Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Mary Mack

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Web 2.0 innovation collaboration software, metadata got the world turning as fast as it can hear how technology can help legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to the Kennedy Mighell report here on the Legal Talk Network

Dennis Kennedy:

And welcome to episode 404 of the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor,

Tom Mighell:

and I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy:

In our last episode, Tom and I talked with legal tech guru Michael Kraft of Kraft Kennedy as part of our Fresh voices on legal tech interview series. Be sure to give it a listen and hear Michael’s fresh takes on legal tech, ai, and the state of affairs of tech in the legal profession. In this episode, we have another very special guest in our fresh Voices on legal tech series in Fresh Voices. We want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:

Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy Model Report, we are thrilled to continue our fresh voices on legal tech interview series with the ever fresh Merrim, CEO and Chief legal Technologist for EDRM, the electronic discovery reference model. We want our Fresh Voices series to not only introduce you to terrific leaders in the legal tech space, but also provide you with their perspective on the things you ought to be paying attention to right now. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Mary Mack to our Fresh Voices series. Mary, welcome to the Kennedy Mighell report.

Mary Mack:

Well, thank you, Tom. Thank you, Dennis. Glad to be here.

Tom Mighell:

I have to say I’m especially excited because Mary is probably the person solely responsible for launching me out of law practice and into other areas of legal technology. I worked with her very briefly at Fios, had a great time working with you there. Sorry that didn’t last longer, but I am so grateful for you introducing me to all of that. It’s really made a difference for me over the past few years. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit to our audience, a little bit more about you? What is EDRM? What’s your role there? What should the audience know just to get started?

Mary Mack:

Well, I’m coming to you from the Columbia River Gorge, just a little east of Portland. Yes, I’m the steward of the EDRM and it’s a project-based community. We create consensus-based work product, everything is organic, and so we provide an overarching structure for groups to collaborate with each other to solve problems that they see in their practice. So we publish like you Dennis with Creative Commons 4.0 once we’re done, and we also care for the whole person at EDRM. We are on 296 of our weekly support calls. So in the beginning of COVID, Kaylee and I felt that the community needed a place to talk about job health, other challenges, we thought it would be six months and it is still ongoing, but our biggest project right now is EDRM 2.0 and revisioning that, Tom, you’re more on the left side. So much has happened on the left side of the EDRM, so that is cooking. And on the right side we’ve got a potential disposition phase and a little bit of augmented presentation. So that’s a bit of a mouthful, but I could go on.

Tom Mighell:

That’s very exciting. I will say that I was so happy when the EDRM added information governance, or maybe I should say finally realized, yes, information governance is important to eDiscovery because it was not part of it for so long. And I’ve been sitting here going, oh no, if you’re not doing information governance well then the entire EDRM becomes much more of a problem for you. And so I have those conversations with our clients weekly about the EDRM and it’s just such a useful model to talk about the process.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, it’s so interesting how with the EDRM, which to me almost literally started as a back of a napkin sort of thing, has grown to really be the framework for e-discovery. But that aside, Mary, it’s so awesome for us to have you as a guest on the podcast. I always think about talking with lawyers about technology and how difficult it still is, or I would say it’s not easy, and even those lawyers who need to use it for eDiscovery, I get a little frustrated sometimes talking about trying to explain technology and its benefits to the legal profession. I really liked the way that you were able to talk about these topics. When you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology and what you found works well for you.

Mary Mack:

Well, it’s interesting legal and tech don’t communicate that well. As you said, Dennis, you were one of the first to be one of our translators and our bridge builders, but lawyers like to talk in terms of shades of gray, that old joke, how many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb? It depends. Yeah, there is a grain of truth there, and our technical people tend, at least they used to talk in terms of binary, black, white off on zero one. But things are changing now so that the tech people are beginning to talk more probabilistic with the advent of AI machine learning and the statistical element of technology, and as you speak to lawyers in math language, they’re like, oh, no, probabilistic. I want to know, did the search term hit? I want to be black, white. Yes. No. So I think we’re having things come together there, but

Tom Mighell:

Convergence.

Mary Mack:

But you did ask me about what works and I think you have to ascertain the technical level of the attorney. And so do you need to go back to really, really basic concepts or do they have some facility with what you’re talking about and then figuring out if they’re visual or auditory and the things that you would do in front of a jury when you’re trying to communicate with regular people. Lawyers are regular people too, but they have this inordinate fear of technology and math, the ones that haven’t adopted yet. And so you have to get them over the fear that they’re going to make terrible mistakes and also the fear that technology will come and take their job. Once you get through those fears, I think you can communicate pretty well.

Tom Mighell:

So that kind of leads to the related question of, or at least to me, of technology competence. Dennis and I have been talking about it for a long time, and I would say that eDiscovery was one of those areas where when it was first beginning or when it was starting to pick up, it was very easy to tell who was technologically competent in eDiscovery. The bigger firms were doing more that work, the small firms were not. So we wanted to get your take on what you see with lawyers and competence today. I would imagine, I would guess, but maybe I’m wrong, that the community of the EDRM tends to lean toward the more technologically competent. I may be wrong about that, but seems like it would be, but maybe what are you seeing out there? And then with regard to eDiscovery, what do you feel like lawyers need to know about technology to have that competence level? And if you want to focus on eDiscovery, that’s fine.

Mary Mack:

Well, I think that we’re in an interesting time, Tom, when you and I were working together, I would say we probably had 10% penetration for e-discovery within the legal profession. You think over a million lawyers, very small subset, we’re adopting, I’d say we’re approaching 50% now, not of all lawyers, but of litigators because you got the whole transaction side. But what we are seeing now is an enormous uptake for ai. Much like when Google came out and everybody started seeing a search bar, then they wanted their e-discovery platforms to work just like

Tom Mighell:

To work like Google,

Mary Mack:

Just like Google. Well, now they want it to work just like the chat GPT, the Gemini, the perplexity. And so it’s a little bit different. So for technical competence, I don’t know that we’re ever going to be a hundred percent competent on everything, but you need to know when you need help and you need to recognize that there are certain areas, much like you wouldn’t go into an IP pharma case without somebody specializing in that discipline in eDiscovery, if you’ve got something new, you might need to get yourself an expert or even something old if you’ve never done it before. If you haven’t been around the block you want to guide.

Dennis Kennedy:

That guide piece is really essential. And then also I think that lawyers don’t understand the message that they send when they say, I don’t want to do math, I don’t want to do tech because my reaction is, I don’t want to hire you. I don’t think you can relate to what’s going on in the world. Let me sort of turn this direction from your, I think really unique vantage point. What are the areas in the legal profession that need the most attention now and how can we actually get people to pay that attention?

Mary Mack:

Very good question. I’m going to go to the basics, and this might be a little controversial, but I think our social license to operate as a self-regulated profession is at risk in a big way. I’ve thought that for decades, but things move slowly. But I think now with so many people not being served, you are either the moneyed class or the subsidized class if you’re going to consume legal services right now, that middle, which is so huge is not being served. And then the polarization around the judiciary, I think that that’s an issue that needs a lot of attention. And then deep fake evidence. You had mentioned earlier before we started recording the idea of AI as evidence, and I mean just if you’re assuming all the evidence is good, it’s going to be challenging. But if you insert a bad actor who is making a deep fake in bringing that into the court system, that also undermines the faith that people have in the legal system. And so I think it’s incumbent on all of us attorneys, number one to make sure more people get served. And number two, to increase our awareness of the very real problems that people have in everything from child to their ability to stay in their house or an auto accident wherever it is, and take all the garbage out of the legal system that we’re just charging for that doesn’t bring value. I’ll just leave it at that.

Dennis Kennedy:

If I could just follow up one thing on this time, because I’ve been thinking about this and it’s that sort of the moneyed client and the not moneyed client and sophistication about AI and AI evidence because if I were the moneyed client, I would want to make the other party prove everything was not a deep fake, like every single thing. And I think I could wear them out. And I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think that’s right. But I think that if you’re moneyed, especially in criminal, the high stakes, high profile criminal, that you can shift the burden on deep fix to people who don’t even want to deal with it. And that’s a weird kind of arbitrage imbalance that I am not sure we’re paying enough attention to.

Mary Mack:

Yeah. Dr. Grossman calls that the liar’s dividend, and I’ve seen that quite a bit, but currently the way the federal rules, at least in the United States is that if you’re producing it, you don’t have to have an expert to get it admitted. We’ve made it easier to get evidence in, but that was before the advent of deep fakes. So now there needs to be, the pendulum needs to swing back a little bit about that. But I agree, Dennis, I think that that’s the kind of legal process that I’m describing that doesn’t have a high value. When one party decides to wear the other party out, having structures that enable that, I think that’s just not helpful.

Tom Mighell:

But to me, and granted I’ve been near the Courtroom in a long time, tell me if I’m wrong about this. At least with the moneyed client, with the moneyed one, you have the wherewithal, you have the lawyers, you have presumably the expertise to be able to prove it if that is required. If you’re looking at the subsidized or the middle, you may have someone coming into court with a deep fake that there’s no way for that judge or anybody or the other side to police that to prove it. I mean, that’s just being able to figure out how do we stop that in the ordinary case when you don’t have lots of technology or lots of money to be able to do it. How does that get done? That’s really kind of scary.

Mary Mack:

Yeah, we’re seeing some new entrants into our e-discovery field. One of our newest trusted partners is Magnet Forensics, and they have a deep fake detector. One of our other trusted partners, haystack ID, has a service for deep fake detection as well. So I think seeing more organizations addressing this problem, but probably for the next 10 years, this is going to be a cutting edge problem because there are so many different types of data that can be deep fake,

Tom Mighell:

Well, hey, always good to have a problem. Right? I mean, something keeps everything interesting. Let’s talk about collaboration, Mary, that Dennis and I love to talk about collaboration within the EDRM community or really wherever you want to talk about it. What are your favorite ways of collaborating that could be technology process people all above? What kind of strikes you as your favorite ways to collaborate?

Mary Mack:

Our EDRM mantras all are welcome, and some organizations like to have the cream rise to the top, if you will, and only have those people do the collaboration and the publishing. But we believe that everybody has something to learn and everybody has something to contribute. So our newer people at EDRM, they read for intelligibility, can they understand what the experts are saying to them? If they don’t have the domain knowledge, they still have a role, they still have a way to contribute. So that I love multidisciplinary collaboration across and the global aspect of things. Rob Robinson of complex Discovery, another one of our great partners went to Talen to the digital summit and came back with all sorts of ideas from that side of the world. And we’re just blessed to have global participation on our projects because the US legal system is not the only game in town. The other countries, other areas of the world have innovated in this area and have found ways to serve. So my excitement is all getting all the different people together and having them work, argue, explain things to each other with respect.

Tom Mighell:

That’s so interesting that you say that because with all of our clients, they repeatedly tell me, well, we have global operations, but we don’t worry about eDiscovery internationally as often because it’s so heavy here in the United States. And they really, litigation is not, we don’t have a lot of litigation in those other places. I never really thought that maybe they’re actually innovating other places about that. I would love to hear more, unfortunately, we got to move on. We have more questions from Merrimack at EDRM, but we need to first take a break for a quick word from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Mary Mack at EDRM. We found in our Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience does as well. You have a great career story. Would you talk about your own career path and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus? I am guessing that you didn’t start out when you were young saying like, oh, I want to be really known for this whole e-discovery thing.

Mary Mack:

You’re absolutely right. I did not. I am a Rust Belt refugee and I’m a classical languages graduate from a liberal arts college. I came out in 78 in Buffalo, New York, and that was when the steel industry, the auto industry, the whole bottom fell out of the employment for our community. So my idea of going into business right after college was that I got a job frying chicken wings at the chicken coupon Broadway, and I got to manage the store, which meant I got to fry things, collect money for things, do the books, and clean out the horrible walk-in freezer that didn’t have a drain. It was the most disgusting thing. So anyway, that’s what propelled me to dust off my nice LSAT score and applied to law school. And so then when I got into law school, it was at a time sort of like what we’re experiencing today with cuts to existing programs.

My grants got cut when I went to law school, I had to make up a few thousand dollars and my law school seeing that I had taken a course in basic during my undergrad, decided that I could run the scheduling computer, which was a big old mainframe with FORTRAN and punch cards. So anyway, I worked with the placement office doing that computer work through school and then a little bit after that and saw the impact of robotics. I was down at McCormick Place and I was like, oh my gosh, there goes the Ford plant, the guy’s painting the cars, that’s not going to be a job anymore. And I was like, the computers are going to hit law in a big way. So I started taking courses and so we were asking how did I prepare myself? I started taking things like IP or antitrust or sales, the law of sales and to prepare myself for when computers would hit the law.

And when I graduated, they basically told me I could go to the law library and just like everybody else who was in the associate ladder rank, and I was like, no. So I took 20 years, thought it would be 10, but I was like, technology’s moving faster. So I went into straight technology, IT work, and I just kept going with new things that you could charge a lot of money for that eventually got to be generic. I can’t tell you how much money I made teaching people how to use spreadsheets. I mean it was just insane. And then the next year it was $10 an hour, so you just keep going with the various waves and technologies. And I really thought eDiscovery, which I found in 2000 would be a five year gig. And here I am 25 years later and we’re having this conversation. So to prepare yourself, I would just say find what makes you sing. I decided to work at my hobby, which was computers for those years rather than do my hobby after hours. So have your vision and then just do the things that will prepare you to take on those challenges when those challenges ripen.

Tom Mighell:

Yep. That’s basically what took me away from the law firm ultimately because technology was very much my hobby more than my day job. Let’s talk a little bit more about AI and I think more particularly generative ai because eDiscovery was really one of the first legal technologies to make use of AI and machine learning. That’s been a while that that’s been happening, but I think generative AI is changing a lot of the things here. So how do you see generative AI affecting e-discovery and what role is ag agentic AI going to be playing in all of this? I think we’ve covered AI evidence to a certain extent, but if we haven’t other pieces to talk about, please, let’s talk about that too.

Mary Mack:

Oh, I think the agent AI is a huge, huge, huge game changer in the law. We’ve had rules-based systems like neada Logic would go out and inquire of a whole bunch of different databases and then bring things back and make with documented assembly kind of technology and automating workflows. And certainly in eDiscovery we’ve seen the automation of batch creation of clustering even of production sets. So we have workflows that we’ve created that are automated, but they pretty much these days are rules based. Once we hit that more probabilistic, the AI aspect of things where there’s decision making being made, I think that’s the different point. But I think we are going to continue to see Tar and Cal evolve and on top of it, we’re going to continue to see the AI tools evolve into things that are citable reliable, less hallucination prone. I think we’ll get smarter about what we feed into the AI because it’s garbage in, garbage out.

And I do think we’re going to see a lot more of that. Ralph Loey had a great article on ag agentic ai and we were talking about AI as evidence. Tom, he sees some of this AI almost as if it’s testifying in a court area and can an AI testify? Does an AI have rights? Then you go back to Citizens United and some of the other court decisions on corporate personhood. It’s not just flesh and blood humans that get to do this stuff. So we’re going to have to think about this and it’s people like yourselves that are going to help us as we move into this brave new world.

Tom Mighell:

I was mentioning before we started recording that I was giving a webinar on retention requirements for different types of text and chat messaging and ephemeral messaging, and one of the things we talked about was AI outputs and prompts, and one of the things that I raised in there is that I’ve been seeing the notion that having an AI assistant transcribe your meeting has the potential to waive the attorney-client privilege because it’s the presence of a third party in the room with you. And I have not seen that actually been made as a serious argument yet, but it gives pause. I mean, it’s something that you need to be thinking about when you use that for those types of conversations.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I would say time and that again, that’s another place where if enough money is involved, people are going to make that argument on both sides. So it’s interesting about AI personhood because in my AI and law classes, students would talk about that from time to time and it’s really difficult to try to figure out what that might mean and how to do it. And I always used to say something happens is involving in an AI who’s liable and could the AI itself ever be liable and what would that look like? And I would just make them think about that. I just wanted to add something about agentic ai. I had an interesting conversation a week or so ago about this, especially in eDiscovery, but in a lot of places we would think about APIs and say, we need to figure out ways that these different systems can communicate with each other and structure the data in ways that that can happen.

And there’s a whole, I mean that’s been going on for years. This guy was saying to me that with ag agentic ai, it’s almost like you can skip over the API piece because the agents, the AG agentic AI can log in as you can put in username and password and get the information and all of a sudden you don’t need the APIs. It was just an eyeopener for me to think about that and the implications because all the people doing the APIs, that’s look a little bit threatening to them, but on the security side it raises a whole different set of issues. So AI clearly both the challenge and an opportunity. So what do developments and perspectives in AI do you find most interesting today and what are you yourself and EDRM moving toward? And I guess my better way of saying this, what do you see is actually working in AI these days and where is their action and outcomes and not just talk?

Mary Mack:

Oh yeah, I’m hearing all sorts of things in eDiscovery depending on what technology stack they have. I’m hearing all sorts of good statistics on recall and precision where in the beginning it wasn’t that good, but different organizations are really putting pedal to the metal in that area in terms of transcripts and being able to summarize transcripts. But you have to have the right kind of AI so it doesn’t go hallucinating on you on dates and things like that and that it cites what it’s doing. I talked to somebody at a big old AM law that had a class action with hundreds of complaints and that they were able to build a model for their AI tool that was filling in the answers to those complaints in a matter of a couple of hours instead of a couple of days each. So I’m seeing it in regular litigation tests being highly successful and then also in the e-discovery process as well.

Tom Mighell:

We are working, and I think I mentioned on the podcast before, we are working internally where I am to use AI to look at legal regulations around record keeping and make a determination of whether this regulation or that regulation applies to this particular company and what they do. And we’re finding the same thing in terms of recall and precision is that it was originally not great and now it is saying things like, yes, this company does work with this particular product or this particular chemical, hazardous chemical, it’s because of their facility that they operate in Bentonville, Arkansas, and they’re able to actually tell you where it’s doing it. It’s just amazing how far we’re going here and it’s happening so quickly. Alright, we still have more questions to ask of Mary Mack at EDRM, but we need to take another break. We’ll be back after a short break to hear from our sponsors. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy bio report. I’m Dennis Kennedy. And I’m Tom Mighell. And we are joined by our special guest Mary Mack at EDRM. We have time for just a few more questions.

Dennis Kennedy:

So Mary, I’m going to ask you to elaborate on something you said earlier about making your hobby your work. So my question is, because I deal with today’s law students and new lawyers all the time, and they’re looking for what their career path should be and what they should do. And a lot of ’em are starting to become interested in legal tech, ai, non-traditional careers, definitely non-traditional careers, and they don’t have a great sense of what’s out there. So that’s one thing is they need to learn more about it. But the other thing that surprised me is even where they can a lot more money in say eDiscovery, legal ops, other things like that, they have this thing and it’s sort of family and friends and it comes down to that notion of shame in a way to say, but what if I did all this stuff to go to law school and I’m not a lawyer? What do I say to people? So I’m curious to see how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find those new types of career paths?

Mary Mack:

Well, it’s interesting, my mom before she passed a decade or so ago, so are you using your law degree yet? Because that 20 years of doing it drove her batty. Just batty that I would be not using my law degree. I will say having the law degree and having the law license is more important to me now than it certainly was during my IT years. I used to downplay that when I would talk with technical people because they didn’t believe lawyers could do anything technical. And that’s also why I got my C-I-S-S-P because lawyers need to prove that they know technology if they’re dealing with somebody with technology background. So in terms of finding the new areas, I would say as a student, I would get yourself as up to speed as possible on the tools you’re going to use no matter where you go, your Microsoft stack, your word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Casey Flaherty has a great course. He had that company certas that helped people not bill for cutting and pasting and reformatting and keeping the formatting. I mean just simple things that people at a high billing rate should not be doing. And then to experiment with the technology, I would also encourage all the students to develop their network in law school, you’ve got the students, you’ve got the faculty, and you’ve got the alumni and to really while you’re there, deepen it as much as you can and then look external, certainly you’re welcome. We have a lot of students at the EDRM that are participating on projects, as I said, all are welcome. And so that element is open and the EDRM is a very generous networking organization and find those like the Minority Corporate Councils Association. It’s a fabulous networking organization. Not all organizations really encourage people to meet each other and basically spread the love in terms of networking.

But those are a couple women in eDiscovery is a good networking organization, legal ops.com, also another very, very good networking organization, but make those contacts and ask people about their jobs, see if you can do a ride along. Certainly in the organizations you can stretch your own stuff and actually lead projects. You can write, you get published. So find your areas where you think you want to go and take some steps in that direction. You’ll find out soon enough if it’s something that suits you and if it doesn’t suit you, yay you’ve found a path that you don’t want to go down and then you go and you find your other path, but don’t think you’re going to know what you’re going to do for 30 years. You are not going to know. Just get to the next plateau and then harvest and then move on.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, I have a two-part question to finish up. The first part of the question is what we call our best advice question, which is tell us the best advice either that you have for our listeners on your own or the best advice that you’ve ever been given around legal technology. That’s number one. Number two is purely selfish on our part. Who are the fresh voices that you think we should be paying attention to that our audience might want to listen to? Who would you recommend that we look at to bring onto the podcast?

Mary Mack:

Oh boy. Alright, well, let’s see. So the first one, the good legal advice would be lawyers are slow to adopt. And at one point we thought that in the early days we thought everybody would do review of native files or near native files. And that TIFF and PDF were dead. See, the tiffs are still going strong and so most lawyers look to precedent. So if you’re somebody who likes technology, find those early adopters and learn with them. In terms of fresh voices fresh, since I’m fresh, I’ll give you a couple of my era and that would be Craig Ball, Ralph Lowey, Rob Robinson, they’d be wonderful guests for you. And then I’d do some mentoring and I’d say the class of 2008, the class that came out during the financial crisis, some really interesting practitioners in that group.

Tom Mighell:

A lot of good EverFresh recommendations there. So I think that’s great. Well, we want to thank Mary Mack, CEO of EDRM, the electronic discovery reference model for being our guest on the podcast. Mary, tell our audience where people can get in touch with you or where they can learn more about what you’re doing.

Mary Mack:

I’m [email protected] or just come on the website if you want to subscribe to newsletter or something, but you can catch me directly at my email.

Dennis Kennedy:

So thank you so much, Mary, you’re fantastic guests, great information, great advice, and always ever fresh. So as usual as Tom knows so many topics to discuss, so little time, but it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Mary, take it away.

Mary Mack:

Alright, I am going to plug your operational protocol method. Dennis Kennedy. It is brilliant reminiscent of Ralph Lowe’s panel of experts on absolutely everything that he’s got in his whatever you call those things, GPT area. So that’s mine.

Tom Mighell:

And Dennis, do you want to briefly mention it and tell more about what it is? We haven’t talked about it on the podcast, I don’t think, did we?

Dennis Kennedy:

No, I think we’re going to talk about it in the future, but people will hear more about it. I published it on the SSRN side as a paper and Sabrina Peri just republished it on ll rx.com. This was something I was experimenting with this summer where I wanted to see if you could build history into personas and give them expertise and then reuse that on a regular basis. There’s notion of persistence, which is usually missing from AI use and building expertise. And then also I was using the AI persona to help build themselves and to revise themselves. So it’s interesting in law, people are worried about getting rid of hallucinations. I look at AI as this creative tool where I’m looking for ways that can be truly useful and I don’t need to minimize hallucinations, I need to use it creatively and then have the AI signal to me in a way when I need to jump back in as the human in the loop and redirect it. And by kind of giving it personas, it’s been useful. And I think Tom, we may talk about this chief of staff persona in an upcoming episode.

Tom Mighell:

Yep, totally agree. Alright, my parting shot, I was struggling for a parting shot this week and then I noticed that Dennis was going to recommend a book, so I decided to beat him to the punch and recommend a book of my own. I’ve been reading, I’m not finished with it yet, but I like it already. It’s called Breath the New Science of A Lost Art by James Nestor. And he is talking about he has struggled from a lifelong of health issues that he started doing breathing exercises and breathing practice and wound up solving many of his issues. There are a lot of claims he makes in there around how there is evidence to suggest that A DHD is caused by breathing issues and other things are caused by breathing issues, whether you believe it or not, there are many interesting concepts in there. We need to pay at least as much attention to the exhalation than the inhalation and that actual carbon dioxide is important to what we’re doing. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there on the specific kinds of breathing exercises you can make. I think people on the podcast know I’m a Peloton user and Peloton recently bought a breathing app, acquired a service that does breathing, and I’ve been doing some of that and it’s very interesting. So if you’re interested in learning more about Breath, this is a good book so far. I’m about halfway in Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I do have a book recommendation with the sort of two side trips I want to make about it. The book is called Range by David eps Epstein, and it starts with this notion of looking at the specialization versus generalists and kids who specialize in one sport from the beginning and people who try different things and musicians. And he comes out in favor of the generalist approach for a number of reasons, and that’s fascinating in itself. He also talks about this notion of what generalists are and the types of problems we face in the world. He says there are kind problems and wicked problems, so can think of kind problems or I have a problem, there’s a solution to it, I could do that. A wicked problem means like all these variables are changing and that’s sort of the world we actually live in today.

So that is really good. He also talks about this notion of match quality and then over time, and Mary kind of talked about this and you see it Tom and your career and mine is that we’re looking to say, what is it that we like doing and we do well and can we match our work and what we’re doing at a high level of quality to do that. So the two side trips are, so the easy one is I realized that I might be the last person to discover Audible, but I just joined Audible as a way to get audio books. You are, you’re

Tom Mighell:

The last person. I think that’s probably true.

Dennis Kennedy:

So that came out of it. And the other thing is, and this relates to the paper I wrote in a way too, is that one of the things you could do is to say, I can have the AI and I want it to be the devil’s advocate. And so whatever I do, I just wanted to take the other position. But the fact is that if you do the devil’s advocate prompts, it will talk you out of doing anything. Every single thing you want to do, every single thing, actual this Range book in the generalist approach is a form of devil’s advocate. It is very nuanced and it will explain things. And so I will do this thing where I always say, okay, here’s what I’m thinking of doing now. I’ll have the generalist take a look at it and point out some things. And it is really useful. And like all AI I’ve found for me is it gets me as a human back in the loop. And sometimes it just gives me breakthroughs where I’m like, I am doing this. I am underestimating some of these things and I’m going in the wrong direction. And it can be truly helpful.

Tom Mighell:

Heck of a parting shot this time, Dennis, that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mall report. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Networks page for our show. You can find all of our previous podcasts along with transcripts on the Legal Talk Network site. You can subscribe to our podcast there or in your favorite podcast app. If you’d like to get in touch with us to ask a question, suggest a topic for an upcoming episode. You can always reach out to us on LinkedIn or remember, we still love getting your voicemails. You can leave us a voicemail at 7 2 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy:

And I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy Mighell report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. We wanted to remind you to share the podcast with a friend or two that really helps us out. And it’s great for our Fresh Voices series. As always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. And we’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

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