#36 - Embracing AI in Law: A Conversation with Andrew Perlman on the Future of Legal Profession

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mary o', Carroll, and today on the show is Andrew Perlman, dean and professor of law at Suffolk University Law School. The innovation and technology specialization they have there, including a certificate program, was the first of its kind from a major law school. During his time in academia, Andrew had served in several leadership roles involving the future of legal services. He's written numerous articles on legal ethics that have appeared in some of the nation's lead law reviews, and he's co authored a civil procedure casebook that's been adopted at more than 80 law schools. Prior to entering academia, Dean Perelman clerked for a federal district court judge in Chicago and practiced as a litigator there. He is an honors graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, and he received his LLM from Columbia Law School as well. As you can see, Andy is extremely impressive, and we had a wonderful conversation. We talk about all that is happening in AI and how. How it is affecting the future of the legal profession. And of course, Andy has a first row seat to what is happening at the law schools. What does this all mean for the future of the profession when it comes to training associates, training young lawyers, and what are the skills that are going to be needed in the future? Is he thinking optimistically or pessimistically about the future? You'll have to keep listening to hear about that. With that, please enjoy. All right, Andy, so excited to have you on this podcast. You are such a pioneer that we all look up to an early founding father, if you will, of so much of what I think the industry and this profession is focused on these days. So just first, thank you for all that you've done and what you continue to do in advancing technology and innovation and just a new way of thinking in our space.

Oh, well, you're very kind. I feel like I can say exactly the same thing to you as a founding. I don't know if I'm a founding father. You're a founding mother, and, you know, it's a great ecosystem, and I feel very much like I standing on the shoulders of giants of people who came before me. And I'm sure you feel the same.

Absolutely. It's a lot of fun, and I think it's such a fun time. And I feel like I've been saying it's a fun time to be in this industry for like a decade now, but now more than ever, it just feels like things are moving and clicking and conversations are happening. I mean, don't you. Don't you think things have changed totally.

When, when I really got into doing legal innovation and technology in earnest maybe a dozen years ago, we pretty much knew everyone who was doing it because it was a relatively small group. And now I think we are seeing both in the legal profession and in law schools. Everyone's paying attention to it now. Everyone recognizes how important this new knowledge and skill set is going to be. So, yeah, I think a lot has changed in recent years for the better.

Yeah, for sure. And, and then you, of course were the keynote speaker at Clock amia's event and you were up there on the big stage talking about generative AI because, you know, what else do we really talk about these days but how it relates more specifically to the future of the profession? And I just thought it was one of the best AI talks that I'd heard to date. And you just made it so accessible and real. And I know I ran up to you afterwards and said, we gotta talk, we gotta get you on the podcast because that was so good. Can you, do you mind if you remember giving us a quick, quick recap of what you talked about?

Yeah, I'm happy to do it. First of all, that's very kind of you to say because I'm sure you've heard a lot of these talks.

I have and I. And I mean it.

So yeah, in a nutshell, what I did was put what the whole development and all of what we're seeing in generative AI into a little bit of historical context, that this is not just all of a sudden we're seeing this new technology that's going to change the delivery of legal services. It's part of really a long standing trend going back really decades about how lawyers and other kinds of legal professionals are adopting new tools. And so when we started doing this work more than a dozen years ago, the idea was automated legal document assembly and kind of a very well crafted set of questions and answers in a more turbotax like way to create documents. There's been an emphasis on legal project management and process improvement. That design thinking, that's all been going on for a while and so generative AI is really just the next step. But then I kind of pivot and start talking about generative AI and give some use cases and demos and I think that's what really opens people's eyes. People who have not really used these tools in a law related context and there are still quite a few people who have not experimented with these tools. And so I show what these tools can do and of course what they can't yet do. And I think that really opens people's eyes and minds to the possibilities about what generative AI might do for our legal profession and, and in my view will do for our industry.

So are you seeing people really using generative AI in the day to day practice of law yet?

Only in limited ways so far. And I think it is people in my conversations with law firms, because I've been giving these talks at law firms and legal departments, everyone's still trying to figure this out and how they're going to use it, whether they're going to use it and how they're going to use it. So I don't think anyone's figured this out yet. And so I'm really a big fan and I think I may have used this quote at the clock event that from Bill Gates who once said that we overestimate the change that occurs in two years and underestimate how much change there will be in 10. And I think generative AI is exactly that kind of development. I think, yes, it's pretty transformative, but the amount that it's going to change the legal profession in the next two years, relatively limited. But I do think it's going to be transformative in the next ten.

Yeah, that's funny. I use that quote quite a bit myself, so I think that's funny. And my experience has been kind of along those same lines. When there are attorneys who are just so against everything that generative AI is and stands for and you know, just the naysayers, this will never work. And they actually try it. They're the ones who have this, wow, this isn't bad. This is like spell check. This is something that's actually going to help me but not threaten me. But on the other hand, the people who are like kind of have really high short term expectations for it and think this is going to come in, I'm going to pay money for this tool and all of a sudden it's going to make my work so much better and it's going to be like taking, you know, work off my plate, which it does. But they oftentimes come back and say, well, it's not, it can't actually do my work for me yet. So it's not that good. Right. It's that the expectation setting is kind of all over the place and the experiences it really depending on how you're going in with it, what your mindset is really sort of colors they're feeling once they've tried it.

Totally agree. Expectations matter a lot in this context. And I think one problem area related to this issue is that people expect way too much from these tools. They expect perfection, they expect them not to make mistakes. And I think it's really worth emphasizing that you always have to ask, relative to what? Relative to lawyers who never make mistakes, Relative to existing tools which never make mistakes. Or when we're thinking about access to justice, justice and using these kinds of tools to help improve people's access to legal services. Relative to what? Relative to having no help at all. And so I, I think that people have to get out of the mindset of expecting these tools and the technology to be perfect. That should not be the goal. And you know, you see something similar in a, in a different context with self driving cars where people say, well, they sometimes cause accidents. Well, that's not really the right question. The right question is whether they cause fewer accidents than human drivers and whether fewer lives will be lost to driving if we have self driving cars. So I think that's kind of the way we need to think about generative AI and legal services too.

Yeah, I think that's such a good analogy. And so how, going back to the use cases, how are you seeing people actually use this in practice today? And maybe we start with, you know, law firms and then talk about in house too.

Yeah. So I think that right now one of the biggest problems is the confidentiality concerns. And I think this is probably the main, one of the main drivers for why there isn't a lot of usage yet that law firms and in house legal departments are quite understandably telling lawyers not to use these tools because you shouldn't be putting sensitive information in them. And the reality is that even ChatGPT Premium, which I pay for, doesn't tell you that what you put in there is confidential or going to be kept private. So I don't think lawyers really can use these off the shelf tools yet. Now what we're seeing, I think is Westlaw and Lexis, Thomson Reuters obviously purchasing case text. And it seems like people are, you know, we've got Harvey that's out there as well that, that people are using. So to answer your question, I think that at least for lawyers who have access to those kinds of tools, the uses are relatively modest at this point. It might be used to help draft very simple documents, might be used to help draft emails or responses to emails or draft clauses. So I talked with a lawyer the other day who is in the mortgage business in real estate and he was rewriting some of his terms and he used ChatGPT Premium to help rewrite provisions of a common document that he uses. And I thought that those are the kinds of use cases that I've seen so far.

Yeah. On the law firm side, I've often thought, look, they're sitting on such rich data and knowledge, right. Every minute of the day they're pumping out advice and counsel and memos. And if you are able to put a large language model on that and get that out somehow, somehow to your clients and figure out what the business model looks like, that starts to get really interesting. And I was talking, I've been talking to a lot of firms about this idea and kind of how the future is going to look. And someone said to me, well, we've thought about that, but we don't know what data we own and what data the client owns. And so it's hard to figure out what we can train on and what we can't touch. And I thought, ah, that's sort of a light bulb moment for me that I hadn't realized is a bit of a struggle for the law firms and all the data they sit on.

Yeah. Fascinating set of questions. It's somewhat similar to the IP issues that are plaguing this field too. And I think, yes, law firms are going to have to grapple with that. It's much easier for in house legal departments because their data they know they own. So they're probably going to be more capable of using it, at least in the short term. But yes, I think this is going to create a whole set of new legal issues for law firms to grapple with.

Yeah. So what about on the in house side? What are some of the use cases that you've seen actually happen?

So very similar in terms of limited use cases. The actual most interesting development that I've seen in terms of in house counsel is in house counsel asking their outside counsel to use generative AI to help drive down the cost of the services that they render for the company. The most notable communication along those lines is from the general counsel of Ford who sent a letter to his outside law firms, the partners at those firms, asking for them to report to him how they're using AI to help Ford reduce the cost of their outside legal spend. So I think maybe the most interesting use case for generative AI is for law firms to leverage their outside counsel into either finding more efficient ways to deliver their services or maybe we will see the long predicted demise of the billable hour for similar reasons.

God, I hope so. It's been a long time coming.

I know, I remember my days of billing by the 10th of an hour and I do not miss them. And I don't think any lawyer will if we ever move away from it.

Yeah, it's such an interesting time because all the firms, all the firms I talked to, I'm sure the firms that you talk to are all saying that the clients are putting a ton of pressure on them, asking them what they're doing in the AI space and telling them they need to be using AI on their, their work, their matters, their cases. And I guess the question is, are you, are you actually seeing it? I'm not sure I'm seeing it. I'm hearing a lot of firms go back and tell the clients, yes, we've invested, we have all the tools, but is it actually being used on your work and where and how and how are you pricing that? Have you seen that?

No. And that's why when you've asked me the question, both in the in house context and the law firm context, what are the practical examples of lawy using these tools? It's really hard to give you a good answer to that question because I think there hasn't been much in terms of practical use at most law firms and legal departments yet. And I think that's really the critical word is yet. It's very clear to me, in light of what this technology can do, that it's just a matter of time. It's kind of when, not if. And so, you know, we could talk about what I think the use cases are likely to be, but in terms of what they are now, you're right, it's limited. And I think primarily for two reasons. Number one is the very understandable concern about inaccurate information being generated. The hallucination problem, which I think is already getting better for what it's worth. But it's, it's a concern that many lawyers have, I think a very surmountable concern, but it's a concern. And the other one is the confidentiality issue that I mentioned earlier. Until we have good hived off instances of these tools, and there are some that exist, we mentioned, Harv mentioned there's an enterprise version of ChatGPT, for example. I think until we can overcome those two big issues, there is going to be limited use. But I do think both of those issues will be overcome in the not too distant future and that's when we're going to see the various use cases take off.

Yeah, I agree with that. I do want to hear the use cases for the future in your mind. I'll tell you what I'm seeing right now in terms of real life use cases are pretty limited but first and foremost contracting and that is inside a contracting platform. Obviously that is what we at Ironclad do. But pre signature, post signature asking about operational metrics, seeing what you've agreed to within your contracts, negotiating, we are seeing real usage and real ROI on that. And beyond just efficiency, but in sort of insights to things that people weren't able to do before. I think the adoption will be necessarily built into a platform. So the second area that I think we're seeing a lot of use cases in is ediscovery. So ediscovery contract, this is where platform on platforms that people already have in their departments that they're used to working in and that's when the AI is just kind of showing up. So I liken it to, you know, when Gmail first said we're going to finish your sentences for you as you type, which you know sounds creepy and you wouldn't look forward and opt into that but when it just shows up and you try it, it becomes non threatening and helpful and you kind of adopt it. So definitely contracts, e discovery, hearing about some simple chatbots. So a lot of this answering sort of policy questions from your department, you know, what's my spend authority, who, who can sign for this approval and then most recently hearing much more about drafting litigation briefs. So kind of sharing your past ones and seeing if it can make sense of this new case and draft something for you. So that's what I'm seeing so far. But it's, it's changing. You know, every time I have a conversation about AI or write something, I'm like depending on when people listen or read, this might be out of date very quickly. So that's what I'm seeing so far.

Yeah. So I can speculate about some areas that I think are particularly promising. So if we think about litigation and you've got a library of documents for a particular matter, maybe it's lots of discovery, all the pleadings, all the motions and the briefs, we often find ourselves wanting to kind of have either a summary of what did this witness have to say or what's a timeline of the case or what's the timeline regarding X and you'd be able to just prompt the tool to give you that and you'd have it in an instant or if you're writing a motion for summary judgment and you're looking for whether anyone ever testified on some issue to be able to find that. I mean you can use some of the discovery tools for that. But I think that generative AI is going to get even better at it than a lot of the existing tools that are out there. And of course there's going to be the drafting of basic motions and interrogatories. I use a demo where it drafts interrogatories in a basic slip and fall case. And that's just kind of the ChatGPT4. We're going to get to a point where you can upload or have available all of your litigation documents or all the existing pleadings and have it suggest interrogatories and document requests. And I think that can be really powerful on the transactional side. Same thing, you're doing due diligence. You've got all of these documents, you can ask questions of the documents and get a lot of information back, or you've got spreadsheets and lots of financial data and you want to present it in various ways or you want to look for information. You can use generative AI for that as well. So I. And then you get into the, like, the. Even the small ball issue that I was describing before. You're drafting some kind of agreement and you just need some language and you want to look for kind of the best possible approach. You might suggest it and ask the AI to respond and give you some alternate suggestions about how to word it. And I've done that and I found it to be really powerful. I gave a demo at a large law firm recently and they referred me to a very sophisticated publicly available transaction. And they said, well, can you tell me what it would do to revise this type of provision in that contract? So I did it, showed it to them, and they're like, yeah, that's not bad. And that was a pretty high, pretty sophisticated law firm. So I think those. And that was just GPT4. So I do think that there are those promising use cases that are around the corner once we get over the couple of barriers that I mentioned earlier.

Yeah, and once people start experimenting and finding it useful, those use cases will multiply very quickly.

I am finding that in my own case. I mean, I'm using ChatGPT almost every day for something. The things that I used to go and close your ears, Mary, since you used to work at Google instead of going to Google. I use ChatGPT now for a lot. And so I understand why Google has been rushing out Gemini and all of these generative AI tools, because they see that too. They know that once people get accustomed to asking questions of generative AI tools, and they become reliable and can summarize information more quickly than poking around at different websites. It's going to be a game changer. So I think that's going to be true in law firms and legal departments as well. For lawyers that once they realize how good these tools are at saving them time, it's going to be a kind of a switch that's flipped.

Right. So every time that I'm giving a talk or in front of other people and give a similar point of view that you're giving here today, without fail, someone asked the question, well, how will we train our associates? If this is the work that all our junior associates do, how will they become partners? How will what, what will that look like? And you know, you're a dean of a law school. How, how are you thinking about what the law student, young associate of the future will be?

I give this question a lot of thought and, and I can give you a tentative answer and we'll, we'll see if it plays out this way. So off the bat, I can give you the cliche answer. At this point. It's a cliche. Even though this has really only been discussed for about a year, which is that I think the future is not going to be lawyers versus generative AI. It's going to be lawyers who use generative AI effectively versus lawyers who don't. Right. If we believe that, and I generally do think that that's the case, then that kind of suggests certain approaches to legal education. Number one, that we should be teaching our students what I like to call a new kind of issue spotting. So whereas our, when we went to law school, many of us were trained to spot issues like property and contracts and, you know, crim law torts or what have you, and you learn the doctrine, not that you would be able to recall all of that information at some subsequent point, but when you were presented with a client's problem, you would say, ah, you know, this is. Conceptually, I understand this. I'm going to be able to identify what areas of law we need to look at. And so it's at that level now what I think we need to be able to teach students to be able to do is to spot the issue of how to deliver a legal service better, faster, and cheaper. So there, whatever field you go into, whatever area of law you are in, you are going to see what the client's problems are and how your legal department, legal services organization, or law firms delivering that service. You could say, you know what, When I was in law school, I learned that there are certain tools that would enable us to deliver this service to our client better, faster and cheaper. And maybe those tools have changed and they've evolved as they will, but you will have a mindset that better prepares you for the future of legal services delivery. I think that's what law schools need to be able to do effectively. That's part of the answer. The other part of the answer is that I think it's going to be a while, if ever, before AI or generative AI specifically are able to reproduce the very nuanced problem solving and judgment calls that lawyers have to make, or at least the best lawyers have to make. Or that in person counselor role that's, you know, we're called counselors in many contexts for a reason, because I do think there is that function. And I think human clients are oftentimes going to need to talk with their human lawyers and get their best judgment and best perspective. And so I think law schools can't lose sight of that either. We can't just be all about training the new technology. We also have to train what it is that I think is not going to change about the delivery of legal services to. So I think we can do both of those at the same time and should do both of those. And that's going to prepare our students to be as successful in the future as I think they are today.

Yeah. You said something about kind of recall and the knowledge that we sort of try to shove into our own heads. And it's really what lawyers of yesterday sort of pride themselves on. And if you think about what ChatGPT and LLMs can do, that recall kind of becomes not valuable anymore.

Right.

Because you can recall from all sorts of data that's out there in the world. But you're right, it's the actual counseling, it's the issue spotting. It's the problem solving skillset. But you also said something about the mindset shift that really needs to happen. Now, you and I have been in this game a long time. We've been talking about mindset shift as probably the foundational problem. That is where the reluctance or resistance to change in our industry has been in every corner, whether it's in house teams or the law firm's mindset shift needs to change or the law schools need to change. What are we doing to change the mindset? I mean, I know that we are all out there talking and trying to educate folks, but it all starts at the schools.

Yeah, maybe I'll push back a little bit on all starting at the Schools. This has been a long running debate. I think it starts in the marketplace. I think if law firms are looking for a different kind of legal, professional law schools will change. And if corporate legal departments ask of their outside law firms for a different approach to legal services, the law firms will change and then look for law schools that are delivering the knowledge and skills that they need. So I think it's almost a little backwards to say, hey, law schools, you really need to kind of train lawyers with the skills that we need when the legal market hasn't been demanding it. And so I, I, so I think this is a moment, maybe not this year or next year, but again thinking in those 10 year terms where we will finally see a real market change in the market in terms of the knowledge and skills that employers are expecting and that clients really want. So I think that is going to be the biggest driver of all in terms of law schools because then we will, more of us will adapt. Now having said that, we're seeing the beginnings of it already and it's not like it hasn't been there. There certainly has been some market demand and we have seen it at Suffolk because we been ahead of the curve in developing the nation's first legal innovation and technology concentration, for example, more than 10 years ago. And some of our graduates in that program have gone on and are already achieving great success in legal innovation because of the skills that they learned at Suffolk. But it's relatively modest in terms of the overall pie of professional opportunities. But I think that's going to change.

Yeah, I love the perspective, I love the challenge and I do agree with you. And it is so hard to make that change happen because even from the client side, I've seen it been on the client side and worked with in house attorneys who say they want something, but they really don't want something different. And then when I was at the law firm, we would try to be innovative and offer up different models to the clients and the clients would say, now let's just go back to the billable hour. Right. So it's, it's a sort of virtuous cycle that we need to break here somewhere. And what you are doing at your law school has been really unique and innovative, as you said, for over a decade. The program, legal innovation and technology there is. So tell me more about that. There's a specialization, there's a certification. How has it evolved over the years? So interesting.

Yeah, so we've been doing a lot for quite a while. My predecessor as dean, Camille Nelson, had really led the creation of our Legal Innovation and Technology Institute. And I had the good fortune of serving as the inaugural director before my time as Dean, which now is like ancient history. I've been doing this for so long. So this was back in 2013 or so, and Richard Suskin was kind enough to be our keynote speaker. And it was right around that time when we created this concentration that I was describing. And the core course courses were the kinds of classes that you would be hard pressed to find at any law school at that time and still don't find them that often. Legal management and process improvement, automated legal document assembly, design thinking for lawyers, those, those kinds of classes. But then more recently, what we've done is we've invested in this area even more deeply. So, for example, by creating a Legal Innovation and Technology lab directed by two fantastic lawyers, slash computer scientists, really just industry innovators in every way, David Colorusso and Quentin Steinhaus. And what they do is they've created what is, for all intents and purposes, a new kind of law school clinic. So the traditional clinic is one where you represent individuals. Maybe it's an immigration matter or a family law matter or a health law matter. What they do is they represent courts, legal services organizations, and they help them reimagine what they do and help them serve the public more efficiently and effectively through the use of innovation and technology. So, for example, we work with the courts during the pandemic and had an international document pipeline program where we were automated, commonly used legal forms so the public had access to the services that they needed while the courthouse was closed. And at this point we've served thousands of people. And now we've also created a way for those documents to be filed directly into the court. And now we're expanding to other states and we've got grants to be able to do that. Critically, our students who are getting that concentration training that I described are in that clinical program and they're working with these outside organizations. So they're getting hands on experience with the knowledge and skills that they have acquired. So, which is really exciting. And then another example of the work that we're doing is we've created a Legal Innovation and Technology Fellows program. So those traditional clinics that I described, we still have them, but what we do is we embed a student who has the legal innovation and technology training in those clinics to help the traditional clinics reimagine their work. So we're kind of looking at ourselves and say, hey, we're delivering legal services too, and why should we be doing it the way we've always done it, shouldn't we try to update what we are doing as well? And so the students are playing that role. And then we also have had a legal innovation and technology certificate program, which is more external facing, to take some of the knowledge that we've been giving to our students and making it available to the legal profession and the public more generally. So those are some of the big initiatives we've undertaken in recent years.

Now, see, I think you do get a lot of credit for changing the mindset, starting with the law school, because I have to imagine someone who goes through that experience which is very different than let's say some other traditional law school is going to come out. Let's say they join a law firm like everybody else and in their first year they already have the mindset of let's use technology, let's challenge why are we doing it this way. So I have to think that there is something happening early on to start changing the way they're thinking when they get into the law firms and start challenging their experience there.

Yes. Although for the most part we're finding that those students with the specialized training are brought into very specialized roles. Some of them are going into law firms and helping them reimagine their work. But oftentimes law firms are looking for specific people with that expertise and they're out there. But that is, I like to, I think that we are going to see that demand increase significantly and schools like Suffolk and the many others that are doing this kind of work now are going to be well positioned for that future.

Yeah. You and I have talked about how many new titles, new roles, new opportunities there are for those who graduate with a legal degree that didn't exist 10, 20 years ago. There's so many now. And I think we've talked about where students are getting placed. It is not always in a traditional legal practice role. What are some of the roles that you're seeing out there?

So there are a few. Some are going into traditional practice. And where we're seeing it very interestingly is in small firms that where they're not entirely comfortable with technology and they want to hire a recent law school graduate to help them kind of deliver services the way they've always had, but also update what they do. And the same is true in large law firms. Here's a way to think about it and then I'll describe some of the non traditional roles that I see people going into is that I think the traditional model has been that law firms would go out and hire newly licensed graduates to start practicing. And the more senior lawyers in the firm would train the more junior lawyers and help them become acclimated to the profession and become more productive and useful to the firm and their clients. That's the traditional model. What I think is happening now is that I'm hearing more and more law firms saying, we don't really know what's going on here in terms of these new tools. We would love to be able to hire someone who not only can help us in all the traditional ways that's still going to be important, but also can help us think in new ways about how we do that work. And so it's flipping the traditional training model on its head in some ways. So that's not simply law firms training the new lawyers, but the new lawyers contributing to the training of the law firms and legal organizations that they're joining. So I think we're seeing a little bit of that already. But aside from those more traditional roles, we're seeing people take on roles with titles like legal solutions, architect, legal Project manager. We have one of our recent graduates, Vidika Mahera, who graduated about 10 years ago. I think you know her. She heads up Oryx Legal Innovation Lab. And another one of our graduates very early on who learned about automated document assembly, a woman named Julia Rogers was on Shark Tank last year, or a company called hello Prenup. And she got invested. She got two of the sharks to invest in her legal tech company. I think it's the first time there was ever a legal tech company on Shark Tank. And she's been wildly successful. And she credits a lot of the basic concepts for her company from what she learned in law school. So those are just a few examples among a growing number of people using the skill set to find new paths in the legal profession, which is really exciting.

That's so great. Again, so grateful for what you're doing. Why do you think it's still not the norm to have programs like this in every law school? It seems like this is obviously the way things are going in the future. Is it just really hard to change law schools, too?

Well, it is hard. It's hard to find the right people. And we are very fortunate. I mentioned David and Quentin, who are fabulous. We have Gabe Tenenbaum and Diane o', Leary, all these wonderful people at Suffolk who are doing this work, really committed to it. So I think we are also benefited by being in Boston. Right. So we have this ecosystem of innovation and technology. And so I think we have a lot going for us. And not every law school has that opportunity. We're also a very large law school that enables us to invest in a wider array of areas. And I think a smaller law school can. And so it's a little easier for us to be able to pull that off, to be able to invest in a new program and hope it pays dividends. Not every law school, I think, is able to take those kinds of risks. And so I think we've had a lot going for us, some of it fortuitous, some of it being just the right people at the right time. You know, the one strategy that I have found to be useful, and I picked this up from Richard Susskind when he came to give that keynote address that I mentioned earlier. He said something that's really struck with me over the years. He said it can be very useful to create a parallel track of disruption. That is, you don't ex, you don't ask everybody to do something differently right off the bat or even ever, you say, you know what? We're going to keep what we've always done, because that is likely to still be really important for the future. Let's do something over here, let's do some pilots, let's try something new that doesn't require us to reimagine everything that goes on in the law school and see if it's effective. And that's kind of the approach that we've taken over the years. So when I talk about the legal innovation and technology work at Suffolk, it's not like everyone is doing that. I would say it's a small minority of people who are contributing to the legal innovation and technology work. So it's not everyone, and that's fine. I think we should let all flowers bloom because I do think that the future is going to require us to teach many things effectively. But I think that's one way to position it. I think that it can be a mistake to say, hey, we're going to completely change everything in our law school. And that's very hard to do for a variety of reasons. Really risky from, you know, a future perspective is also politically difficult. So I, I, I, I really taken to heart what Richard told me many years ago. And I think it's a really effective strategy.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I also want to learn more about your certification program. So that is open to anyone to take, like not, you don't have to be a law school student, is that right?

Yes. So we have had an online certificate program that's, that has A number of different courses in it. So yes, we've had that for a few years now.

What are some of the courses? Because I, I, we, everyone gets asked all the time, like, I want to get into legal ops. You know, there's all these either attorneys or non attorneys who are interested in legal technology and innovation and they say, is there a certification? Is there a path, Is there a school I should be going to? Is there a book I should be reading? And you know, I never have that great an answer, but there, there are programs out there like yours.

There are. And certainly we're not the only one. There are a lot of people who have created great online programs, including even LLMs, that are preparing people for the current marketplace. So we're certainly not the only ones. But we've had classes in legal ops to your point. Legal Project management, process improvement. So those are an automated document assembly. So those are some of the key concepts and knowledge areas that we've taught in that online certificate program.

And what's the level of investment in time and energy? Like, how long does it take to get through this?

Oh, from a student perspective? Yeah, yeah. I think that if somebody were to max, it's been a while since I've looked at it, but I think the somebody can complete the certificate program in a year. I think under a year. I think that's right. But again, I haven't looked at the timing of when each course is offered in a while.

Okay, that's super interesting. And then I guess the other question I get asked all the time, I'm curious your thoughts is what are the skill sets that you would say the lawyer of the future needs to have in order to be successful? How should they plan?

So I think there is no single answer to that question. I think there are many, still many paths to success, as there always have been. I think that there are some people who are going to be fantastic orators and trial advocates and that's just what they do. And they're not going to be necessarily needing to know a lot of technology. They're just going to be really effective at that skill set and there's still a role for that. There will be some people who are really good negotiators and really understand how to work out disagreements with an opposing party. And there's going to be an important role for that. There is going to be an important role for people who know how to drive down the cost of legal services by doing what they do more efficiently. So I think that when we talk about what knowledge and skills future lawyers are going to need. I don't think it's going to be monolithic. And that kind of goes back to my point about what law schools are doing, that we can't just do it in one particular way. Because I do think that people will still thrive in many different ways in the legal profession. And we need to be giving people the skills they need to pursue those different paths just to rattle them off in no order of priority. Because I think there are lots of skills that people need. Effective oral communication, effective written communication, problem solving, negotiation, effective use of technology. Those are just a small number of skills. You don't have to have them all, but you'll probably need one or more of them. That's the way I like to think about it in terms of what future lawyers are going to need to be able to do well.

And I like what you just said, because those are skills that really today's lawyers need. Maybe yesterday's, maybe not the technology piece, but those are sort of timeless skills and really apply to a lot of different roles. What you didn't say was, hey, you should learn to code. Hey, you should learn to, you know, build apps and stuff. And I think there is some misconception that you do need to learn all that stuff. But I think one of the beauties of generative AI is it actually makes all the tech and tooling so accessible, so human that you can use it all day long and not, I mean, I have very little to no technical skills, so there's a way to get around it.

Totally agree with you. This idea that, you know, there used to be some debate about whether lawyers need to code. I was, was never really in the camp of lawyers need to code. And I think that is more true than ever now. Even though technology is becoming more important, I think the ability to code is becoming less important. One of I love many quotes from Sam Altman, but one of my favorite quotes of his is that the next programming language is going to be English. The idea is that you're not going to need to programming language, you're just going to use your own language to tell a computer what you need it to do. And I think that's the insight here, is that we just need a comfort with technology, not the ability to code. And so that, you know, just as we need to have a comfort with online legal research tools, we need to have a comfort with drafting a document using word processing. You need to have a comfort with doing those things. The same will be true with generative AI. You just need to have a comfort level with it, an important one, but it will need to have it.

Yeah, that's exciting. I hope that's the case. I have a lot of ideas for apps that I would like to build, but I have no dev skills.

It's funny that you say that. I recently put together a custom GPT that's available and it's a legal resource finder. And I. Because one of the areas for generative AI that I thought has been promising in the access to justice arena is just helping people find appropriate resources. You know, Google searches are fine, but they don't always get you where do you need to go? And it can be difficult to use. So just kind of prompted. I created a tool that prompts you what jurisdiction are you in? And then asks you the questions that are necessary to then refer you out to an appropriate resource. So, you know, I. I don't have coding skills. Not since when I used to program my Commodore 6440 years ago. So, you know, I. This was fun for me. I just used English. Yeah.

That's amazing. It's amazing. Love your mindset, Love what you're doing. And again, thank you for everything. And of course, thank you so much for being here today. I learn a ton from you every time we speak, so it's been a real pleasure.

Vice versa, thank you very much for having me.