AI or Die! Lawyers, Founders and Executives Must Embrace AI Today, Or Be Left Behind Forever.

All right. So today we are here to talk about AI. I know it's a hot topic button for a lot of people. I titled this AI or Die: Embrace the Future because I believe that we are at a turning point in society, all business professionals and lawyers, especially since we're in the language business. Are going to be seriously disrupted by AI. I've been using AI in my practice now every day, all day long for over a year. And my job today is to kind of help you see the future and help bring you along on this AI journey, which is, from my point of view, inevitable. So we have 40 minutes or so, and then I'm going to save 20 minutes for the end for questions because I know there's going to be a lot of questions. And there's really not a good way to teach people AI in 40 minutes, so that's not going to be my goal today. I'm going to introduce you to some concepts. I am going to help you, I think, understand where we are in the evolution of AI and where it is going. And then I'm going to provide you resources at the end of this presentation so that you can continue your learning journey in a very structured format. But I think the main thing that I think we need to understand is that as legal professionals, we are going to have to adapt to this technology and we are going to have to learn to leverage this technology. How many people in the room use AI occasionally during the week to help them at this point? All right. So a good number. That's not surprising. I think at this point, You know, everyone's seeing some of the value. How many people feel like they're getting something of value out of their use of AI when they do interact with it? All right. Most everyone. I think that's good news because there is a frustration level when it's not doing what you want, when you're not getting the output that you need. That causes a lot of people to simply abandon ship. And for reasons that we're going to discuss today, I think that's a bad idea. You do not want to abandon ship. It is picking up speed. So the question is no longer about whether to adopt AI. I think it's how quickly we can adopt it and how effectively we can integrate it into our workflow in order to enhance our own abilities and deliver better client services. And it's going to be across every single practice area and business model that was discussed earlier this morning by all of you. There is no different niche of legal services that won't be impacted by AI. I do want to take a look at 2 foundational issues, which is why you should care and how AI is already being used by your competitors, myself being one of them. I don't want to drive this out of fear. AI is coming for your job. AI is going to take over the world. AI is more powerful than nuclear weapons. We're all going to be dead. AI robots are taking over. Like, that's not the way to look at it. You want to look at this as an opportunity, as an opportunity to develop skills and approach and change the way that you practice law. In an efficient way and in the least frustrating way possible. I use AI at a very high level every day, and it's garbage in, garbage out. So the better skills you have, the better results, the better assistance you're going to have from the AI. I think that with a relatively modest amount of effort, you can really up your game as well. A word about predictions. There are a lot of predictions surrounding AI. There's a lot of prognosticators who are saying that, you know, AI is going to this and AI is going to that. And you can debate these issues all day. How much of an impact is AI going to have on us as lawyers, on our law firms? Are our clients going to start using AI and not use us? You have whatever your opinion you want about that. That's fine. Let's debate that another day. No one really knows for sure what's going to happen next. We just need to be ready for it. And I think that this is the only technology that's happened in my lifetime where there is general consensus amongst everyone, including the skeptics. The AI is going to have a tremendous impact on all of us in all aspects of our lives— political, social, personal, health, profession, relationships, across the board. So of all the predictions that are out there, there's this really one that I, I think is important here, and And that is that there does not appear to be a ceiling on the capabilities of AI. Cloud can only do so much. We only can store so much data. You can only create so much software in order to build a platform that's going to help you do your job as a lawyer better. All of those general limitations that we've seen every time there's been a new transformational technology that's come down the pipe do not appear to apply to AI. There is no ceiling to where this thing can go. And the 2 variables are data and compute. They are developing more and more compute, and they're able to get more and more out of the compute that is available. And the data is a big potential limitation. But what happens when we feed really good data into these systems, what are they going to be capable of then? And certainly a lot more than what we're seeing now. It's going to be happening probably much more quickly than even the optimists believe. If there's no ceiling on AI— and AI is intelligence, and we could talk about what is intelligence. Is intelligence speech? That's how we reflect intelligence in our world. We talk to each other, we either reflect as smart or not smart. We either reflect as really being knowledgeable about a subject or not. And we do that through the words that we use and the words that we write. Is reading and writing and speaking the best indication of intelligence? Maybe, maybe not. But for now, these large language models that are built on language and spit back somehow mysteriously, even though no one knows knows how these incredibly intuitive answers to our questions, seemingly understanding between our words what we mean, and then interpreting those words and then providing output through these chat tools that are spot on more often than not. So if, if AI is kind of exponentially capable Right now, whatever— fill in the statistic— is AI already smarter than 60% of the world's population? Whatever the number is, it doesn't matter because it's getting more powerful every day. GPT-5, or whatever they're going to call it, is going to come out sooner rather than later. The major chat tools out there, the major large language model tools that are out there— Gemini and ChatGPT and Claude— They are all leapfrogging each other week in and week out on capabilities. The exponential nature of what they might be able to achieve is what we're going to witness in the next 12 months or 3 years. Will AI be 10 times smarter than we are? 100 times smarter than we are? 1,000 times smarter than we are? What is our role as attorneys? When an AI system is 1,000 times smarter than we are, when it has all of the knowledge about a topic available to it in real time, in nanoseconds, and can analyze that in nanoseconds and spit it back, how could we ever compete with that? And I think we need to think about those issues because that seems to be the trajectory. What is our role as lawyers in a world where AI is more capable than we are. Where are we right now is different than where we're going to end up, and we're not quite sure where all that is. But where we are right now is AI has the ability to assist us. We're still the master to some degree. We want to think about the use of AI as an assistant to help us do our job the same way we have assistants in the office— paralegals, secretaries, associate attorneys. All of these different human interactions that we have every day where we delegate a task, we provide background information to the law clerk and we say we need a research memo on this issue. And oh, by the way, here's some background and I'll review the complaint. The simplest thing about AI and your use of AI, it is literally no different than a human being. You are going to provide it background information. You're going to upload knowledge, all the prior pleadings. You are going to tell it what direction you, you want it to go. You are going to tell it what your client's goals are and budget as background information so it has that available for every interaction that it has with you. It's going to return output. It's going to give you some work product, just like a law clerk. Then you're going to say, yeah, yes, no, I need to dig in more here. You're going to send it back to work, and it's going to come back just like a law clerk. And then you're going to say, now let's do this next, and it's going to come back like a law clerk. If you are submitting a question into one of these tools and getting a single response and saying, you know, pretty good, you're not using the tool correctly. That's not the point. The point is to continually work with, interact, increase the knowledge, provide more background. to these GPT assistants that they can get better. As a good manager, it is your job to manage the assistant, provide good instruction. This is really just a question of not if, but when, and then fill in the blank, right? When are we going to be disrupted in a more meaningful way than we are today? And I think that that probably is going to be this year, but maybe it's next year. Either way, it is coming. Where does this leave us? I don't know for each one of you where you view your place in all this is, but I can tell you what my place in this is. I don't know what's going to happen next, but I plan on understanding how to use these tools, building up my skill set in using these tools, delivering more value to the clients in less time. Using these tools. If I am already 3 times better as an attorney than I have ever been in my 30 years of practice as a result of integration of AI, right, I'm going to keep going to 4x, 5x, and 10x. And maybe at the end of the day, there will be a place for me in this new world that we're about to enter, right? Because at the end of the day, I'll be able to interact with AI better than the attorney across the street. In this period of kind of unknown duration, AI is currently an assistant there to help us. What I encourage everyone in this room to do, and what I'm going to provide you the tools to at the end of this to be able to leverage, is to start the journey, make the time, make the commitment, upset the apple cart, get out of your habits. We've all been around for a long time. We all have a way of doing our work. All that has to end. You have to create new ways of work that leverage AI tools that become part of your workflow. I plan on helping lead the AI revolution as a life's purpose. I have been doing new and emerging technology since the internet. I saw the internet as a move from the industrial age to the information age. Mistakenly, I thought that the internet would provide intelligence, and instead it turned out to be clickbait headlines. And, you know, the depth of knowledge that people had an interest in turned out to be pretty shallow. But as each new iteration of technology has come down the pipe, the ability to change the world, the ability of the world to change, has increased, and never so much as with AI. I plan on being part of that, and I want all of you— my— some of my best friends are in this room— to come along on the ride. Of all the kind of ways you can think about AI, and you could be inspired by it, you could be afraid of it, you could be uncertain about it, you could be skeptical about it, you could be optimistic about it, you could have a lot of different emotions about AI. But I think that the thing that is the most interesting to me is doing a better job is fun. Having better client relationships because your email communications with them have gone from here to here, because AI can draft emails way better than any of us, right? I'm short, I'm curt, I can't type worth shit. My emails are not great, but I do almost all of my emails using an AI assistant I created for client communications. And the response I get back from my clients to these emails is incredible. One of the things that you're going to learn is that AI is much more about— much more than doing the job faster. And sometimes it's actually taking more time because you're digging in much deeper. And it's so much more than just simply doing better quality work. It is changing your relationships with your clients, with the adverse counsel. It is much more fun doing better work. And that is the best reason that I can give you to use AI, because each of you have made it to this level of potential, of your potential. I don't do religion. I never shared religion with my kids. They sat in church one time and were completely horrified by what they were seeing because they'd never been exposed to it before. What is the religion that I shared with my children? It's to find and fulfill your potential. That's why we're here on this earth. From my point of view, AI changes that equation on so many levels that it's, it's really quite staggering to think about. Some rules for the road. Being discouraged is your enemy. Mm-hmm. AI tools right now are not perfect, and they can sometimes hallucinate. They do not do case law research if you're using ChatGPT because it does not have access. To the case law and statutory databases that Westlaw and Lexis have. You can't ask it a question about what's the right case, as you've all seen the lawyer in New York who filed the brief, right? You knew that was going to happen. It got great publicity, which means it probably isn't going to happen much anymore. But you have to understand what data is going into the system. But don't be discouraged if it doesn't get you the result that you want. Because again, you're building skills today for the tools that are going to be available tomorrow. You're building an approach today that you are going to apply as the tool starts to move forward tomorrow. AI is getting better at a pace that even the top AI experts are continually astounded by. The people who know the most about AI, the people who built these models, don't know how it works. All they know is there's— they condensed all this data into a neural network. That somehow has got weighted relationships between words and phrases and sentences. And then somewhere in that neural network, exactly like our brain, it's able to pull out knowledge. And they don't know how, right? That's the scary part about AI. That's the thing that blows— that's the thing that makes certain AI experts quit their jobs at Google in order to try and evangelize, we have to stop AI, because We didn't see this coming. We thought we were 30 years out at a minimum. Now all of a sudden it's here. We don't know how it works. If we couldn't predict this, then we don't really know what's happening and what can happen next. That is pretty interesting stuff. Some other rules: you have to have the right mindset. It's more than just using the tool; it's the way you think about the tool. You have to develop a workflow strategy. That workflow strategy could be as simple as a sticky note on your computer that says, use the fucking AI, right? Because you have to get out of your routine and start thinking, how could I use this tool? You have to take the time to create a GPT assistant that does a very specific job for a very specific client where you upload the background knowledge for that client, the client's goals, the client's concerns, the client's strategies, the pleadings. You create that assistant and now you can use it and improve it over time. You have to commit, you have to recommit, you have to be open to change, you have to learn with AI together. And the one thing that I will say has been the most staggering thing for me as an aggressive user of AI is that I use it across all aspects of my life. I use it in the morning when I get up. I've created a, um, a spiritual GPT that helps me Work through problems of the day. It does it at levels that no level of counseling could ever get me, and it's there 24/7, and I can speak to it and it'll speak back to me. I don't even have to type. AI is going to transform every aspect of your life, not just law.

And we don't use it as a policy just because we're afraid of the—

yes.

I haven't invested in my own private—

yes,

capsule. What are you using? So you—

Great question. And it is the biggest thing that you need to think about for a tool like ChatGPT. If you— and there's a video that you're going to have access to, it's going to show you how to maximize your privacy settings. And I have been granted access into OpenAI's backend privacy and security documents, which are not publicly available. They take it as seriously as any cloud platform you're using. And you are using a lot of cloud platforms with the exact same issues, right? You have to vet the company and you have to get your security settings set up. And the tools I'm going to give you at the end of this, the training videos are going to walk you through and quiz you on security settings so that you don't screw up right now. Is there still a chance that something could escape? Yes, just like with your email provider, just like with your cloud provider and Salesforce, just like with your Basecamp, you know, extranet provider. There's always going to be some level of risk, but you got to use these tools and you got to pick the right ones and you got to vet them correctly. So what are the tools that I'm using? So look at the time here today. What I decided is in 50 minutes, I can't teach you— I can't get you from wherever you are to where I am. In terms of how to, how to really get into the nuts and bolts of how to get the most out of these tools. So what I can do today is I could tell you what are the tools that I use that I trust and how do I use them by way of example. Well, all right, so obviously ChatGPT, Perplexity, and OpenAI Whisper. I also use Fireflies to record all my meetings so I can upload that into the GPT. But let's just take a look at some of this stuff and see what the capabilities are. And some of this, hopefully you guys are already doing. You're going to get the training videos to be able to do all this stuff at the end of this. So you can take those home and you can use them for free and, and scale up.