Evidence, Tech, and You. How Paralegals Shine in the Digital World.

Episode Notes

Transcript

Jill Francisco:

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Paralegal Voice. I’m here today with my co-host Tony Sipp and our guest John Sammons, which we are so excited to have him here. He knows he was just waiting to see when this plug was going to happen, but I came in contact with John for our local paralegal association and he did a phenomenal job presenting, but then now I’m so excited that he’s won or will be one of J D’s professors in his college travels here in the cybersecurity forensics at Marshall University. So John Sammons is an accomplished scholar, author and educator with a wealth of experience in the field of digital forensics as a professor at Marshall University. He serves as the associate director of the cybersecurity and is well-respected instructor in the areas of advanced digital forensics and firearms. In addition to his academic work, John is also a formal Huntington police officer and has received recognition for his investigative work from the United States Department of Justice. So John, thank you for being with us today. Welcome.

John Sammons:

Oh, thank you very much for having me. I’m really excited about being here.

Jill Francisco:

This is going to be a fun thing and we’re excited because this is a hot, hot topic and it’s important I think to obviously the legal industry and obviously we want to give some tips and things and knowledge for our paralegals that are tuned in today. So the role of forensics and cybersecurity in the legal industry. Do you want to give us a little your thoughts about that? Because tell people maybe how it’s all connected and how we’re getting involved here.

John Sammons:

Sure, I could give that a shot. That’s a pretty big platter to, yeah, there’s a lot to work with in that statement. Yeah, I think, let’s see. We can get into the broad scope wise first. I think all the evidence today is digital. So if you’re working in civil litigation, which I assume is your primary audience here, it used to be all the evidence was papers and reports and memos, and you go get discovery and you get all paperwork, right? They bring in boxes and boxes of that. Well no more. All that ended way back when and now it’s all ones and zeros that is not going back. You know what I mean? And it’s only getting more and more prolific. So now you’ve got things like computers and then you have networks with servers and those kinds of things. And then you get into the mobile devices and then tablets and then now the awesome landscape of all the internet of A things devices, which is literally everything from toaster ovens to microwaves to you name it, pretty much thermostats, literally anything.

And that’s part of the challenge. I guess that’s one thing I could mention right out of the gate of the challenge with relation to the iot device is really getting an understanding of what evidence might be available that is not super obvious, I think by everybody asks for emails and then what’s on the computer and then what’s on the mobile device, and then maybe you spread that out to a tablet or so, but how many discovery orders have you seen or written asking for access to an IOT device or some other kind of a system that may have recorded some kind of date and time or some kind of other action that may be able to support or refute some claim. Right? There could potentially be some things there that might be gleaned if you really get a detailed look at what’s going on inside the area where these things happen. So that’s one thing. We do a lot of training for law enforcement. We just developed a class taught for the last year and a half for the West Virginia police about these things, and it was all basically, most of it was on internet of things devices.

Jill Francisco:

I was just going to say, I think you were the, I got this from, and it scared me, but you were talking about, I think it was the data on the Roomba, like the automatic sweepers.

John Sammons:

Oh, yeah.

Jill Francisco:

And I do not personally have one of those, but I was telling a friend that had one of those, and we were laughing about it and dah, dah, dah, dah. Quick story, we go to bed that night about one 30 I hear this knock on the door, knock on the door. I’m like, what is that? And I come out and literally that thing is banging against the door and I’m like, oh my gosh, it’s mad at me because I was telling everybody that it’s recording and now it’s out to get me. But seriously, that was one thing I never, ever, ever thought of. And so that’s the thing that paralegals, I think can help their attorneys think because they might be a little bit younger possibly using all these tech devices. And like you said, some of the stuff that you’ve given examples I would’ve never thought would be valuable or a source to try to ask for because we did, I mean, I’m sure Tony, same thing.

Tony was in litigation and it’s like we never asked for, I mean, what did we ask for? We asked for papers. We wanted correspondence and letters and things like that. We never even had emails. Now we’re trying to get Facebook, we’re trying to get phone records, we’re trying to get text messages. And like you said, it’s changed so much, but the sources is very Oh, yeah, exactly. It’s very interesting. Yeah, and like you said, it’s hard to get that connected because the attorneys have to even know and be educated on what to ask for because if you don’t even ask for it

John Sammons:

A hundred percent,

Jill Francisco:

They’re not going to give it to us. Let’s get in that to a little bit leading into where you talk about, so we’re talking about attorneys and then we’re talking about they have to be educated, and I think there’s a different way and aspect that you’ve done research on and stuff. It’s dealing with the experts and the most effective way to transfer that either from, like you said, the classroom and the attorneys and their evidence and getting that into effectively in the Courtroom to do and say what you need it to do.

John Sammons:

Yeah, I’m starting my 19th year at Marshall, so I’ve been on this higher education journey for a long time here and try to hone my skills as an educator. Throughout that time, I started to learn more and more about what’s the best way to be able to get people to learn and understand things. So I’ve seen in the higher ed world, it was when I first got in it, it was a very teacher focused thing, you want to learn how to teach better. Well, after more research has been done, it’s now completely flipped. It’s not about how we teach, it’s how people learn now. They’re really pushing on the educators. You really got to understand how people learn, how the brain works, those kinds of things. There’s a way more effective approach than teaching people how to teach. So it’s sort of a two sides of the same coin, if you will, but there’s definitely a different mindset to that, and there’s been a ton of really good research on this.

So when I started looking at the better ways to do this, it struck me that I think there’s a lot of these same lessons could be brought from the classroom over into the Courtroom. So I started looking at that and come up with some things I think would be really beneficial that I think would benefit a lot of expert witnesses when they start to think about how they want to present some of these highly technical things to a jury. First thing I would say is number one is you really need to have some deep empathy for that jury, which I think is lost on some experts that they really don’t think about what that jury knows and doesn’t know. And there’s this concept called first called the curse of knowledge. Have you guys ever heard of that? It’s this thing that we all have. Give you a great example of it.

If you go to the doctor, you’ve probably all been to the doctor before you walk in. The doctor walks in with your chart and starts to launch into this hugely scientific explanation of what all these tests you just had are. So he throws out five or six acronyms, a few numbers, a few measurements you’re not familiar with and all that stuff, and then ask if you have any questions. You didn’t understand three course of what he just said or she said, but the same thing happens in the classroom, and the same thing can also happen in a jury box because experts often forget what it’s like not to know something. So what happens is they launch right into their native tongue. So they’re used to communicating with their own tribe, which your doctors and nurses and scientists, if you will. So they start speaking that same language and then you put stress on somebody, right? Then they revert back even more to that original thing. So you put somebody in, an expert in a jury box, stress of a cross-examination, they’re going to revert even maybe quicker back to that native tongue. So there’s a lot of things working against them if they’re not aware of this. So you got to really get empathy for that jury, and the jury can be anybody. So the odds of somebody in that jury box being remotely familiar with cyber forensics, science in general is probably not great.

Jill Francisco:

Well, on those terms and everything too, and the legal ease and

John Sammons:

It a lot, right? Yeah, there’s a lot going against them. So you really got to understand, and then from a learner standpoint, because the role of an expert is really to teach, you got the role to teach them what’s going on about these things because you’re never going to be able to put them through a full class. You got to give them the basics and you got to do it in a hurry and in an environment that is not built for doing it. Everything is working against the expert in so many ways and accomplishing what they want to do. So they’ve really got to leverage the strong parts of this and be aware of the pitfalls of what’s happening and work around that to be really effective. And you can see with disastrous results when it happens, it could really get the train off the tracks.

So you’ve got to be aware of the jury and their problems. They’re stressed, they don’t want to be there. So they’re not optimal students to start with. They’re under stress, which reduces their capacity to learn without getting into the full thing here. It’s a problem all the way around. So you really got to get that strong empathy for them and realize that, and then you’ve got to start leveraging what you do have available to you. Alright. One is obviously recognizing where they are, which is probably starting at zero, and then speaking their language. You want to say things, explain English, plain language. You probably cannot avoid acronyms and jargon, but what you have to do is absolutely define and explain it the first time that you use it. If you don’t, it’s going to be a problem. And then you start to introduce concepts one thing at a time, right?

One concept at a time. Absolutely. A lot of times you’ll see, I’ll go ahead and hit this point now is we’ve all been to classes and presentations up there with lousy PowerPoint. We’ve all heard PowerPoint sucks and PowerPoint’s awful. PowerPoint is the devil. It’s my humble opinion that it’s not PowerPoint that sucks. It’s the technique that sucks. There’s definitely ways to use PowerPoint better. One of the things that a lot of people don’t realize is that it’s a myth of multitasking. Everybody thinks that multitasking is a great trait. In fact, some people even interview based on that. Are you a good multitasker? Right? Most people will say, absolutely. I like to have 19 things happening at once. But the problem

Jill Francisco:

Is that’s a

John Sammons:

Paralegal. That’s a paralegal, right? One of those amazing things here recently that’s been found out through all the research that’s been done is that’s a myth. You can do these 19 things at once, but you really can’t do them all at the same time. There is no simultaneous computer processor that’s getting two threads processed at once. We are tasked switching in our head, so you’re going back and forth and back and forth. So obviously that’s going to impact your ability to actually learn what you’re supposed to learn and then retain it and apply it. So that’s a huge problem. All that to say, let me steer you back towards the PowerPoint. Now that PowerPoint can be a huge problem if it’s done wrong for that reason. Because what’s going to happen is if we’ve all seen those lousy presentations where you’ve got the wall of text, for example, you’ve got somebody that puts up three paragraph of text on a slide, that’s a problem because now you forced the juror to pick.

They can either try to read that or they can listen to you, but they’re not going to be able to do both with the same level of efficiency. It’s just physiologically not possible. Then we’ve all had this experience, I’m sure is where, okay, you pick to read the novel that’s on the screen and you get half through it and it’s gone, and now you’re even more confused than when you started. And all these things have this cascading effect of creating this massive, massive gap, and they get so far behind By the time they try to get caught up, it’s never going to happen. The same thing can happen with a visual. If the visual is overly complex, it can also have the same effect. So all these things have got to be simplified. The analogy that I use when I talk about this is the flash bang grenade from back in the day when I was a police officer, we’d have to throw these flash bang grenades in a place where we didn’t want somebody to shoot us because it would literally distract them for three to five seconds.

They would not know it would just be frozen. That has the same effect on a jury. You basically flash bang the cognitive flash bang, right? It’s a cognitive flash bang that you’ve stunned them with this. Now they don’t know what to do. They don’t know whether to listen or read or read and listen. They don’t know what to do with that. And then by the time they get zoned back in, they’re behind. So it has the same kind of effect. And this kind leads into a concept called cognitive load. So basically the average person’s going to be able to hold about three to five things in their brain and their brain’s working memory at a time, which is a lot like a computer’s memory. So there’s a finite amount of computer memory that you have. So we’ve probably all gone out and maxed our computer memory at some point where you’ve got 15 browser tabs open, the iTunes is cranked up, I’m watching three YouTube videos, and all of a sudden the computer starts to slow down.

So the same thing happens in a person’s mind. So that thing is only so big. So whenever you exceed that, the other stuff just hits and falls off, hits and falls off. So you definitely want to manage that user’s cognitive load. So what that means is you can’t stun them with the first concept you introduced and keep stunning them and keep and expect them to be able to learn and retain this stuff. You really got to think about this and plan for it and use the visuals as one of your strengths. The PowerPoints could end up being your downfall, but if you do, it can absolutely be a force multiplier.

Jill Francisco:

Let’s take a quick break and we’ll come back and we’ll wrap that up about the jurors and the tips for the paralegals. Welcome back to the Paralegal Voice. I’m Jill Francisco with Tony Sipp and our guest John Sammons. And we were just talking about, John was giving some great insight and information about how attorneys and even paralegals are going to need to point out and help the expert witnesses when they are testifying court because of the way that the jurors comprehend, the way they’re learning, the way they’re listening. And John pointed out they can’t do 10 things at the same time, even though like you said, it’s now been a myth that really you can’t, and I like when John said the thing that I get from that, because everybody knows, I mean all our paralegals are listening, we have to multitask. But I like when John, when you said that they cannot do two things, three things at the level they would if they were just concentrating on one.

I mean to me, what the important thing is here, we know that from trying to do three or four things, you might get it accomplished, but you’re not going to do it as well as if you were just concentrating and putting all your effort on one at a time. So I think that’s very important. And I was just talking too a little bit to Tony and while we’re in break, I think the paralegal’s role in picking the jury, so how John’s talking about how the jurors learn and how they’re processing things and receiving visuals and things like that. It’s like I think the paralegal has right off the start, they aid in picking the jury and then I think they also kind of look at people and can be like, oh, they’re not paying attention. They’re sleeping. They do not like the plaintiff’s attorney. They think that they don’t like the defense attorney. I mean, isn’t that true, Tony? Don’t you think you get that?

Tony Sipp:

It is. And there’s a lot of apps, a lot of technology that is going behind that. So immediately when you get their name of a juror, you can look them up. It’s like doing a quick Google search on them immediately and finding out their history. So we do that in the background and again, the nudge to the attorney like, oh yeah, yeah, we should definitely get that person.

Jill Francisco:

And sometimes they even say why? And you’re like, I don’t know, just don’t pick them.

John Sammons:

Yeah,

Jill Francisco:

It’s my paralegal intuition anyway. So John, what do you think about paralegals? Obviously we’re trying to give our listeners some tips here. I mean, obviously paralegals have got to be up on technology, they got to be up on what’s outcoming software and just technology in general. But what do you think, how can paralegals, what do you think to stay informed and to be familiar, the ever-changing landscape and obviously of cybersecurity forensics and how you’re bringing that information in through expert testimony or the visuals like you were talking about?

John Sammons:

Awesome question because that’s one of the things that we struggle with, even in what I do. I mean it, you are just drowning in the change because everything is changing at such a rapid pace and at different paces. So you’ve got the underlying commercial technology that we all use and that we’re all going to be analyzing in the lab and working with on the other end of this. And then you’ve got the technology that the good guys use, and then you’ve got the technologies that the bad guys use, and then you’ve got the tactics that the good guys use and the tactics the bad guys use, and all those things change at multiple speeds all the time, and it can radically wreck one piece of that. So it’s a huge problem as far as keeping pace with what’s going on. One thing I would say would be really get familiar with the commercial technology because that’s what you’re going to be wanting to get your hands on, possibly down the road.

So being aware of those kind of internet of things, devices, when you walk through Best Buy, for example, while you’re there shopping, look around a little and think about what in here might be evidence one day, and you’ll probably think about 90% of it other than the CDs and movies maybe, but there are so many devices in there that collect and hold data of various kinds is just amazing. Be aware of that. And if you want to get on the very forward edge of that, one thing to maybe look at is that consumer electronics show they have every year in Las Vegas, which is a monster of a show, and that’s where everybody, that’s anybody that brings out a new gizmo or gadget, that’s where they debut it at. So you can start to look at that from there and didn’t do more research on it and try to see where that may be something interesting, if that might be in somebody’s house or office or whatever.

That kind of thing. Finding those good quality news sources out there on the internet, social media, as much as I hate it and everybody probably hates it and it’s so hateful and everything else, there are some really good uses for it there if you follow the right people. So there are some really good thought leaders out there that you can get some absolute, I’ve never been a big Twitter, but now it’s X. But I never tweeted really much. I never felt compelled that I had to update everybody to that level, but I found it absolutely phenomenal at keeping me up to date on legal cases would be great. Updates on things like that, stuff like that. Case law hitting all the time, all that stuff. So you don’t have to participate. You can just be a sponge and absorb it all right. Another tip I guess would block off some time in your day, 15 minutes a day in the morning, whatever else, just to look at that skim through it to make sure that’s a habit because if you skip it for a week, two weeks, three weeks, you’re going to miss a lot.

Jill Francisco:

There’s something new.

John Sammons:

Yeah, there’s something brand new. Absolutely. If you want to get into the weeds a little more into the forensics side of things, there’s some really good journals out there, but those are going to can be a tough slog, but if you read the headlines, that would be a way to see at least they’re a new thing. And then you can ask somebody that has a little deeper knowledge about it, but that way you have an idea of the trends,

Jill Francisco:

Like you said, keeping up on that. And it’s like even our software in our law firms is changing. I like that though. Going on and just absorbing that information. Sometimes you get worried you don’t want to be having to participate, you just kind of want to, but that’s a good idea with that social media that you can just, like you said, be aware of it, know it’s out there and know it’s a source. We’ve had a little trouble getting those things, so if we need those records, Facebook and the are not really excited to turn over all that information.

John Sammons:

Oh, for sure.

Jill Francisco:

But it can be done. That’s great advice for paralegals.

John Sammons:

There’s some apps out there that are aggregators. I’ve got one on my iPad that basically creates a magazine for my social media feed. So to me it looks like a magazine. I just browse through it. You can literally flip the pages in it, but it’s got all the latest updates and you follow the right keywords and places. It builds you a phenomenal up to the minute edition on the fly.

Jill Francisco:

That’s cool. We might need a whole show on that,

Tony Sipp:

Right. Tony, another segment. That’s really good to know. So it sounds like staying updated. Yeah, staying updated on new technology and just taking that time consistently learning because technology is moving quickly

Jill Francisco:

And sometimes, I mean, we always say the paralegals are better with change, are better with adjustment. And so sometimes we go out there, it’s like you have to change software, you have to, like you said, you may not like social media, but it’s here to stay and that’s a source. And so if our attorneys don’t want to deal with it, then I think the paralegals can be that source and go out there and find the information and do it or adjust to the new software and kind of just move the transition so our attorneys won’t be so,

Tony Sipp:

But also if you’re working on a case and you see situations where they may have missed Alexa, where they may have missed the refrigerator.

Jill Francisco:

I was just going to say the refrigerator of the stove,

Tony Sipp:

The stove, all of those things matter. And sometimes the case comes down to that. I mean, I’ve had situations where pulling data from that made a big difference in a case. So know what’s out there. John was saying just be aware of CES in Vegas. They have all the new technology coming out, and then of course the vendors are going to come in and try to adapt because you have to pull that eDiscovery from somewhere and they have to adapt to that technology. So yeah, stay abreast on what’s going on. I love that.

Jill Francisco:

That is good advice. So do you think that John, that the paralegals or just in general, I guess that we can, is there anything that we can give our employers, give them some tips or try to just make sure that from being less vulnerable to the cyber attacks, because just for example, I think I work for local Dior and sho, they’re actually a national law firm and I feel like they’re on top of it. They’re really on top of their game. We have to do the training and we have to pass it. I mean, we have to do this stuff and I feel like they are really protective. We’re changing our passwords. Our passwords are a hundred characters long.

Tony Sipp:

Oh my gosh,

Jill Francisco:

That fun thing. But the thing that I think is kind of fun though that they do, you’ll laugh at this, that I think it’s fun, but they send us test emails and we have a little button like it’s phishing or whatever, and it’s like it comes up and it’s like, great job, Jill. You’re the reason why this. We’re not getting hacked and you’re making us safer. And it’s funny, but not really. And I know some people, and I probably older attorneys, they think that’s all a pain and it’s bothering them, but it is reality that your law firm, your employer, your job could be on the next nightly news with Lester Holt that they’ve had a breach and you’re done. They don’t want our data. People might think, well, they want the law firms data. No, they want our client’s data. What client is going to want to come back to this law firm that’s had some kind of breach like that? What do you think about that with protecting and keeping the law firms up on all that?

John Sammons:

Yeah, I think that’s a great question, and that also was a thing you just mentioned. Number one is the user awareness because there’s no amount of blinky light boxes from the cybersecurity side that’s going to keep everybody safe if they can’t protect the Pentagon and they can’t protect Bank of America, and SHO probably doesn’t have a chance against somebody that really wants in there, right? It’s a two-pronged thing. So number one is going to be that user awareness training because the weakest link in all of this is the people period, full stop every time all the time. It’s the people or the main vulnerability. So

Jill Francisco:

Click it on those links.

John Sammons:

Yeah, that is the rule number one.

Jill Francisco:

Oh, click on the links.

John Sammons:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jill Francisco:

Oh no, not the gift cards. The gift cards. Don’t bring your gift cards down to, oh gosh.

Tony Sipp:

Anyway, Jill’s in a meeting. Can you buy these for me?

Jill Francisco:

Yeah.

John Sammons:

Yes. Just don’t click anything and that’ll solve most of the problems. Believe it. A lot of it, you’ll reduce a lot of your vulnerability by not clicking on anything, but you have to be super aware. And where it’s going to get worse and harder is with ai, because those phishing tests that a lot of those use broken English, don’t make any sense and all that. You’re a little bit attuned to it. They’re not hard to pick out with AI that’s going to go away. They’re going to be highly engineered, highly specific, much more targeted and much harder to detect. So it’s going to be really tough. Really, really tough. It’s going to make that a lot harder. So we’ve got to get really good at it. So that’s number one. Then updating and patching. Make sure your systems are hardened as much as you possibly can, and that means running those updates as painful as they may be, but keeping those things up to date because even though that’s hugely inconvenient, that’s going to be hugely important in keeping everybody safe and then recognizing the risk. You’re saying that a lot of the senior partners may not recognize the real risk of this, but it just takes one time and they’ll realize it. You know what I mean? When all their client data goes out the door and they can’t get another client,

Jill Francisco:

Right.

John Sammons:

It is a major problem. And then you guys know what the term social engineering means?

Jill Francisco:

Yeah, I’ve heard it. Well, for our audience, yeah, let’s explain.

John Sammons:

What I’m talking about here specifically is where you get somebody who would call you and they would convince you to give away information that you shouldn’t, that kind of thing. Or they walk in the door and that kind of thing. So you’ve got to be aware that it may not be greetings and salutations through an email. It might be a human being on the other end or AI on the other end of that phone so they can get now to where they can create synthetic voices and people that look pretty realistic, and that’s only going to get better and better as time goes on. So this is going to get tougher. It’s going to be interesting, I think where this all ends up. And then recognizing the risk from the senior folks and being able to commit the time for the training and the money and the prevention and having some dedicated cybersecurity folks in there to be able to do this because they’re going to be worth their weight. It’s not a cost center anymore where it is just an expense we have to have. Well, it’s like insurance. One of those things where you really got to have folks on this because it is going to be a huge, huge problem from now until end of time. I can see it’s just going to keep escalating and evolving.

Jill Francisco:

Yeah, we’re thinking j D’s not going to have a problem finding a job.

John Sammons:

Usually not. Yeah. Yep.

Jill Francisco:

Alright, well, let’s take a good little break to thank our sponsors and we’ll be right back and wrap this up with some interesting things on what’s hot and coming down the pike in cybersecurity forensics legal world. Welcome back to the Paralegal Voice again. I’m Jill Francisco here with Tony Sipp and John Sammons, and we’re talking about the ever-changing world of cybersecurity and forensics. So John was just, like I said, telling us how important it is for you as an individual personally to be aware, because like you said, the biggest problem sometimes is the personal, the person, the individual factor. If you’re aware of your surroundings and aware of what’s going on and aware that what these devices can and can’t do that sometimes is half the battle. So John gave some great tips for law firms and things like that that paralegals can kind of try to initiate and nudge their attorneys sometimes to make it a priority.

I mean, John had a good point. That might be something in the world if you have to cut something that they might have, they might put the budget somewhere else, but it really needs to be, you got to have some, like you said, staff and funds to keep on that because if you have a breach, I mean, what else are you going to have left, like you said. So let’s talk about, just real quick to wrap up before we have to go about, what do you see coming down? We’re kind of early, we’re still in February of 2025. Do you see anything coming? I mean, obviously AI is probably one of the things, but what do you got in your professional mind?

John Sammons:

Well, SI is going to be ai. AI is going to be there. AI is going to have an impact as much as it’s beaten to death every day, all day, and it’s getting to be kind of a trite thing. It’s still a huge thing. So it’s going to be a double-edged sword like most things are. So it’s going to help us on the good guy side with it’s going to make, on the forensic side, we’re excited about it because it’s going to be able to help do some examinations and analysis in a much more effective and efficient way, but it’s going to help us do things and be able to take some of the burden because one of the things we struggle with on our side of the fence is the sheer massive volume of data we’ve got to examine and deal with. So there’s got to be a way to cut that down.

There’s not enough resources, there’s not enough bandwidth. Clock cycles pick picker unit to measure to be able to analyze all the data that’s out there that we have to look at. So we got to be able to work smarter and not harder, if you will. So AI can help us that way. On the other side of things, like I mentioned in the last block about the AI on the bad side, used for evil can be used to help write those phishing messages, be able to create synthetic personas, be able to do things like that for fraud and other things. It can also, AI that’s unrestrained can help them think evil. We can use the good AI to help brainstorm for good things. Criminals can do that to brainstorm for not so much good things. So there’s a lot of things there,

Jill Francisco:

Sadly.

John Sammons:

Yeah, sadly, yeah. Other things coming in down on the forensic side would be, yet again, more internet of things, devices. Every year there’s an explosion of new things to deal with, and then every time you have a new thing that creates forensic problems on how we’re going to get the data, where is the data, what kind of data, what do I have to do to parse and get the data to where I can use the data? So there’s all kinds of questions there that have to be answered. So that’s going to bring a whole new set of challenges. It’s a gift that keeps on giving, if you will. Then big data, the massive amounts of data there. So how to be able to use that data to sift through the data to be able to bring you our customers, something you can actually use. So that’s a good way to be able to visualize that data.

There’s a huge, constant development in that. And then DeepFakes is a big thing that’s terrifying in what those things can do. I mean, we’re using that technology on our side now and higher ed to create online learning, creates synthetic personas to be able to be the talking head over a PowerPoint presentation. And it’s amazing how that we can just provide our folks. Now, I give them a slide deck and they create this avatar that delivers the presentation, and we’ve got technology also that’s actually by Google called Notebook lm. That blew my mind that I handed up a PDF file and it creates a podcast.

Jill Francisco:

Oh, Tony and I added the job in

Tony Sipp:

Jeopardy. Sorry, I always worried about large

John Sammons:

Language models.

Jill Francisco:

Oh my gosh.

John Sammons:

It blew my mind that it is absolutely amazing. It’s got the awkward pauses in the conversation. They crack little jokes. It’s mind blowing

Jill Francisco:

Just what we’re doing.

John Sammons:

Yeah, it sounds a lot like this. It’s extremely conversational and it’s amazing

Jill Francisco:

From A PDF,

John Sammons:

From a PDF file. Wow. And as you might guess, my slide deck is pretty sparse, so it’s able to fill in the words I don’t have on the deck, and it is able to complete those thoughts. I mean, it is pretty wild.

Jill Francisco:

When you were talking about your students or whatever, is the chat GPT an issue or is that something that’s not really in the realm of that or

John Sammons:

Yeah, it’s in the syllabus. Yeah.

Yeah. Yes, it is. That’s one of the things then when we first heard of this, I thought, well, here we go. This is going to be a massive cheating tool that students are going to be, you’ll never see an originally written paper again. So here goes, the writing is going to go down and all that. So it’s kind of like the electronic calculator was, if you’re my age-ish, you’ll remember how that was when that first popped up, you, I was at my Hodson high school and they’re like, absolutely not. You’re going to have to do all this math by hand. That’s the devil. You’ll be stupid. No. That kind of thing. So now it’s accepted, right? It is an efficient tool. AI and LLMs now is basically that for speech and thought, and I’ve used it a bunch to brainstorm. I love it. It’s amazing.

Well, you give them guardrails, I give them, it’s now specified in the syllabus that gives them, you can use AI for this, but you absolutely cannot use AI for that. And then you give them guardrails and that kind of thing, so they get guardrails. So we’re trying to embrace it and value it for the tool that it is, but give them parameters where they can and can’t use it where they should or shouldn’t. And then if they do use it, here’s the proper use of it. You need to be able to cite your use of it. And that’s another thing on the forensic side that AI is good for is I think writing those final reports is generating some of those standard explanations of what is email. Instead of us having to write that over and over and over again or whatever, or creating that ourselves. We can just have the standard explanation of what this is, and we have to verify it. Absolutely. The expert has still got to stand behind it, but that’s one shortcut or one workaround that gives that time back to do the real work. So that’ss one way to look at it, but it’s got to be verified because it still tests some of those hallucinations, if you know what that means.

Jill Francisco:

Well, I’m glad to hear you say that because like you said, it’s kind of like you don’t want to not educate at all about it because it’s reality that that’s out there.

Tony Sipp:

Yeah, it’s happening. A lot of companies are downsizing, right? They’re downsizing and replacing it with ai, which is, we said it wasn’t going to happen, but it’s happening. I don’t know. That’s going to be, I guess easier for the forensic side, but at the same time, room for error. Got to be aware. Again, take those 15 minutes in the beginning of the day and read, read, read, read. So maybe at the end of the day as well, and in the middle,

John Sammons:

Well, you can also use Aida too. To

Tony Sipp:

Summarize, summarize, summarize everything that it was. What did I miss today? Siri?

Jill Francisco:

Yeah, read it to me. Yeah, I mean, I love that idea too though, for brainstorming. That’s a great, I think mean we had that all scary in the beginning. Oh, it’s going to replace attorneys and everybody’s freaking out. It’s going to replace paralegals. But like you said, it’s not, there still has to be at some point you need that human factor to get in there. But like you said, it’s also, there are some good things in there. Just like most things in life, people were scared. The internet, and again, internet, some of it’s horrible, just unthinkable. But also there’s a lot of good things about the internet. I mean, I always do the example that all this Zoom and all these technology, it’s like we never even were using it really until covid. And I mean now people are talking to their families and all that stuff, and it’s like, why didn’t we do this before?

It’s like, oh, I don’t know. You’re doing mediations by Zoom and you’re doing depositions by Zoom. And now since you were forced basically to do it, it’s like they’ve seen that it’s just as effective, and it’s just a matter of trying those different methods and when maybe you don’t want to, but when you’re forced to and then you kind of see, okay, it’s fine. It’s saving our client money. It’s still effective. So John, I appreciate you joining us today. I appreciate all the tips that you gave us, and if our listeners would have any other questions or follow up or need any information, because clearly we need to have you in one of those rooms and lock you in there and have you tell us all these awesome things that we could do that would make us our lives easier. But yeah, let our listeners know where they could get ahold of you if they wanted some follow up.

John Sammons:

Yeah, John dot [email protected].

Jill Francisco:

Perfect. Perfect. Because like I said, I’m sure that our listeners are tweaked with a lot of stuff and you gave us some great information, and of course you’re very knowledgeable on everything we talked about today and plus so much more. So anyway, I really appreciate you being here with Tony and I and the paralegals, our listeners, and like I said, I’m excited because educating JD over there. So we’re really excited and he’s very interested. Loves it for our paralegals out there. I mean, it’s not something that paralegals couldn’t go into, honestly,

John Sammons:

For Sure.

Jill Francisco:

I think now it’s more of a career switch since Covid, you’ve had to kind of pivot and switch around sometimes. So what Marshall has and the program and their professors and everything, it’s really a great thing. So thank you again, John. Appreciate it.

John Sammons:

Thank you. Really appreciate the opportunity.

Jill Francisco:

Thank you. Alright, well we’re signing off for another episode of the Paralegal Voice. Please tune in and listen to us next time. Bye.

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