AI Is Here, How Will Paralegal Professionals Remain Vital?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Tony Sipp:

And welcome back to the Paralegal Voice. My name is Tony Sipp and I have a special guest with us today, Dan Lear. He is the VP of Partnership at InfoTrack. Dan, welcome to the Paralegal Voice.

Dan Lear:

Thanks, Tony. It’s really fun to be with you. I’m excited to chat for a bit.

Tony Sipp:

We’re excited to have you. So Dan, your journey from file Clerk at Perkins Coy to VP of partnership at InfoTrack is the pretty remarkable journey. Can you walk us through that path and the moments or decisions that help you pivot from a traditional legal role because you used to be a paralegal to the legal tech. Tell us a little bit about your journey from there to where you are now.

Dan Lear:

Absolutely, and everybody always likes talking about themselves, so I’m going to really try to make this not just ABA Journal or a bunch of connected set of war stories, but something that’s useful to your audience. But I’ll also try to keep it relatively brief. So yeah, coming out of college, long story, but my wife and I moved to the Seattle area, which is where I lived to this day, and honestly was just looking for a job and was fortunate enough to sort of work my way into that role at Perkins and very much an entry level type role. In fact, I was just telling a colleague about this interview coming up and I told them that the InfoTrack, we do a lot of court filing, and so when they heard that I was a file clerk, they thought I was actually doing elect court filing.

And that may have existed in 2002, but it was more actually physically moving paper files, retrieving them boxes from the file room that was behind me. So I did that for a year and I did sort of always have law school kind of on my mind as something that I wanted to do. But again, long story short, I had, and I guess again, I don’t want to take us on too many diversions and tangents, but one thing that is a theme throughout my career, Tony, and one that I will heartily recommend to both people who are earlier in their career and also people just trying to sort of figure out what they want to do with their lives is networking. When I first got that job at Perkins, I had talked to a bunch of people, including some folks at Microsoft, and the job at Microsoft didn’t work out.

So I took that job at Perkins and then about 18 months to two years later after I had been working at Perkins and actually begun my law school journey, I had someone from Microsoft reach back out to me again. And this was two years after they had actually turned me down for a job that I applied for there. I guess the recruiter liked me enough, and so when a different type of role appeared, he reached back out to me and invited me to apply and it ended up being a paralegal role. While I was going to law school, I had started a family, I had a lot of other stuff going on, but that income, those benefits really seemed like a nice thing to have. And so I switched my law school trajectory, went to law school in the evening and kept working as a paralegal for three or four years while I went through law school.

It was such a great experience. My favorite piece about that, I’ll tell you, but it was such a great way to better understand how legal work actually gets done as opposed to how it gets taught. And that’s not to bag on the theoretical stuff that happens in law school, but I do think it can be a little bit of a shock when you get dropped into an actual scenario, a law firm or a legal department where it’s very different from even if you go to classes to learn to be a paralegal, right? It’s really different when either a client or another attorney is looking across the table at you being like, will you do this? And you sort of freeze up. You don’t know. So it was really great to sort of supplement my school learning with my real life learning as a paralegal and understanding who did what and why. And the fact that it’s usually paralegals, you actually get most of the work done if we’re being candid.

Tony Sipp:

It’s true, it’s true. So a lot of times we have those experienced paralegals that are the people that do the training for what we call baby attorneys. So law school doesn’t typically prepare you for the practice of law. It has the theories of law and it makes a big difference to have. And you can tell the attorneys, the judges who have been either paralegal, legal assistant secretaries that worked in law firms prior to actually practicing law because they come out different and they have a different respect for the staff and the support staff that is with them. Perkins is a great place to start. They’ve been in the news lately. There’s some interesting issues so people can do their research on that. But making that transition, Dan, was sounds like it was a pivotal move for you.

Dan Lear:

So yeah, when I finished up law school, I ended up working for a technology law firm, actually a couple of them that did outside counsel work for Microsoft. And then pretty quickly, although I practiced for six or seven years pretty quickly into that sojourn, I realized I was much more interested in thinking about how legal work got done and the technology that was involved in kind of helping that get done than I necessarily was in sort of doing the legal work. And again, that’s no disrespect to those folks who are in the trenches doing legal work. It just wasn’t my jam. And so about a decade ago I transitioned and basically started working as a business executive in the legal technology sector, a business person executive sounds so fancy pants, just the same as a lot of whether you’re doing marketing or sales. The piece I was going to pick up on, Tony, I know you want to come back to this was I know you want to talk about AI, and I actually think, I don’t want to get too far ahead of us, but I just wanted to leave a little flag, plant a flag in the ground to say, I actually think that those legal professionals who have worked as paralegals, who have worked as legal assistants are actually better prepared to understand what the new landscape is going to look like because of their breadth of experience.

But let’s come back to that, but I wanted to pick that up and plant that flag. So that’s my story. Again, I could talk about it forever. Like I say, if I were to highlight some specific pieces, it’s really that networking was what, and that connection with Microsoft was what sent me on this technology trajectory that’s really defined the last 20 years of my life. And so I can’t underscore enough how important it is for anybody I think who’s trying to advance their career to work, to meet new people and to kind of stretch their professional networks because I think there can be a lot of value in that.

Tony Sipp:

That’s an excellent point. I think Jill and I emphasize that a lot on the podcast is that networking, networking, networking, it’s a crucial component of your job. As much as we like to say that the law industry is a large industry, it’s a very small industry, everybody knows everybody here. So it’s very important to build your reputation and make sure that you maintain those relationships. As you stated, Microsoft turned you down initially, but then they came back and they hired you. So it’s important to maintain those relationships and stay persistent on that. You did mention about going to AI and being a paralegal and then working in big tech, if you will. What made you make that transition? Once you saw the law, apparently I would suspect that you saw some inefficiencies. What made you make that leap and then try to make the connection between law and tech?

Dan Lear:

So again, Tony, people are always way too comfortable talking about themselves, so I hope this doesn’t come across to your listeners as boring. I’d say there were sort of two moments that really opened up this opportunity or this kind of possibility to me. So I was working at Microsoft in the mid aught, so 2004 to 2008, which there’s probably listeners here who weren’t even born at that time, but

Tony Sipp:

It’s possible.

Dan Lear:

We still had computers. Technology was still a thing. It was very different. But the story I like to tell is I was working on some really fascinating technologies. Initially I worked in the patent group and I don’t have a technical background. I was just helping get a bunch of patents filed, and then I supported Microsoft Game Studios and even did a little bit of work with Microsoft Research, which is like Microsoft’s skunk works like their r and d department that’s working on all kinds of crazy things. And through all that work, I would go and learn about all of these amazing technologies and then I would go back to my desk to get my work done. And it felt like I was going back in time, there was all these amazing technologies that were doing all of these amazing things. And then it was like, I mean, yes, I would go back and work on email, but it was going back to stone tablets in a chisel.

It was crazy. I just felt like there was so much interesting opportunity to sort of not necessarily work on the law of technology, but maybe work on the technology of law and legal. I think the other piece was as I began to get passionate about this, I realized there was a real gap or even a fear amongst the legal community of this type of stuff. And so when I started speaking about this, and I’m not a technologist by background, again, I’d spent time working at Microsoft, but I’m a liberal arts major. I went to law school. I’m Not An engineer, but I joked that, and this is something that actually one of the lawyers that I worked with at Microsoft used to say in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

And the simple fact that I knew even the most modest amount about technology and kind of how to talk about it all of a sudden made me seem like some sort of prophet, which to a large extent, to be clear, I was not at all. But because I’d been around it for so long, people for some crazy reason thought I knew what I was talking about. And so I just really sort of seized this, saw this really interesting opportunity. And honestly, if I can one more, and again, like I said, Tony, I really do have a passion too for figuring out how to expand appropriately the applicability of the legal system. I just think there are so many people who can’t get access to it, to whom it is impenetrable and they don’t understand it. And so the opportunity to really think about how we can use technology to make the legal system more accessible to people was also a really compelling option. So those kind of three pieces just were really attractive to me.

Tony Sipp:

That’s excellent. I’m big proponent of access to justice, so that’s something that’s really close and dear to me. Dan, I just happened to read an article and we’ll talk about it on the other side of the break and I’ll just read you kind of a highlight what the article stated. One of the heads of a company behind the model of Claud four issued a blunt warning in an interview with website Axios saying that half of all entry level white collar jobs could potentially be wiped out by artificial intelligence within five years potentially driving up the unemployment rate to 20%. He said the industry most at risk includes law, marketing, tech and finance. I’d like to get your opinion about that article on the other side of the break. We’ll take a quick break folks, and we’ll be right back and welcome back to the Paralegal Voice.

I’m here with Dan Lear. As I was mentioning just before the break, I was reading the article from a, B, C that was just published today, which indicated that some major companies are already downsizing. Walmart is cutting 1500 corporate jobs as part of the technology led restructuring. Microsoft, which used to be a part of, is laying off 6,000 employees saying that the company is aligning for the AI era. So Dan, how can new people, and especially those just entering into the legal field, the tech field, the finance field, how can they protect their careers? What advice would you give them to try to gain that experience? Because it’s already difficult trying to get into the field when you’re just coming out of college, for example, and even those who are in college or in the field, technology is evolving so quickly and a lot of firms that don’t adapt, which we found out from the pandemic, went out of business and we have a lot of growth happening in the paralegal field, great growth that’s happening in the field, but people need to get that skillset underneath them. But that’s stated AI is definitely part of our future. What would you advise people going into the field how to protect their career and where

Dan Lear:

To start? So Tony, I’ll answer your question first, but then if you’ll permit me, I want to talk a little bit about how scared we should be.

Tony Sipp:

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I don’t want to scare people, I just want them to be, well, no,

Dan Lear:

A little bit of fear or the right amount of fear if it motivates you can be a good thing, but

Tony Sipp:

Exactly, exactly.

Dan Lear:

Let me answer your question. So I think step one is we’ve got to embrace these tools. I don’t know that I’m an early adopter. I don’t know where I am, but I’ll tell you over the last, just even couple months, I have gone, at least for a non technologist, I’ve gone pretty deep. I’m now using Claude or chat GPT or even a couple of other tools pretty regularly to do a lot of different things. And I will, if you have some time, I am not kidding when I say this, I have actually fundamentally enjoyed, and I don’t know what this says about me, I don’t know what this says about humanity, but I’ve actually really enjoyed having conversations with these chatbots in the progress of doing my work. I just wrote a five part series on how would you build an AI law firm from scratch.

I put it on LinkedIn, so if people want to go check it out, what were the pieces you’d think through? And I was, I was genuinely enjoying asking questions of the chatbot and having it respond and engaging with topics. It’s actually been kind of fun to really dig in on this stuff. So step one is start using this stuff and a good way to do this. Honestly, I’d recommend to folks, if anybody is like me out there, you probably use Google at least half a dozen to a dozen times a day. A lot of those questions you can drop into chat. And if you can start conditioning yourself to asking those, some of ’em aren’t great for chat, but some are really good. And so just start throwing stuff at it and see what happens. And we all know as lawyers and as legal professionals, we’ve got to check our work, got to make sure our sources are good. But there’s a ton of stuff that we ask Google every day, try throwing some of those at chat GPT or at Claude and seeing what it spits out. So recommendation one is embrace these tools.

Tony Sipp:

Part of the fear and the reality of it is sometimes chat GPT has hallucinations, right? Totally. And especially some younger attorneys, even some experienced attorneys end up utilizing that tool without checking their work. And so it raises ethical considerations, and you’ll see it unfortunately more often than not when that case has that’s been cited, doesn’t have it in a judge or special master comes across it and finds out that, yeah, this was not done properly. So one of the things that you are mentioning, like having that conversation with Chad GBT, which is a fascinating tool because it gets to know you, it gets to know who you are, what you are. Generative AI is fantastic. It is our part of our future. Deep fakes are part of our futures even. I think I also read that the state Supreme Court in Arizona is even using AI powered avatars to act as reporters and summarize court rulings, the Supreme Court of Arizona. So I take your point about having the conversation because people are starting to utilize the tool and have those conversations like you’ve been having and not being afraid of that. So please go on and share a little bit more about having that conversation, getting familiar with the tools, because it’s only going to

Dan Lear:

Evolve. Yeah, absolutely. So that’s one is, and again, we can go to a somewhat dark place, and I really do want to speak to the question of how afraid should we be, and I’ll get to that at the end. But even if you want to be pessimistic, if you want to give yourself the best chance possible of surviving into this type of a new landscape, the people who know how to use these tools are going to be the ones who are in the best position to survive instead of those who have ignored it and pretended they don’t exist. So that’s 0.1. I think 0.2 is like do things that the robots can’t, and I know it feels like in legal right now, there’s so much that these things can do and they’re getting smarter and better every day, and that’s scary. But is it client counseling?

Is it your network that you have that robots can’t mimic? Is it advocacy? What are the pieces that you bring to the table that at least for now, and maybe we’re only running two or three steps ahead of the robots, but it’s like what’s the old joke about if you’re running a bear, you don’t have to be faster than the bear. You just have to be faster than the other person faster. Yeah, exactly. And again, I know these are scary ways to think about the world, but I think we are in for a pretty meaningful change. And again, I want to put a caveat on that, but yeah, kind of 0.2 is what are the things that you as a human can bring to the table that a robot doesn’t or can’t? And you might be wrong, but that’s how I’ve started thinking about the world. I have kids, I have a son in college who’s trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, and he suggested a particular major, and I was like, Hey, maybe that’s actually not a bad idea, because that seems like something that robots are not going to be able to do anytime in the near future. So that could be a pretty good direction to go.

Tony Sipp:

And to your point, Dan, making the human connection is something that AI is not doing right now, I don’t know. But right now that is something that you can actually do something about networking, going to in-person events. AI is not doing that. You can do that. You can go to it and make that connection, make that human connection, build that network, build that network that you need to have. Because I mean, a lot of times getting your job and moving up is within that network.

Dan Lear:

And we can get really nerdy here, Tony, but I want to give just one slight something that, so I was telling you last week, I wrote five, I wrote a LinkedIn post a day on this AI law firm. Full disclosure, I use chat GPT and Claude really heavily to sort of help me refine my ideas and draft. But there was one post in particular, I was basically writing these right the day before. And there was one post in particular where I just didn’t have a lot of time. And so I leaned really heavily on the tools to basically draft the thing for me. And of the five pieces that I put out, that was my poorest performing one. That’s a very anecdotal small data sample. But I actually think it’s really interesting. I think it’s possible that maybe LinkedIn’s got an algorithm that they can tell, so they’re not, it’s like the robots competing with the robots, it’s an arms race. But I also do wonder whether humans can tell too, whether it’s that they know me well enough or whether they can just tell when something feels synthetic and not authentic versus real. And so we just don’t know how this stuff is going to evolve. But I think it’s an interesting data point. So I thought I’d share it.

Tony Sipp:

No, it is, I mean, having critical thinking skills is going to be super important during this, and I think that’s something that we as Americans have slipped away with, I guess people have slipped away with as well in general. But it’s important to bring back because being able to see and suspect and know that something’s a deep fake takes some time. And knowing that there are tools out there that can create a deep fake. So knowing the tools, being able to make yourself indispensable, whether you’re in law or a different field, is something that’s going to be important. Are there other tools that you might suggest to other people? Because I think making that switch and being able to see that and identify that, I think people are recognizing that and seeing that, and hopefully not intimidated by that technology even though it does face its own challenges moving forward in going to the future. And as I stated earlier, that some of those big companies are making changes and you have to adapt to those changes. So with ai, and as you were mentioning about the articles and getting that, and what is something that you would suggest to others that would help them really hone in on using AI as a tool as opposed to as you stated before, kind of writing your article?

Dan Lear:

If I can’t, Tony, I want to just spend one minute sort of maybe getting on my soapbox about this.

Tony Sipp:

Okay. All right.

Dan Lear:

So I read this really interesting article and people can go look it up. This is back in 2016. It’s called The Free Time Paradox in America, and it was in the Atlantic. And one of the things that this article, and if you’re looking it up, Tony, you can go and I just looked it up myself and unfortunately it’s got a paywall on it now, so you got to sign up for a free account. But anyway, you can get a free account and check it out. But one of the really fascinating things that it said in this article was back in the mid 1950s, the expectation was that technology would be so amazing that it would reduce the number of hours we would all be working to 30 hours a week. And those of us living in the 2010s and the 2020s know at least so far, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. We’re working more.

Tony Sipp:

Exactly.

Dan Lear:

And this is through some very radical technological changes, the computer, the pc, the mobile revolution, the cloud revolution. And so to some extent, and again, I don’t think this is a reason to just ignore these technologies, but I also think getting freaked out, I’m not sure really helps us. And I believe that if we are thoughtful about the way that we move forward, I think we’ll find, again, this takes us in a whole different direction, but maybe what we as humans do in order to just take care of ourselves is figure out how to keep ourselves busy and figure out how to have other people pay us for keeping ourselves busy. Who knows whether we’re actually doing anything or getting anything accomplished. But over the last 75 years, the workforce has navigated fairly significant changes. And it’s possible that this change, and actually you could argue over the last thousand years, it’s possible that this change is the one that just breaks everything, or it’s possible that it’s just like a lot of the changes that have come before. And yeah, there will be some changes and there’ll be some adaptations. And heaven knows I work dramatically differently than my grandfather did back in the fifties and sixties, but we’ve both been gainfully employed for a good portion of our lives. And if we can expect that, that will be true going forward, I think that’s maybe a better approach. So I didn’t really answer your question, Tony. It’s more I wanted to put a tool in the hands of folks who are scared to say, yeah, maybe I don’t need to freak out so much.

Tony Sipp:

Understand that it’s really something that I actually want to shift our attention to as far as the career development and getting started, because you let us on the road that where you are and you’re in there and how you got into there. But for the people that are just graduating, getting into the field or in the field and getting ready to help make sure that they are indispensable in their career, let’s talk on the other side of the break about career development and getting started. Where should they start to try to get that education and start networking? So we’ll talk about that on the other side of the break. And welcome back to the Paralegal Voice. My name is Tony Sipp and I’m here with Dan Lear. Dan, we were just talking about ai, it’s development, and I remember that after reading your resume that you’ve co-founded meetups, you’ve written blogs, hosted podcasts. How important is community and ongoing learning for paralegals entering in the tech world?

Dan Lear:

Huge. I already, I think, pretty much made it very clear that I think networking and building community is hugely valuable. I was the one person dumb enough to try to gather people in Seattle to try to get together and talk about legal technology, which was also really amazing. But you can, and by that I mean, not that I was amazing, but just that it was a really powerful kind of force in my career. But I think paralegals, legal professionals of all stripes and really professionals of all stripes employed, people of all stripes can get a great deal from connecting with their colleagues in their own company, in their own law firm, in their own community. I think it’s hugely, hugely valuable and ongoing learning. I think we were just talking about that as well. I think if there’s anything that’s true, whether we want to be afraid of or excited about ai, I don’t think there’s any excuse for any of us today to not constantly be trying new things and stretching ourselves. That’s just today’s workforce, whether or not AI is going to take our job. So I think both of those things are hugely important, Tony, and I think we should all be thinking about them all the time.

Tony Sipp:

I have to agree with you. Some of the concrete steps that you can take right now, folks, is joining your paralegal association, your bar association, getting involved in tech. We is out there, women in eDiscovery, there’s a lot of opportunities for you to learn without being part of a school, being part of a firm.

Dan Lear:

Do a lunch and learn at your place of work, do a lunch and learn. Just get people together to hang out with you and talk shop a couple times a month. It’s easy.

Tony Sipp:

Yes. So Dan, to wrap up some rapid fire questions for you, what one piece of a career advice do you wish someone had given you when you were a file clerk?

Dan Lear:

There are many paths to your destination. Yeah, I think I was too focused on there being one. And there are many, many ways you can get to where you want to go.

Tony Sipp:

Excellent answer. What’s your favorite legal tech tool right now and why?

Dan Lear:

Oh man, that is a tough one. And I have a very specific legal example for it. So I had to put together a timeline from about a dozen documents that were in a Google drive that I was working from, and this was one of my more legal tasks, and I just asked Google Gemini, which was just there at the side, like, Hey, look at all these documents and put this timeline together and spit it out. And it totally did it, and it had some gaps. It wasn’t perfect, but it was amazing. So these tools are so powerful, so powerful. So I’ll give you Google Gemini on that one.

Tony Sipp:

Alright, and last one, black Mirror fans to Black Mirror Fan. What episode best capture your hopes or fears about legal tech and ai?

Dan Lear:

Did I say that I was a Black Mirror fan? Did you know this or, okay, I

Tony Sipp:

Do my research, Stan, I do my

Dan Lear:

Research. Oh, you’re the best. The other question I often get is Beatles or Stones. I had that somewhere as well. I’m not going to remember the exact, I mean, as you know, Tony, I frigging love, love Black Mirror and that, again, I don’t know what that says about me as a human, but the second, it’s either the second or third episode of the first season, which is called the Entire History of You, where people have this little thing, they have a little grain that’s inserted in their eye, and this actually does have totally legal ramifications where they can go back and watch their experiences as they happen. And you can also project it up onto a screen so you can watch someone else’s perspective as they happen. And again, oh man, I just love Black Mirror. But the moral of this whole episode is that it still comes down to perspective, which is exactly what the law is about, right? It’s not about right, it’s not about wrong, it’s truly about those perspectives and how those perspectives can be corrupted. Oh man, I love Black Mirror. Don’t get me started. But that still remains, and that was one of the first episodes I saw and it remains one of my very favorite episodes. So there you go.

Tony Sipp:

Dan, it has been great talking with you and we could talk forever. Where can people reach out to you if they want to get in contact with you after this podcast?

Dan Lear:

Absolutely. I spend most of my time these days on LinkedIn. You can just look me up. I’m Dan Lear, I’m in Seattle. There might be a couple others, but I’m the legal technology junkie, so it’s D-A-N-L-E-A-R, and I think it’s just linkedin.com/whatever, blank. And then it’s like Dan Lee or D-A-N-L-E-A-R. So yeah, you should be able to find me. I’m in Seattle, not hard to track me down.

Tony Sipp:

Alright, Dan, it’s been great talking with you. I appreciate you being on here. And folks, if you want to find out some other, if you missed that, go ahead and go to the Legal Talk Network, look for Dan Lear and you can find all of his contact information. Any of the links that we discussed will be found there as well. I’m Tony Sipp with the Paralegal Voice. Have a great day and talk to you soon.

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