EP 284: Building A Human-Led, AI-Enhanced Justice System

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AI, Everything's about efficiency. More tasks, more productivity, more business, more growth. That's what it's always about, right? But when we're talking about the legal system in law firms, is is more always better? Is, is it just about growing the firm? Or can generative AI help the legal system in other ways and. And help law firms focus more on impact versus just efficiency? All right, so we're going to be talking about that today and more on everyday AI. What's going on, y'?

All?

My name is Jordan. I'm the host of Everyday AI and this show is for you. We do this every single weekday, helping you grow your company and grow your career with our daily livestream podcast and free daily newsletter. So we are going to be talking today about how you can build maybe a more human LED and AI enhanced justice system. But before we do, we're going to start, as we do every day, by going over the AI news. So if you haven't already, make sure to go to your everydayai.com and sign up for that free daily newsletter. All right, let's go ahead and talk about big stories. We got some big stories going on in, in the world of AI today. So nice little feature release here from a very popular tool, but Perplexity has released a powerful new AI feature. So Perplexity AI has just launched a feature called Perplexity Pages, which allows users to create visually appealing articles or reports using AI generated content and customized prompts. These pages, interestingly enough, can also be shared and searched through Google.

So.

So, seemingly a pretty big SEO play here. So users can customize prompts, select the tone and audience of the content, and add or remove sections as needed. The feature is seen as information curation rather than AI generated content curation. So pretty, pretty interesting update there from Perplexity. All right, speaking of big names, well, some of the biggest names in tech have teamed up to go against Nvidia. Yeah, maybe Nvidia is getting too big, too popular for everyone else's liking. So Intel, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and other tech giants have formed what's called the Ultra Accelerator Link or UA Link Promoter Group to create an industry standard for connecting AI accelerator chips in data centers. With this kind of unlikely partnership, the group aims to reduce dependencies on Nvidia and promote innovation. In addition to Google, Microsoft and Meta, the group also includes amd, hpe, Cisco, and Broadcom. So pretty interesting there. Like, we've seen a couple of these alliances. You know, people worried about Nvidia getting too big and too powerful. All right, last but not least, pretty big news happening with Apple. So some new information on Apple's upcoming collaboration with OpenAI to enhance Siri with their GPT technology. So, according to reports from Bloomberg, Apple is expected to reveal a new Siri AI helper and at its WWDC conference in about two weeks. So this partnership has reportedly angered Microsoft, who has invested heavily in OpenAI and is concerned about competing with Apple's AI technology. So Apple, according to reports, has been in discussions with OpenAI since mid 2023 to integrate cutting edge GPT some of this voice technology in the upcoming iOS 18. During internal testing, Apple engineers connected ChatGPT to Siri, demonstrating enhanced query handling and context comprehension. So Microsoft has expressed concerns about the Apple and OpenAI partnership, foreseeing potential competition and server demand challenges. The new Apple and OpenAI Siri integration reportedly may require the latest iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max due to the advanced kind of AI demands on the chip. Also, the upcoming AI features may allow users to control features inside of apps with your voice. So pretty big announcement there with, with Siri and, and OpenAI and the future of interacting with iPhones. I don't know if I'm going to use my voice to interact with apps. Seems counterintuitive, but, you know, it is. So I'm, I'm excited for today's show. Yeah, a little, little different. Little different setup here. So thanks for. Thanks to the worldwide Technology, uh, team WWT for hosting me out here in St. Louis. But let's go ahead and bring on our guest for today's show. So I'm very excited. Let's see if we can. There we go. There we go. We got him. So Evia is the CEO and co founder of Darrow. Evia, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI show.

Happy to be here, Jordan. Thank you for having me.

All right. Absolutely. So can you tell us a little bit just about what Darrow is and what you all do?

Yeah. So Darrow is a justice intelligence platform that helps litigation teams, legal teams, create a better impact on the world and grow their business as they do it.

Yeah. And so even just from the AI side. Right. Because, you know, artificial intelligence isn't new. Right. And it's been around in the legal system for a very long time. But can you speak a little bit about how Darrow uses, you know, whether traditional AI or generative AI you know, in your day to day.

Yeah, we use, of course, both. And a lot more than that. I feel a lot of technology and also a lot of methodologies and how legal teams could work Agile. Right. So the best use case I can kind of give as an example is the needle in a haystack, where you're trying to kind of connect one event that happened in multiple corpora. Right. So a lot of corpuses of text. Right. Corpora. And. And you want to kind of correspond the. The mentions of the event in all different types of language.

And.

And that's how kind of our world is currently built. We have a lot of silos of information, and each of us has a very hard time to find this information. And lawyers are not different than any one of us. So it's kind of creating a multimodal justice system that can absorb a lot more data into it. And I'll just want to give an example just right away, so it's clear. One of our clients had one of the best use cases we've seen where they decided to solve a problem that they personally had, the pesticide and herbicide problem. They saw that regenerative agriculture, I hope I'm saying it's correctly. Regenerative agriculture is kind of trying to solve this. Right. By growing a lot of different crops in the same field over the years so that the soil kind of regenerates and you don't need a lot of pesticide and herbicide. But modern agriculture isn't like that. And we grow the same crops in the same place again and again. That creates a need for some dangerous herbicides and pesticides that cause alarming diseases. And this law firm, this legal team, wanted to solve this. And the specific litigator that used the software basically asked to analyze a lot of publicly available data, connecting between the application of herbicides and pesticides and high cancer rates that correlate to the same chemicals in these herbicides and pesticides, according to research. And what happened is that they created a pipeline of cases for their firm for years. Right. Years in years of business. And that happened just as a single use case by a law firm. We're talking about some of the greatest, biggest cases, like Aaron Brockovich kind of cases you can think about in one specific state in the US and that's the use case they created. So kind of this software has the potential to create justice in an intelligent way and to enhance the justice system led by humans, by AI that helps them.

Yeah. So, you know, obviously artificial intelligence, you know, traditional AI, you know, when you're talking about deep learning and advanced algorithms have been used in the legal system for decades. But, you know, when we talk about kind of generative AI in large language models, you know, for, for our audience tuning in, that maybe isn't too familiar with how, you know, the legal system either views large language models like ChatGPT and, and all of these others, or uses them. Can you talk, you know, kind of give us a kind of a quick pulse on how the legal system is viewing large language models right now? Because I'm not even sure, because sometimes you hear law firms are using these and sometimes they're, they're banning them. So, you know, in general, can you give us, you know, kind of the overview of how the legal system is or is not using generative AI?

Yeah, first of all, I think that the legal system definitely is using generative AI. We have a lot of surveys showing this 40%, I think, of lawyers have generative used it in a legal use case. And of course, when someone uses it doesn't mean that they just, you know, we hear these stories where ChatGPT invents fake cases. Most of the use cases are not unresponsible. Most of them are responsible. Like most of the use cases of AI in the world right now, where people are using it to do something important that they couldn't have done before at the same timeframes. But that's kind of the efficiency movement in AI, and it's very big in law firms today. The efficiency movement is talking about shortening the cycles of business. Right. Or shortening the cycles of work and making it so that you can work less, so to speak. I guess the problem with this is that you don't really work less when you use generative AI for efficiency, because what happens is that you get more time to then think about what the next thing you're going to do is, and then you use that time by again sending your inputs to some kind of model to get further feedback. And instead of having kind of yourself get help from the model, you're basically helping the model. You're basically training it. And it's amazing. Some people have really good connections with their models. But what's happening in law firms right now, the other movement that is kind of coming into the legal world, and it started with first of all GCs and then plaintiff lawyers and now defense law firms, and also the courts themselves, we're kind of seeing the whole ecosystem rally around the idea that you could use AI to find out what the most impactful thing you could do to achieve a world that you're imagining is right. And you're looking for the stories that really deserve your attention. You're looking for the things that have to happen in the future for your firm to thrive and for humanity or whatever it is your cause to thrive. And the best example, I just gave it away. Right. But there are so many others. We can see it in defense law firms that are trying to, transactional firms that are trying to help more transactions happen in the sustainable energy world. What's happening there is incredible.

Yeah. So, so Evia, like one thing that I think when I think of the legal system is I think, you know, a mountain of books behind someone and they're preparing for a case and you know, they have, you know, mountains of paper on the table, right?

Yeah, it's like this. So we always have a book like this, right?

Exactly.

It's always a book like this and then like a library. It's always like that. Yeah, you're right. Right.

So, so I mean when you think about large language models and generative AI, I like, I always, my, my mind tends to think is, is, you know, what professions have the most to gain, right. From being able to, in theory, right. Be able to comb through mountains of books and find that one little thing. Right. So I see the huge upsides in, in how the legal system, you know, could potentially be using generative AI, but I see the downsides as well. So what are maybe some of the dangers of law firms maybe being a little too reliant on generative AI versus that kind of quote unquote old school combing through mountains of paper approach? Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating them masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use gen AI. So whether you're looking for chat GPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can, you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen.

Yeah, well, I kind of want to get philosophical like always with this topic because it's really big. I think law firms in general kind of follow two universes. They have a multiverse already. One universe is the, the gnomus, right? This, this is a cover. Robert Cover wrote this in 1983, I think, and, and it was kind of this amazing concept where there are two universes in law. One is Nomus. This is the law, right. These are all the legislations and all the use cases of law. The, the, the cases that go into print, you know, and these, these law books, these big law books, they all look the same. And then there's another universe called the narrative universe. And Nomis and narratives are the two universes where lawyers live. The narrative universe is all that happens. And they're trying to figure out which narratives should help develop the law and which laws should help develop narrative. You just got the need to move a little bit.

Yeah, I got.

When you get up, it's better, it's fine. And I think it kind of helps everyone kind of set the stage for our conversation about universes. But basically, we're right now in a universe of narrative. We're talking, and humans talk through narrative. But the law works in a different way, where there are intentions put into a book, and the intention is that that changes reality. And humans can create law because they work together. Right. And have a democracy. Democracies create really good rules, and those rules help govern our societies in a way that creates better impact and better societies. So lawyers work in these two universes, and now you're asking, how do they use AI? And the way that they're using AI is to kind of expand this multiverse, have a lot more narratives to talk about, have a lot more rules to talk about, kind of grow their understanding of the world outside of the books that they have, you know, on their desk and kind of open to the world. And in the past, like the, the big incumbent companies in, in legal tech have kind of segregated information, siloed it and sold it. You know, they actually sold the information. They didn't sell your. Your ability to use information. They actually sold the bits of information. The government does this as well with, with a pacer. Right. And then there are like, free law projects that kind of try to, to change that, but we have a whole ecosystem of data that segregates the data into silos so that lawyers have a harder time kind of breaking the silos and getting to a world that really is truly collaborative between narrative and law. And that's the world we're coming to today. And in a world like that, lawyers just have to sit and become thinkers of what kind of world they want to create, and it's in their fingertips. They could do the right strategy, you know, perform the right strategy with the right litigation and legislation and whatever. Right. Build a real strategy that changes the world. And it's fascinating.

Yeah. And, you know, yeah, we got very philosophical there, you know, but, you know, one thing that I'm wondering about is this constant balance, right? And how should, you know, whether we're talking individual lawyers or law firms, how can they balance that? Like efficiency and productivity versus creating impact. Right. And when we talk about, you know, social justice. Right. So how should law firms be, you know, how can they find that balance? To, yes, use the productivity gains from large language models, but to still, you know, kind of do the right thing and to focus on what matters. Right. Whether that's their. Their clients or a bigger issue. But how can they find that balance?

Yeah. So first of all, Darrow, the company that I work for is a growth movement company. So we, we work on growth in legal AI. We help law firms grow. There are companies that do efficiency AI, and, and most of the companies in legal tech do that. And, and I think they're absolutely essential. Like, no law firm can go without using efficiency AI. But after you do that, you get a lot of time on your hands. And like speaking just for a second commercially, once you solve a lot of efficiency bottlenecks in your pipeline, it will be harder to bill the same amount of billables. Right. The hours that actually make money. For law firms, it's going to be hard to bill as much because clients will say, well, I'm not paying for this NDA if you just chatgpt it, right? And everyone knows already, so you can't spend $1,000 on an NDA where, where that NDA was created by ChatGPT. What's going to happen today is, and it's already happening, is that law firms are kind of seeing this and saying, well, efficiency is very good because it solves a lot of bottlenecks. It helps lawyers, associates, partners spend more quality time on the things they like doing. But then how do we make sure that the things they like doing are the things that create the impact we want in the world? How do we make sure that, like what we love to do and the work we're doing get connected. And I think that's where growth AI comes in and Darrow comes in. What Darrow does is helps litigation teams be strategic about growing and really go to the realms they want to create, create the worlds in which they want to live in.

You know, you, you mentioned something there, Eva, that at least when I've talked to some law firms, and I've talked to people either even who are consulting, you know, in the kind of AI and legal space, and a lot of times it comes back to billable hours. Right. So I'm glad you brought that up. It's kind of the, the elephant in the room, I think, with when it comes to legal and generative AI, do you think that maybe a lot of law firms are leaving impact on the table? As in, you know, hey, they're still doing things kind of the old school way and they're pushing off innovation because they just want those, those, you know, higher billable hours, whereas maybe they could still use generative AI and then focus in different ways or better ways on that client. Is that something that you're seeing? And if so, you know, how can, you know, how can law firms solve that?

Yeah. Well, I think, first of all, law firms are doing it today. I haven't seen a law firm that isn't strategically thinking about implementing AI into its systems. And that's amazing. I think the thought of strategy right now is kind of like, how do you become more efficient? Because we need to keep up. And I kind of want to say, don't worry about it. You're keeping up, even asking that question and thinking like, am I keeping up? That's keeping up. That's fine. Now, after you did that and you found a provider or five, hopefully five, that you work with on the foundational model side and efficiency AI side, you get some kind of architecture, but then there's the application layer. And in the application layer, you want to be strategic about what kind of applications you build using AI. These applications are not supposed to just generate efficiency. If you're generating efficiency with them, the thing that will happen is that your firm will kind of eat itself. Right. Law firms have a tendency to focus on the things that generate the revenue right now instead of thinking about the future. And we've seen this in a very interesting way in the world of marketing and biz dev. You see that when the law firm is very busy, then investment in biz dev and marketing is very low. When the law firm is not busy, then the investment in marketing and biz dev goes up and that creates the fluctuation of revenue in law firms. And that has created a huge liquidity problem that generated the litigation finance market in general, which is a financial market that all it does is basically pay for the billable hours before they happen in order for the lawyers to be able to take that work and hire the lawyers. So the whole thing kind of revolved around not being able to look sustainably at the future and kind of smooth out the revenue curve. So that's why we kind of wanted to do this. We wanted to help law firms think about the world less in a fluctuation and more in a. It's. It's less. I think it's less bipolar. Right. It's more about just being content with the world you're trying to create and work through it diligently. But. But, you know, with happiness. I think that's the change. And also I want to say, like, because always this happens when we talk about law firms and big law in general. Then there's some kind of like, well, are the lawyers having fun? Right. And you hear about lawyers kind of billing 300 hours a month and working tirelessly and having a really hard time. And I think the thing that we're trying to get to is a world where the profession is also good for your mental health, because we can't have the people trying to save the world suffer so much. In order to do it, they need to be in a collaborative atmosphere. So at Darrow, we developed something called Agile for legal teams, which is an agile methodology of doing legal development, what we call legal development, where you're developing the next legal world. You're developing a world where some problems don't exist anymore, they solve themselves. And technology can help you do that, and the people that you work with can help you do that. But thinking like that, thinking, how will this herbicide and pesticide problem solve itself? The answer is that there will be a pipeline of cases that happens every time applications are nefarious. Every time it happens more than you need or dangerous materials are introduced immediately, there will be a reaction from the justice system. And that reaction will then create another reaction where we do sustainable agriculture. So that's kind of the world we're trying to solve. And we always look at, at the.

End goal, the vision, you know, and I'm on a. For our live stream audience, you probably see this. I've been operating in the dark half the time. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stand up here so I can, yeah, please do work that's all right. Hey, they're, they're trying to shut me out here. But, you know, one thing, one thing.

There's light. There's light.

So one thing, if you had that I, I was kind of thinking about is, you know, when it does come to impact, right? In, in how lawyers can use generative AI just for something more than, you know, fighting through that mountain of paperwork, how can they use generative AI in maybe more creative ways to find impact that they can create, whether that's, you know, in their communities or with the clients that they're working for? Maybe. What are some, you know, creative ways that they can use generative AI to create impact?

Yeah, I kind of want to say, like, something about the efficiency movement. I don't think it really is about not doing the paperwork and the books. Right. I think one of the most exciting things I had as a clerk in the Supreme Court was going down in the library to one of the darkest floors and finding a book from the British Mandate and in Israel. Right. And looking at that and seeing, like, how law used to be practiced in, in a world that was very different than the world we live in today, far less democratic. And looking at that and kind of see that was, you know, really an inquisition into history, and I think we should have that. Sorry, there's a phone ringing here for a sec.

No worries. Hey, today's, Today's one of those episodes where we just have all kinds of, all kinds of fun distractions.

It will, it will ring.

Hey, just so people know, we always do this live. It's unedited, unscripted. So this is.

Yeah, no, it's, it's true. It's true to the thing. So, so I, I, I was kind of saying, like, that that experience was amazing for me. And, like, that's why we admire Mike Ross, right? We don't admire only the Harveys of the world that kind of, like, avoid trial and are very sleek. We admire those people who sit in the dark room for a second and actually read a book and get an idea. Wow, these are amazing people. And they don't live bad lives. There are some amazing lawyers who are real philosophers of our time thinking about how law can advance humanity. And we want those people to have the freedom to do that without feeling like they're bogged down by the need to be so efficient, because they're creating an amazing thing. They're really creating an amazing thing. So that's the first. And then let's get creative about how we can use AI to, to solve Real world problems. So I'll give an example that I'm working on now, which I think is amazing. One of the people in our company, Eyal, who leads the privacy group, is kind of thinking about the next steps for privacy, and we thought about the right to be forgotten, which was a new human right introduced in our time. Right. And that's an exciting thing. During this time that we have been living, humanity has created a new right for people to be forgotten from the Internet for things that they don't want humans to remember about them. And not only humans, but machines as well. Right. Because if a machine can remember something about you, then humans will as well. And we saw that happening, and then we were kind of thinking about, wait, what about the right to be remembered? We have huge communities in the world that are disappearing from our memory just because the way that the architecture of the World Wide Web works, these communities are just disappearing the memory we have of what they did. And you could see this in the blogosphere, for example, where we're just losing whole segments of humanity from 2010, from 2002. Communities that existed online but now are like, you know, a faded Wikipedia page and, like, where's all that data? Someone. Someone removed it. And I think, like, we saw this in the MySpace, you know, issue where, like, a lot of information was just deleted from MySpace. Like, I think 50 million songs that people uploaded were deleted. Right? There's a right to be remembered. Now think what a law firm can do with that. When a law firm thinks about the right to be remembered and wants to create work in order to achieve, you know, establish that human right, what could you do? There's so much business in that. There are so many cases against bad deletion practices, against companies that lock you out of your social media account, which you worked so tirelessly to create, and then you need to kind of knock on someone's door and there's no phone number and you don't get an answer, that that's something that we need to change. So we're working on the right to be remembered, and I hope we get some. Some interesting cases in the next couple of weeks that. That will kind of help the law firms that are working on this as well. But. But I guess what I was trying to say is that that is how we can get creative. We need to think about visions of the world we want to create and use the legal system to generate that world in existence right now.

So. So, Eva, we've. We've covered a lot in today's episode, so We've talked a little bit about what Darrow does and we've talked about this kind of wrestling match between efficiency AI and impactful AI. So, you know, as we wrap up today's show and you know, what's maybe the one takeaway that you hope people can, can gather from today's conversation when it comes to, you know, how we can have this more, you know, human led AI justice system? What's your takeaway message?

First of all, I think we need a mission. All of us do. Definitely. Fortune 500 companies need a mission. We need to have more corporations that are working to be on the right side of history, doing good for humanity and, and just not doing the busy work, not doing the things that are, you know, bogging you down with efficiency, going for real growth for humanity. That's the movement that's happening right now. AI is just enhancing that. It's helping us. It's really just another tool in our toolbox. We've created a lot of them. We'll create more in the future. This is just another wave, but this is a wave of unprecedented growth. And we need missions in order to have that growth. Go to the right places, grow humanity to the right places, manifest a future that we want to live in.

If that didn't give everyone a little extra, you know, daily epinephrine for your daily life, I don't know what will. So, Evia, thank you so much for coming on the Everyday AI show and sharing with us. We really appreciate your time.

Thank you. It was a pleasure.

All right. And hey. Yeah. And hey. As a reminder, everyone, we covered a lot and there's obviously way more going on in the world of AI than what we can cover just today. So if you haven't already, make sure to go to your everydayai.com Sign up for the free daily newsletter. We'll be recapping today's episode as well in more depth and sharing other resources. So thank you for tuning in to Everyday AI. We hope to see you back tomorrow and, well, not tomorrow, but Monday and every other day. So thank you all. We'll see you.

Thank you. And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.