderson:

We have now gone from Deus to Dory,

Dan Lear:

Right? Totally. To finding Nemo. Absolutely. I think you ignore AI at your peril

In the same way that you ignore email at your peril and that you ignore the telephone at your peril. But I don’t necessarily think that I’m open to the possibility that we’re not all going to be unemployed legal professionals in less than a decade. And if I were to, I guess, tee up, my question to you is, and you sort of hinted at this, can you see through the singularity enough to know that even on the other side, like you said, we’re going to keep striving. That’s just what humans do. Or is it like, Hey, get your house in order because when this thing blows up, at least you’ll be best positioned or you’ll have lived your greatest life before we go through that black hole, what do you do?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, no, I think that’s a great question. And so yeah, I’m still going to put you on the spot to answer it too, but I’ll start here, right? I’ve lived long enough and I’ve been in this business long enough that I’ve already lived through several technologies that were going to change everything, several revolutions that were going to come. It was, oh, I’m going to forget the author’s name. Please help me. Who wrote the End of Lawyers question mark.

Dan Lear:

Oh, Suskin

Christopher T. Anderson:

Richard. Yeah,

Richard Suskin and then Poor Guy. I mean, he put a bloody question mark on it, but everybody ignored the question mark. That’s a great book too. And I’ll just mention just before I go into it, that what you just described about Homo Deus and Kurtz, it dovetails. Kurtz will blow your mind. If you’ve read Deus, and I’m reading this Homo Deus, I mean, because talking about the same things, but from very different perspectives, I’m going to guess alright, but so AI firms, in all of these times when the internet was going to change everything and other technology, were going to change everything. What we found was that it just didn’t incorporated those. Now you would be an idiot not to use the internet, not to in your legal work, to insist on going to the law library to do your legal research. But we’ve also had the same conversations that we’re having about AI now about like, oh, is the internet safe?

Can we put client’s information in it? And we all have those conversations. My advice to people generally is don’t panic. People are like, oh, I got to get me some ai. Oh my God, I’m not doing it. I’m not doing the AI thing. I’m falling behind. And the answer is, remember we started, does this podcast talking about all the different technologies, they’re all doing it for you. Cleo’s putting AI in my case is putting AI in. Microsoft is putting AI in. I bet InfoTrack is starting to use AI in some way. It’s every piece of technology that we use. My iPhone is putting AI in.

Dan Lear:

Every

Christopher T. Anderson:

Piece of technology that we use is already building AI in. So you may not think you’re doing it, but you are already doing it because it’s happening. No lawyers aren’t going to go away, but I think we’re going to need to learn to use AI in different and new ways, be just the same way we use the internet in different and new ways. It’s a tool that is being presented to us in many different flavors and we ignore at our peril, but we also don’t need to panic and all feel like we have to become experts in it. That’s not how it works. It’s just a tool that’s becoming available to us.

Dan Lear:

You had threatened to turn this back on me, but you didn’t, but I’m going to ask you. Well, I did.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I’ve throwing it to you now to

Dan Lear:

Debate me. Yeah, no, no, no. I actually completely agree. And the piece, I would just add to that tying back to Dan Pink, and maybe this is a good place to sort of move off of AI to money, or maybe even I’ll give you an opportunity to insert another commercial break, which I think you need to do.

Christopher T. Anderson:

That’s what

Dan Lear:

We’ll do. One the pieces that Dan Pink talks about in his book, whole New Mind is Humor. And one of the other elements that he says we have to introduce and that I think I know I am really not good at, maybe others are good just as from a human perspective, but I think it’s tougher for lawyers is play. And again, I’ve been doing this, but I don’t do it nearly enough. Well, and I’ll actually share two quick examples. Playing with these models is actually really fun. I started using chat GPT, I’ve got this kind of very lightweight daily journal routine, and I started using it for that big caveat. It turned out to really suck. It promised me it would save the information and did not.

Announcer:

So

Dan Lear:

That was really sucky. And I’m using, I don’t have the Uber paid version, but I have the paid version of chat GBT, so don’t use it for that. But the experience of using it to do that and setting that up was actually really enjoyable. I actually had to also do some research on HIPAA the other day, and I started doing some research on the internet sort of the way I would. And then I just went to, I can’t remember whether I used Chat or Claude, and just started interrogating it with questions and sort of asking my way around the problem. And then of course I’m going to go back out and validate, but I didn’t need case law. I just needed to understand. I needed to sort of understand how the framework was set up. And it was really great. I would ask it a question, it would come back with something. I would say, well, what about this? It would ask it.

I do think one way to embrace these technologies without freaking out, without panicking is to just play with them and see what they can do and test them out. Because I think if you can get comfortable using them in that way, and I totally agree with you that they’re already, if you’re using to your point, if you’re using an iPhone, you’re already using probably three different types of AI in different ways, some of which is being used on you, but that’s another conversation. But I think just really making it a part of the way that you interact with the world or learn about the world or be curious about the world, I think can be really a great way to embrace it as well.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, no, I think that that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. The idea of chatting and playing with chat GPT, I think that’s really an excellent one. I think if that’s the only thing people take away from today’s show, that’s a great one. And because it’s the conversation when you do it, you can refine, you ask it a thing. We’re used to go to the internet, we ask a thing and then there’s our answer for better or worse, but you refine the question. It’s an ongoing conversation. I think that’s the fascinating part about it. It’s really, really cool.

Dan Lear:

I’ll share, sorry, Christopher, I know I’ll just share one more really quick one.

Instead of using chat to record my journal, I’m now using a Google form to do that. But what I’m really excited about is once I get enough information in there, I can use Gemini to interrogate that information and tell me themes about my year, what’s the most interesting thing. I said, what’s the most depressing thing? I said, what’s your sense of my best day? What’s your sense of my worst day? So I’m super just as one thing that I’m building that I’m actually really excited to start using. So anyway, just wanted to toss that one out. There’s another example.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I think that’s great. And that’s exactly part of your idea of play. This is just, wow, this will be cool. I’m going to do this thing and then it’ll help me see into it. Alright, so we’re going to go to a break, just like you said, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about money because we said we would. So we’re going to go there and we’re talking with Dan Lear. He’s the VP of, what do we call it? VP of partnerships at InfoTrack, former director of industry relations at avo and all around good thinker, we’ll be back in a minute. We are back with Dan Lear, VP of partnerships at InfoTrack and right brain law with a website that’ll be back sometime. And we’ve been talking about AI and really riffing on what it means and how that technology will affect the practice of law going forward. But we did say we’d talk about money. So let’s turn that conversation. I think you said at the top, and I agree with you that that might be as big a seismic shift for law as all this ai without presuming what you’re talking about. With that, what about funding? What about money are you seeing affecting the future of law?

Dan Lear:

What I’m hearing are mostly that’s strong whispers is probably not, doesn’t do it justice, but it’s not front and center, but outside funding is coming to legal full stop and it’s finding its way in a lot of different ways. I wouldn’t recommend, although we can go there if you want Christopher, talking about whether or not this is a good thing. I have my opinions, I’m totally happy to share those. But I do think that it is a fact of life. I think the reason that I paired these two ideas together in talking about them on LinkedIn was they really represent, and these two ideas by AI and money they represent, I think, or they create a fairly strong demand on legal professionals to really think differently about their businesses. Again, in a world of ai, you have to think about what can I do more efficiently?

I mean, again, just going back to our examples, if I was an attorney who elected to not use email or not use the telephone or only do my legal at the law library, I might end up making a good enough living, but I’m going to severely hamper myself vis-a-vis my competition. Similarly, if I’m not thinking about either the question of how do I compete with another law firm that has access to outside funding in any number of ways, or even how do I set up my law firm in a way to make myself attractive as an acquirer or as a potential acquisition or able to access that kind of resource? Again, I think you just put yourself at a fairly significant disadvantage. And again, I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I do think it is a thing and I don’t think it can be ignored.

And so I think that that’s sort of the big picture thinking in terms of sort of tactical or specifics. Obviously there’s the changes that have been enacted in Arizona. Utah’s been playing with this. There are companies or law firms that I’m aware of that are setting up and successfully doing this. By the way, it’s been tried historically and never worked kind of dual entity structures where you have a law firm that’s effectively tied to a traditional corporation that is handling sort of back office work. There are law firms that are strategically acquiring other firms and doing so in a way that either accesses their own personal capital or brings capital into that equation in a way that is perfectly permissible, but changes the dynamic. And so all of this stuff is happening. I mean, personal injury firms that I know are being acquired by entities that are operating again completely well again, and this is the beauty of being a lawyer, is they’re operating in a gray area, but definitely not operating in a way that is blatantly in violation of the rules of professional conduct that they’re building, scalable, very targeted, very business oriented entities and that are going to be, I think, very formidable competitors.

Yeah, love to hear your thoughts on it, but that’s the other piece. And yeah, to your point that’s happening today, I think these models are still getting better on the AI side, the ability for a robot to walk into court and completely displace a lawyer is still at least a few years away. But the things that I just mentioned in terms of financing, these are conversations that I’m hearing about and that I know are happening right now.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, I think the good news with that, I think people have, like you said, let’s not do the good or bad because it is and is as with many things, money and the ability to invest came to medicine and they’re still doctors. And I’ve personally lived through the advent of the huge roll-ups of veterinary medicine. That’s another one that was very mom and pop up until about 10 years ago, 15 years ago maybe now. And then two major entities came through and rolled up most of them, and yet they’re still veterinarians. There are so many other professions. We’re really the last one in a very big way that has not had the access to capital. And we’re also the last country. There are other examples, England, you know what, they’re still lawyers in England and you could still get legal help sometimes.

Dan Lear:

They’ve still got the wigs, don’t worry,

Christopher T. Anderson:

And they’ve got the wigs. But it is a paradigm shift and the availability of capital to law firms is going to change a lot. And like you already mentioned, Arizona and Utah, but people also miss the fact that Washington DC has allowed this for decades, has it’s just been a fact of life there to some extent. It will accelerate the adoption of AI and innovation, which to me, one of my core values great fundamental core values in the legal world, not in doing this show, but in doing the work that I do with law firms, is providing access to justice. And I believe that this change will provide more access to more people to have a dispute resolution system that works for them. And as a society, I think that’s a good thing. So if we say we wouldn’t talk about good or bad, but I think the one thing that we should say is good is that if this provides more access to more people, it prevents a society that feels that it doesn’t have access to dispute resolution because that kind of society is troublesome. If you don’t feel like there’s a court system or a way to get to a level playing field to seek justice, then people have a tendency to seek justice in less pleasant ways. I think that’s an advantage of this

Dan Lear:

Coming. Totally. Yeah. No, there’s a lot to be said there. I’m actually going to take us in a little bit of a different direction and try to tie a few different ideas together that we’ve been talking about, because one of them did occur to me when we were talking about AI, and I sort of didn’t mention it. I read another, I’m actually in the middle of a book right now called The Prize, which is all about the development of the petroleum industry from first well through to the modern day, and I’m actually only about in the fifties or sixties, but Standard Oil, which was John Rockefeller’s business. One of the things that made them such a juggernaut was they were fanatical about access to information. What they would do is they would acquire all these local oil companies and then they would run them at scale, and all of this information would feed back up to the mothership in New York.

One of the things that we were talking about when we were talking about AI that I think is so fascinating, and one of the things that’s at least dawned on me is I think we kind of take this for granted, or maybe don’t think about it in this way, but one of the things that’s enabling these AI engines to be so powerful is the fact that we’ve connected basically the entirety of human knowledge in one via the internet. And so now we can, and again, I wouldn’t even profess to suggest that what I’m about to say is technically accurate, but I think as a broad idea, it stands, we can now sort of layer smart technologies on top of that to draw insights and understanding from this vast wealth of information and begin to sort of not just have it provide us information when we seek it, but also sort of give us suggestions.

And I actually think that it is a similar level of connectedness going back to the standard oil piece, but just doing this at scale that makes the ability for money to enter this playing field so meaningful and makes it so efficient when you could only tie together three local personal injury firms in Indiana because those firms couldn’t communicate, or at least they weren’t as fanatical about information gathering as standard oil was. And maybe there was enough deviations in what they did, either how they ran or what. Whereas the production of petroleum was fairly straightforward. Legal services was a much more nuanced and almost bespoke exercise, at least within certain parameters. You just couldn’t do it. But now that we have these tubes that move information to and from human beings and businesses so fast and give us so much data, you can now sort of tie all of this together. And then it’s just so obvious that you would want to invest in that scale to make it more efficient, to make it more profitable. And to your point, hopefully expand the number of people when you do get those economies of scale, expand the number of people who can get access to it. So I thought that was kind of an interesting through line through all of our conversations that I wanted to sort of just hit

Christopher T. Anderson:

Off. I think it absolutely is, and it’s actually going to be where we’re going to lead this. I’m just going to tell people, get on our show notes page and drop us a line or just write legal talk network.com and tell ’em how much we want Dan back on the show, because I think Dan and I have only begun to scratch the surface here. Dan, you mentioned people can find you on LinkedIn. Just look for Dan Lear lawyer, Seattle. Yeah, legal, TE

Dan Lear:

Technology.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Legal technology. So we’ll leave it there as far as how people can reach you if they want to read the stuff that we talked about on LinkedIn or just ask you additional questions. But with that, I’ll leave it and say thanks for being on the show, man.

Dan Lear:

Hey, thank you so much, Christopher. Again, I hope it was enjoyable to more than just me or more than just you and me, what I think these things are fascinating. So I hope people found it

Christopher T. Anderson:

Valuable. I hope so too, but if not, it was fun. Right?

Dan Lear:

Exactly. At least we

Christopher T. Anderson:

Got enjoyment out of it. Awesome. Alright folks, that wraps up this edition of The Un-Billable Hour. I want to thank all of you for listening and sticking with Dan and me as we went through some of this really fascinating aspect of the growth of our business, of our industry. One more time. Our guest today has been Dan Lear. He is the vice President of Partnerships at InfoTrack and can be found at Dan Lee. Just look up to Ann Lear Legal Technology Seattle, and you’ll find him. And of course, my name is Christopher T Anderson, and I look forward to seeing you next month with another great guest as we learn more about topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you. And one more thing you can remember, you can subscribe to all the additions of this [email protected] or on iTunes, and you can also participate in The Un-Billable Hour at the Community Table on the third Thursday at 3:00 PM. You can participate live by coming onto the community table, and we will answer your questions. You can ask us anything, or you can drop us questions on the website right [email protected], and we’ll answer the questions that you if you can’t make it live. But for now, I’ll just say thank you for joining us and we will speak again soon.

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