Loading summary
Transcript230 lines
- [00:01]
Tyson Mutrix
Are you tired of the marketing guessing game? Does your website feel more like a digital billboard than a client magnet? If you're nodding along, you're not alone. And it's time to stop the uncertainty and start getting real results. Let's talk about your marketing spend. Are you just shelling out money every month and crossing your fingers? Do you ever wonder what impact your marketing is really having on your revenue? Well, it's time to take the guesswork out of the equation with Rise Up Media. We've been working with them for over a year and the feedback from our fellow members has been fantastic. Rise Up Media is here to take your marketing to the next level. They'll even perform a full audit of your online presence, giving you the good, the bad, and even let you in on what your competition is up to that you're missing out on. And the best part, there's no obligation, no catch, no pressure.
- [00:53]
Cain
If you decide to work with them.
- [00:55]
Tyson Mutrix
Their contracts are month to month. That's right. No long term commitments tying you down. So what are you waiting for? To learn more about how Rise Up Media can transform your firms, visit riseupmedia.com max law and rise is spelled with a Z. Riseupmedia.com max law.
- [01:20]
Ryan Anderson
This is Maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix.
- [01:30]
Cain
So Cain, I've got a quote from Peter Drucker. It's the best way to predict the future is to create it. And I think this is a really perfect quote to start with when it comes to you because you are the chief legal futurist at filevine. And so I wonder what that quote means to you. The best way to predict the future is to create it.
- [01:52]
Ryan Anderson
So for what we do, I think that if you're working in technology, the best way you can figure out what the future is going to be is certainly by building it and helping to shape how it's going to be built. I think what's most interesting for myself and my team is that what I like to say is that now pixels and code are equally as cheap. So what that means is that not only can you work on building the future, but you can work on building it much faster and bring it there much quicker. But I will say in my own work, I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about historical trends when thinking about what to build for that future. I think that's really important, particularly in a field like law. All of us come in with a lot of training, baggage, other things that we're bringing to the fore, whether it's on the technology side or you're in a firm practicing, or you're in a company corporate accounts, whatever it is you're doing. Everybody in law has a lot of pretty intense opinions about things, and those are usually shaped by some long historical trends, so try to take those into account as well. But it's a really fun time to be building and to be building the future.
- [03:05]
Cain
Give me examples of historical trends that you look at, because that's interesting to me.
- [03:09]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah. So when I think about things like when people ask me about why I'm so interested in the manufacture of our tooling, and what I mean by that is something like, why spend so much time working on something like our document assembly tool? Why are you not that, you know, excited about how far you could take word? For me, that's something like go back to earliest examples of human writing in the west and Mesopotamia, and look at people literally inventing writing in order to create contracts. Yeah, right. We will invent the written word in order to make legal documents. And I think you've got to go all the way from there up to what we have now. And then I also ask myself questions like, why is it that myself or someone in the field would have a preference for paper rather than a PDF? Maybe the answer isn't just that people are being stubborn in their ways, but maybe the answer is we haven't created something that's as efficient as that. And maybe, you know, a PDF isn't that much better than a clay tablet. The example I would give too, on. On that same theme is, so after the printing press emerges in Europe for hundreds of years, people spend time doing things like putting wax on the paper, smearing imperfections into it. You think about, you know, why would you take the energy, time, resources, the investment into doing something like that? And it's because it's giving you some particular feeling that matches a previous experience you've had. So sometimes when we build things that are quite futuristic but people aren't adopting or wanting to use them, the answer could be, well, the users just aren't there yet. But a lot of times it's just the tech hasn't caught up to the past, if that makes sense.
- [04:51]
Cain
Yeah, and it completely does. Give me an example of something that filevine's done that you've connected those where it's. You're connecting the past to the future and you're trying to have that overlap in a way where people are going to want to adopt it.
- [05:06]
Ryan Anderson
So for me, I think that one of the experiences that's been really exciting was to watch with. I'll just stay with our document assembly tool on that to try to give the experience of something that's interactive, that relates back to people's data in a way that's useful, but then also trying to figure out the ways that people actually edit or work with documents. So my favorite example on this one, it's a small thing, but major pet peeve that I saw and other people have been in practicing life would have seen. So I was always very annoyed by the concept of check in, check out with a digital document. The reason I found that really obnoxious was the idea of if you go to a filing cabinet and grab your red. Well, right. And get your file out, nobody else is going to mess with the file at the same time. So it seemed like there's a certain efficiency in everyone having access to the document at the same time. But check in, check out just wasn't the experience. Not the experience too of like you take a piece of paper and let's say you, you just drafted something, you hand it to an associate or paralegal to work on. There's a chain of connection there that's not interfering with the work, but also helps you work with others. I really love this idea of just checking in and out a section that I'm working on because that's usually what people are doing where I've asked somebody to check out something. Like I asked Emily on my team to look at a contract for us. She's Recovering attorney of 16 years and I really want her to focus on a few clauses in there, not the whole thing. Or go into the finance section where I'm going to put the finance team on or something like that. That kind of experience. I think there's no replacing bringing in experience of either having worked in or around the domain and then what users say back to you and what other people say back to you. And some things, like I said, that are very, feel very tangible and physical, even if it's about digital objects.
- [07:00]
Cain
Yeah, that's interesting. What's it like working with lawyers both as co workers and also as customers?
- [07:05]
Ryan Anderson
Rough, man, rough. Rough. Yeah, it's not for everybody, for sure. I think that I like it because I'm a very, I would say, high demand person myself and what I expect of myself and my team and things. And there is, let me put it two ways. If you're not ready for it, there's nothing more shocking than feedback you will get from attorneys as clients. And you will see this across legal tech. It's Nothing particular to filevine. Everybody I know in the legal tech space, if they haven't been around law before, they're freaked out by it. But there's nothing also so direct of you're not going to have any. There aren't a lot of times when we're guessing about the opinion of our users on a particular thing we do. I mean, even things where there's a certain shade of like a color in an update, we do. And I'll be honest, the way my brain works, I probably didn't notice it. The design team did. They thought about it long and hard of why to do it. I probably didn't see it, but I will hear about it. So recently, Chris Smith, who's a principal developer on my team, he was doing something on a landing page for us that had kind of a. A green that was tilting back and forth out like. So if you looked at it from it's like Mona Lisa kind of view it gave you. So if you looked at it one side, you thought it was kind of a blue hue. Looked at it the other side, you got this, what we call internally Filepine, this green that's everywhere on our stuff right now.
- [08:27]
Cain
It's a funny name. I hadn't heard that one.
- [08:28]
Ryan Anderson
Okay, so man alive, did we get reactions on that where, I've got to be honest, like, I saw it, thought it was cool, but didn't really think because it was a header and also not part of the work product.
- [08:38]
Cain
Sure.
- [08:38]
Ryan Anderson
Usually I'm. My focus is elsewhere, but so I would say it's very intense, very direct feedback. There's an interesting distribution, I would say, but not a lot in the middle between attorneys you work with that are hyper analytical in the way they respond and do things, or hyper emotional and the emotions are the raging part or the analytical part.
- [08:59]
Cain
Sure.
- [09:00]
Ryan Anderson
But I think people lean on one side or the other pretty heavy. It's not usually a mixes, I think. I think it's something of whatever you figured out is your particular trait that makes you good. Especially with litigators. You see that, right? Like litigators that will. People lean on their strength and it will go one side or the other, whether it's rhetorically leaning into a lot of emotion or, or, you know, a lot of analytical vigor that they have in responses. But I think it's the best thing you could be doing for a couple reasons. One is because what's going on in law right now is just fascinating. There's more action, attention, everything going on in legal tech now than in the last 10 years, there's more investment, there's new people coming in. A lot of them will give out. So you, you see that too in legal tech. Someone gets in and says, I got a great idea for legal. They never worked around law. I usually give it three to five years.
- [09:56]
Cain
Right.
- [09:56]
Ryan Anderson
Or companies just get tired and stop moving and stop innovating. But yeah, I can't think of a better spot within tech to be working on, especially right now.
- [10:05]
Cain
Yeah. It is interesting what you said about the feedback that lawyers give you. A lot of people could view that as a negative, but that's something you view as a massive positive because you, I mean, you're getting that constant feedback. It's a feedback loop that you're getting. Whether it's like. I'll give you an example. I hated the first color of filevine. That color, the color scheme sucked. It was awful. You all finally fix. It was great. But people are going to tell you that stuff.
- [10:27]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah.
- [10:27]
Cain
And so, you know, to iterate and iterate and iterate until it gets better.
- [10:30]
Ryan Anderson
So I have to say, as a CIO at a firm, the Bob file line, I didn't like that color either. I didn't like the fonts either. And I made sure as a client to tell them. And I probably notice more as a client than. Than, like I said, when I'm building something now, it's also maybe because there are other people focusing on that part. But yeah, I think there are different people who are. Who are sometimes looking for different types of things and feedback. The way I take it is, is this way, I think, at 5. And we try to cultivate the attitude of we're serving legal professionals. Well, Legal professionals have to cultivate a certain way of responding and hearing their clients. I've never heard of any of our clients saying our clients are always quiet and soft and never ask us for an update on the case and never go hard about how they're feeling about. So we're trying to match the level of the people we're trying to serve. You know, people on our platform, they have high expectations they set for themselves and try to meet those. We try to run as hard as our clients. So that's what I like about it. Because then there's no separate setting of standard, because I think in legal tech, you've got to go as hard as the clients if you want to stay with it. So it makes a really clear example of how hard are we going to go today? We're going to go as hard as our clients. And most of Them are kicking it hard. So that's what I like about it. There's a match there. If you can find a way to match that energy, it's really good. If that's not for you, go to marketing tech or do something about it. If it's not your style to grind, I probably wouldn't do legal tech.
- [11:59]
Cain
Yeah. Are there times where you've had the customers on one side demanding for something, whether it's a feature or whatever, and then on the other side, you knowing listen the text not heading that way, you don't want that. And here's why. X, Y and Z. Have you encountered that yet where the way that the people wanted to go, it wasn't necessarily the right way to go ultimately.
- [12:20]
Ryan Anderson
So I've seen that several times. The most interesting one, though, for me is also too. I think one of the things that you find is, and I think everybody finds this in any, you know, industry where you're serving other people. But it comes up a lot in legal tech where I will get back feedback, where I'll say, am I supposed to split the difference? Because half the clients are vehement that this is the only right way to do something and half of a group wants to see it another way.
- [12:46]
Cain
So do you? Do you split the difference or what's the answer?
- [12:49]
Ryan Anderson
No. I think we can build better tech when we do it in an opinionated way. And I think that most of the clients, if I talk to them and try to explain why a certain thing is done a certain way, it's not that they're going to agree with me necessarily or. But they're going to value the fact that I put my judgment into it and tried to steer it in the direction that I thought was right. And that will be more appreciated than tried to appease people by building something generic to fit. That usually doesn't make for good tech. And I think those experiences then are pretty lackluster. So usually what we try to do is listen to the feedback. If there's a place where we have to iterate, we do that as many as we have clients. Usually those clients sometimes themselves have two or three opinions about everything. And then in the organization too, I would say another thing that we've done which is matching the energy of our clients is we go pretty hard for debating internally about those items. So if you have a culture that's really accepting of the idea that a lot of people are going to take different positions on things, we're going to go after it, we're going to bring those conflicts out into the open and work with them that way instead of saying, well, I think this particular faction within the company likes it. This design group said they really like this flow, you know, and the group working in development said this flow will work better with the infrastructure. And this group, it's okay if everybody has different positions, but they've all got to come out. And we try to bring those conflicts out and go after each other with them and then keep going the next day. And so that's another thing too, that we try to bring people into the culture of the place of saying, we're going to argue this out in the same way the clients would argue it out with us about what we should do. And then we're going to try to make our best estimation about what we should be doing or how we should do something. But an example of, you know, there are also plenty of things we want to do where the tech isn't there and we have to, you know, find another way to do something or we have to wait till we can do something. So those kinds of things, too exist where you, you know, when you're talking about building the future now, there are also things we'd like to build tomorrow that if we did, they would be a mess.
- [14:57]
Cain
So can you give me some examples?
- [14:59]
Ryan Anderson
Sure. I got a good one for you, actually. So last time we met in person was at mastermind in St. Louis, so. Or maybe we saw one another there. Lex, did we there?
- [15:08]
Cain
I think it was at the conference. Yeah, it was at the conference in St. Louis. Yeah.
- [15:11]
Ryan Anderson
Okay. So at that event in St. Louis, we were working on a voice assistant.
- [15:15]
Cain
Oh my gosh. I'm glad because I would. I've wanted to know about this for so long because it poof, gone. It was disappeared.
- [15:23]
Ryan Anderson
The search by voice. Here's an example, though. So search by voice worked very well in the background. I had from be nasty here for some of the listeners, but it was insurance defense background when I was a cio, so. Yeah, yeah, I know. So boo. It helps me to know a lot of our client base very well.
- [15:42]
Cain
You ever been booed on a podcast before? Is it be the first one? No.
- [15:45]
Ryan Anderson
Normally I'm just doing applause for myself in the background. So here's what happened. Worked very well from the background I'm from, where every case had a distinct number when you're doing a lookup. So 4965.1327. Great. For voice search, Smith vs Jones, with repeated repetitions of the same names getting the wrong Case all the time. The search was not ready then. Do I think that will still be coming out in, you know, the near term future with what we have access to now? Yes, but at the time, an absolute failure there. I felt burned over and over by that. Chris, my developer and I think about that one probably monthly or weekly, but those are the things that push us forward. And then we. We should have found that earlier and we did not.
- [16:34]
Cain
That was so funny because we. So Ryan did so. Those of you don't know, Ryan Anderson, the CEO of. He does the demo on stage. They. It's like an exclusive announcement. You know, we talked about on the show a couple times. I go back and tell my team about it and they're ecstatic. And then nothing. And they were like, well, what happened? And I. It was funny because I had a certain point, forgotten about it until a couple months ago and I was talking to someone, I was like, wait a second, whatever happened to that feature? And now I.
- [17:01]
Ryan Anderson
Because, like, now I know I can't forget about it. It burns me all the time. But there are things like that though too, where the tech isn't there for what you want to do or you discover something in the way clients will be using it that is just not the same as you were planning.
- [17:15]
Cain
Yeah. So I don't know if I have a great definition for chief legal futurist. I've got an idea as to what it is, but I want to hear it from you. What does that mean? I don't want the actual. I don't want like the formal job description. Like, what do you do? Like, what's the point of the position?
- [17:31]
Ryan Anderson
So there are a couple things. So one is I run a Skunk Works team inside of FileVinds. So anybody listening who doesn't know about Skunk Works, the idea is to have a smaller company within the company essentially that can innovate really fast, build new things, and then hopefully push all those learnings to the rest of the organization. So as an example, over the last two years, my team was building out immigration AI. Well, the great part about that is when my team is building out that tool first, it's a smaller group so we can move really fast. You are not going to move really fast necessarily or at the same speed, I should say with the platform that has 70,000 daily users, we can't just change something up and release it like that. When so many people look at Five Line as their infrastructure for their daily work, we can do that when we have a smaller team. That's Rolling something out and the impact radius can be smaller. So first we build things. The other part of my job that's not necessarily job description, but I think the way it's been described to me, and now I've adopted this as a kind of self description, is to be a perpetually dry sponge. So another big part of my job is to watch everything going on, both in legal technology, but beyond legal tech. A lot of the best ideas for legal tech just come from other spaces where people are doing things. So a lot of my day is making sure I'm up to date on everything going on in the domain and space so I can give new ideas, fresh looks to our development team, to the product team, to anybody who's working on a different item, keeping track of what's going on in our space, and also acting as a kind of bridge between different teams. So I do a bunch of speaking on behalf of file line and going to events and have ear to the ground. So listening to our users, listening to our potential users, listening to the industry and what's going on and then building things out. And the other big part is having a really high tolerance, just like we were talking about, for failing at things.
- [19:35]
Cain
Sure.
- [19:36]
Ryan Anderson
So most of the stuff our team tries first will fail and then it takes a long time to iterate things out and make systems that are working and processes that will work and then work for the rest of the organization. So take those things together and then find a way to communicate them to others.
- [19:54]
Cain
Are you trying to predict the future?
- [19:55]
Ryan Anderson
Predict is a strange word for me to think. I think I have some very good ideas of what will happen in the next three to five years, not beyond that.
- [20:04]
Cain
The point of the Drucker quote is I wonder if you're trying to create the future, if you're trying to predict the future or somewhere in between, maybe.
- [20:11]
Ryan Anderson
Somewhere. What I would say is this is there's some kind of line between those two where you can decide what you think the future looks like and start building it. But there's got to be some kind of another line where you have to know where things are going to your earlier point to say this isn't a direction where we'll take things because things are moving in a different direction.
- [20:32]
Cain
Do you ever worry about when you're studying the current industry, what it's doing, what's not doing, that you can get stuck in sort of a silo where you start doing what other people are doing?
- [20:43]
Ryan Anderson
Yes. So this is one reason, like I said, that a lot of the attention is spent on what else is going on in technology. I think if you look at just at what others are doing, I mean, this applies to legal tech as everything else I've seen in life. There's very little you can actualize that's the best representation of what you can do if it's just repeating a pattern by someone else. Because as you would know with your practice and whatever anybody's doing, if you don't take the best parts of yourself, your organization, whatever it is your skill set is and put that into your vision of the future, it's not going to come out that well. If I try to pull off what someone else has done just as a copy of that, it not only rings as inauthentic, but it's just not a very. It's not the highest quality it can do. Right. So you've got to be able to combine those pieces and know organizationally, what are we really good at? Can we execute on that? But just pattern following, I don't think it leads to very good outcomes, but I think that's for legal tech, for life, for other things.
- [21:45]
Cain
I'm very curious about if there's ever a clash between the work that you're doing, where you think something should head, and then maybe where, you know, the leadership team for filevine, which, I mean, I think you would technically be considered part of leadership. Right. But you're like, you're in this interesting position, I think. So let's, let's take you out of it. So let's assume for a second leadership team is the leadership team minus you. Okay. And there's a vision for the company. Is there any. Every clash between the things that you're doing, where you think things might head, and then the vision for the company as a whole.
- [22:21]
Ryan Anderson
So clash wouldn't be the way I would look at it or phrase it not just as like a nicety to colleagues or something. But I would say the nature of the position and what I do means that I'm always trying to push at everyone to go harder, harder and harder, especially on new things that are happening in possible tech. And I think there's, you know, within any organization, there are people who may feel like a direction looks different or something. Like I said, one of the ways we work with that is just by having it all out in the open. So, yeah, there are conflicts about what way you think something's going and someone else may see it going a different way. We bring all that out and try to, you know, bring facts to bear on it. But Some of it's also intuition and fight it out. I think that the company, it's fair to say, is really unique in having invested in my position and the team I have. Not everybody does that. And one of the things I've seen in legal tech, and this is no criticism of colleagues, but just continuing your earlier theme, it's always a worry in legal tech because your clients are so difficult. The company starts to just focus on, like, protective mechanisms. So I say that if you want to watch a legal tech company die, you watch them get very protective about avoiding the interactions with the clients and just becoming a hardened shell, right? But the innovation and the inside, that kind of kills that, right? So five line's pretty unique. You know, Ryan Anderson, you mentioned Ryan, our CEO, he pushes as hard or harder than anybody I know and wants to bring that conflict out. And the whole leadership team, we have adopted that as our style. But people always have different opinions about stuff. But what I want to push on the hardest always is I want to push harder and harder for what ways do new tools that I see that become available do one of two things, basically, I try to boil stuff down to one, is does it make it easier to use stuff? Because in my experience, one of the most expensive parts of all legal work is apprenticeship, right? You get a new person on your team. You know, people feel like Sometimes it takes five, 10 years to really get settled in a firm and know what's going on, know it inside and out, right? This is why I think all of us in our legal lives, you become so attached to the people you work with, because that's. That's almost an embedded sense somebody has. Like you have a team member gets in a new case, right? You can always, you know, run it to a partner to check on whether the case is the right fit. But if you've had somebody working on the team, they'll have that same kind of intuition, you know, the knowledge in their bones. So if something makes our tech easier to use or more intuitive for the users, I'm really keen on that. Because lowering apprenticeship in legal ultra valuable makes work and outcomes better for everybody. And then also so that there's the ease of use component. But the other thing driving it too is, is there something that we can do that may raise standards or help outcomes? Because at the end of the day, you know, all of our clients, all they care about is outcomes for their clients. It's just a cycle like that. You know, it's one. One level separated, but they're tied together. So if it's making the practice somehow better. And there are a million different ways people define that depending on their practice and what they're doing. But those two things are kind of. We're always looking for that kind of thing to drive. So I think conflicts or disagreements we have of what way we may take something. It's always rooted in the same value of okay, but it has an objective where we're trying to go for the same thing.
- [25:57]
Cain
Sure. I'd love to hear about your process for idea generation and then implementation, because they are different. Just because you have a bunch of ideas doesn't mean you're going to implement them. I'd love to hear about what your process is for those both of them, because they're going to be different. So idea. Maybe, I think so. Idea generation and then implementation. So I'd love to hear that because I do think it might be helpful for law firm owners in their practice areas.
- [26:25]
Ryan Anderson
So. And I have a kind of a couple rules for thought on this too, so if you. I'll. I'll share that as well. So I share that with my team. Like, anybody who joins my team the first day, they kind of get some prescriptives from me for this kind of thing.
- [26:38]
Cain
And real quick.
- [26:38]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah.
- [26:39]
Cain
Is the team sort of walled off? Like, do they have, like, special rules where, like, they're. They can do. They can go a little bit farther with things?
- [26:45]
Ryan Anderson
Yes.
- [26:46]
Cain
Okay. Okay. Okay.
- [26:47]
Ryan Anderson
We can try stuff knowing that it's not going to. Because our team, if. If we're trying something, building something new, we may try it in, you know, 30 different ways till we decide that the 31st was the way we think it's looking. And then we can give the results of those 30 different ways back to the rest of the team and say, Here are the 30 ways we thought it failed. The 31st was how we thought it was cooking. You know, use that information as you see fit. So what I tell the team is, number one with good ideation at the center of my work is no idols. And by idols, I mean you can't have any dedication to the way you've done something before. To say that that's going to be the criterion for being successful this time. You may learn a lot of tricks on the way. And we have. And we've had a lot of really amazing stuff. We've done way more than that. We've had a lot of stuff we failed with. And you learn all kinds of things, but it can't be the criterion for starting out with the same over and Over. So no idols, especially idols, like addictions to ways you've done stuff before.
- [27:51]
Cain
So what are some red flags that you see where those pop up? You're like, okay, stop saying it that way. Quit asking that question. Whatever.
- [27:58]
Ryan Anderson
Maybe you start doing a project plan and you start with a write up where to use a term we all know from legal. You see the boilerplate being overused. Right.
- [28:06]
Cain
Okay.
- [28:07]
Ryan Anderson
Did I look at the facts of this particular situation anew? Right. So I always tell team, I think it's. I think it's Richard iii. There's the quote from Shakespeare that says, you know, Ida Rye renders form. Got to cock your head sideways and look at it a different way. So this is the idea that always look at something with a different perspective. You got to keep tilting your. Especially when you've seen the same things over and over. Yeah, as an example, super boring example, but one that's useful. A lot of databases look exactly the same on the back end listeners. You don't need to know anything about databases to understand this example. You'll know it from fact sheet you put together about a case. Same idea. I've seen this MVA a thousand times. I know exactly where that intersection is. I know why they're smacking right there. I know exactly what's going down. In fact, I even know what the likely path is for the meds, for the treatments and outcomes. I've seen it a thousand times. Right, we see that in tech too. The database with different structures. And I'm always telling my team, look sideways, tilt your head, look again, check if anybody else has done anything different. What's going on? Have we really read through that and found that it's the same? We may find it's the same thing, but you should be sure by looking at it sideways.
- [29:17]
Cain
What's an example of something that you've looked at it sideways and you said, oh, that's not what we thought it was.
- [29:22]
Ryan Anderson
Okay, so on this database example, you know my colleague Zach Brenner on the team. So Zach and I have known each other for over a decade. Zach is by training a CPA and an expert in legal finance.
- [29:35]
Cain
Oh, interesting.
- [29:37]
Ryan Anderson
So he and I came up around the same time. So we had some of the same prejudices about how the databases we were going to use, what was going to be the time frame for processing things with them? Well, we start trying to solve for these difficulties we think we're going to encounter, and we're prescribing ways to deal with. This is a simple example, but it's it's summarizing a bunch of records in advance is basically what we were trying to work on so that people weren't waiting on reporting results. Well, it turns out in the intervening time, there were plenty of different companies out there, some of them very well established, that had fixed some of these things. And if we were only looking for what was the real state of the art with the database, we wouldn't have been trying to pre solve for a problem that was no longer there. A good lesson you learn every day, right?
- [30:24]
Cain
Yes.
- [30:25]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah. So that's the first thing, is those no idols. Don't think that just because we've done it a prescribed way before and that worked, it'll work again, or it's the right way to approach it. The other thing I do, and I would tell the team to do this, I tell your listeners to do this, which is get away from a blank page like the screen blinking at you. And I spend a hell of a lot of every day on a screen. Do not let that blank page look at you in the face. Get away from it somehow. Whether that's. I use a remarkable tablet. I don't know if you've ever seen this.
- [30:57]
Cain
Yeah, I've got a remarkable.
- [30:58]
Ryan Anderson
If it's that, that can get you out of the stuck place. If it's a piece of paper, it's a whiteboard, whatever it is. I think getting something tactile in your hands first, doing it, then go draft what your plan or idea is. You want to run a new marketing campaign. Get yourself away from the screen first, away from looking at just what else you've seen that excitement like an example. So if we stay with the marketing campaign idea, you see somebody else, another attorney's video in a particular space, you're like, man, God, that was good. I gotta go do that. I need to make that happen for my firm. Well, I usually think that the better thing to do is at that point, step away from the screen, start thinking, ideating somewhere else. Like I said, preferably with something tactile, get your hands involved, other parts of your body, or even, you know, dictate to your machine whatever it is. Sure, that works for you, but get out of a blank beeping screen at you that has nothing. That's like an abyss. It just seems to kill human creativity at its best. Get away from that, sketch something out. Even if you're a horrible sketch artist, guess what? Nobody else has to see it. Yeah, you can leave that for yourself. Go out, sketch something about what you want that plan to look like what you're thinking. What would be your unique riff or contribution to do that? Try that first. Then go sit down and start dropping the emails to your marketing team. Dropping the emails to your colleagues who might have creative content pieces. But get away from the machine first. Then go back to it and go execute on it.
- [32:21]
Cain
Yeah, I wonder what your thought is on this. So I was listening to Andrew Huberman a while ago and it's Rick. I think it was. Rick Rubin was on it. I think that's his name. The music guy.
- [32:29]
Ryan Anderson
The music producer. Yeah.
- [32:31]
Cain
So he was talking about how something he likes to do and I actually like doing this too. I like to do it a. At bedtime. It's not a great way to fall asleep. But when you lay there. So it works best for me when I'm laying down. But you lay there and you let you instead A lot of people like when you're trying to sleep, people try to close off the thoughts instead follow the thoughts. So you go from one thought to the next thought to the. And it could get wild. That's why I love it so much because it gets. You start getting some crazy things. So I wonder what. What your thought is on that or like if you have anything similar that you do where you just let the ideas flow.
- [33:04]
Ryan Anderson
I try to not have a capstone that finishes the thought flow that makes sense. Like so if I say I'm trying to do a certain thing for clients, really a less effective way to do it, I think is to back yourself into the solution. Because then you're trying to solve for something. Just like I was saying with the database thing. Trying to solve for something where I have an end state that I think I know rather than. Can I push that end state even further?
- [33:29]
Cain
Yeah.
- [33:30]
Ryan Anderson
So the flow of thoughts, that's something that's either, you know, my greatest talent or one of the greatest evils inside of my brain that's going all the time. But what I try to do is not have like a capstone achievement item that I think is the end goal. Doesn't work really well in software. There are physical objects that I think you can tweak and work on to perfection. Have you seen a beautifully, you know, hand carved table? The end state. Like you can achieve that with software that should always be evolving with our client base dreaming up the end state beforehand. I don't think it works that well. Like we have intermediary ideas of what's going on. But it's always gotta be with the idea of that this is iterative Someday this too will die. Like it's, it's not the end state. So it's a kind of unavoidable human thing if you want to see a destination in front of you and like where you're going to get. But on our team we try a lot to say there are intermediate stops we get to. It's like driving with my Ev. Yeah, I'm gonna get somewhere and charge up again.
- [34:29]
Cain
Sure.
- [34:30]
Ryan Anderson
But I'm not stopping there. Keep going.
- [34:32]
Cain
How do you capture ideas from the team? So you, I mean you've got lots of ideas, but how do you, how do you capture those ideas?
- [34:38]
Ryan Anderson
The best way to do it is try to capture people in whatever their native form is. So I have team members who they really gotta verbalize and talk it out.
- [34:48]
Cain
Yeah.
- [34:48]
Ryan Anderson
Got other team members who have to show something. Zach that I described on the team, his, I guess native language, if you want to say is a spreadsheet. Emily on the team, who's an attorney, I can tell you a spreadsheet is not her native format. Hers is in a write up and a document, basically like a brief on her idea about something. Chris, who's the developer on the team, his will be in something he just tried in code. So you got all different ways that people try to express themselves. If you capture people in their native tongue, whatever that may be, get their love language, pick whatever kind of, you know, metaphor linguistic thing you want to do, you can get more for them rather than, I think a lot of people when they start, they get in a role where they're leading other people, they really want to. It's. I don't, I don't think this is not something like sinister about it, but it's really easy to get in a format where you get people to start feeding you in the way you ingest. So I think because I'm really a written word person and I think like if I thought about my ideal state of just, you know, write ups just flowing to me, but it's not the way to capture the best out of different people. You get like, you got to listen to where, you know, if they're in their moment and that's when they communicate best. Try to capture it from that.
- [36:01]
Cain
Yeah, that's a great point because I've had, we've had, you know, employees or I mean even other people in general, like vendors or whatever where like they'll convey something to us. It's an idea and it sounds amazing, right. But then you get some sort of written document where they clearly, that's not their medium. And it's like, well, this isn't, this isn't the idea or. And I've even had it where like in my head it's one thing. I've told it to people. I've put it down in something, either a spreadsheet or a document or in a PowerPoint. They're not seeing my vision for it like they're. What they're seeing is something completely different. So that's, that's an interesting point about how to. And not what you said about not forcing them to give it to you.
- [36:43]
Ryan Anderson
In the way you. Because I found myself wanting to do that of being like, can you give me a write upon.
- [36:48]
Cain
Give me a memo or something.
- [36:49]
Ryan Anderson
Exactly, yeah, yeah. And if they're a person who really gets their best ideas out verbalizing to you, you're not going to capture that. So what we try to do is when we put together. So we have a style for team meetings that essentially in our daily standups, different groupings of the team, they each lead a different daily stand up. And we try to give everybody the ability to do that, put it in front of the rest of the team and then we can all drill through the translations of. Can you explain this to me in my world?
- [37:20]
Cain
Yeah.
- [37:20]
Ryan Anderson
What does this mean? Because you've got to give everybody that opportunity too to see if, if they can bring that alive for the rest of the team. Some people, like, just like we were talking, they won't see a vision on a spreadsheet. I rarely do. If I talk through the vision coming from the spreadsheet and reinterpret it in my way, then we can get there. So yeah, when you look at our team folders, they're full of this. Like, you know, you can tell who wrote which document.
- [37:45]
Cain
Sure.
- [37:46]
Ryan Anderson
And it's better if people stay in that language and then, you know, I can act as a translator between them. The rest of the team can translate. And also too, when people go through that act of translating good ideas, they will have their own contribution that that translation provides. I'll give you an example. So in graduate school, so I went to grad school in Europe and one of my favorite things that we had was a course that's called a Translatorium. And what it means is that you have an original text. So let's say the original text was in German. Everybody's got the original text in German. And then everybody in the course brings in variants of that text in translation with languages they know. So maybe there's somebody who knows Italian. They Bring in an Italian translation of the text. Somebody else. So I bring in an English version or a Polish version or something. Somebody else brings in a version that's in Turkish and Russian. And what happens is when everybody's reading through what they've gotten out of translation, that's the like highest level of understanding I think you can get to. So what I think about for our team documents is it's kind of like a transitorium seminar. Right. Like everybody's bringing their ideas and their native tongue and going through the translation process. That's where other people get their ideas sparked and they see some kind of insight they didn't see before. So that's how I think about it.
- [39:10]
Cain
What do you think about email?
- [39:11]
Ryan Anderson
I really dislike it email. For me there's a couple things email now has. Well, let's say that a lot of people view to email very differently, especially depending on age. And I'm, you know, I learned that more and more at work as younger and younger colleagues come in, email has a strange quality right now of both representing something official and totally non official communication at the same time.
- [39:38]
Cain
Yeah.
- [39:39]
Ryan Anderson
So it's kind of like, you know, your mail room also became a spam room. I find it overload and difficult to place at the right register now. Sure, I'm not as comfortable always with texting as some of my younger guys. I text all the time. But I would always like to pick up the phone too. I still feel like that that works for me and using the human voice is like the best what I will tell you. So I do have a thought on where the tech is pushing us with that.
- [40:06]
Cain
Because that's where I'm headed. I want to know.
- [40:09]
Ryan Anderson
So I think that when we start moving from just the first experiments and exposures people have had with AI right now to where there is content coming every which way from AI with agentic workflows. And we can talk about that if you want.
- [40:25]
Cain
I don't know what an agentic workflow is.
- [40:27]
Ryan Anderson
What is. So, so imagine that you have like, let's say instead of deploying a particular person to like go through and do the first round of emails on collections calls, let's say, yeah, outstanding bills, you've got some accounts receivable outstanding. You got to get somebody in there to do the collections. Everybody's been through that, done it. Instead of just deploying the person to write that first round or second round or third round, you deploy an AI agent that's going, looking where do we have that ar? How outstanding is it? Maybe if it's anything over, you know, 30 day threshold, whatever it is you tell the AI to do, it goes out, drafts that, but not just drafts it, it goes and sends it. So that's why it's called agentic, because instead of just the experience a lot of people have had so far of, you know, chatting back and forth with an AI or getting results back from an AI, we're talking about it taking actual actions and you have like an.
- [41:23]
Cain
Agent doing things, sort of AI agent driven workflow flows.
- [41:27]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah. So when, when this comes and it's coming fast and it's coming everywhere in, in filevine and everything else conceivable when that happens and you get an absolute overload on the email because people will be using these to draft things back and forth. I think there's going to be a lot more focus on what are things we can do to rehumanize contact, especially with clients. Like I think the phone call will actually, it'll mean a lot more because you'll have an overload of those kinds of community. And I, you know, I had an exchange at an event and with an attorney who said, you know, a big part of what I do is the emails that are going back and forth. What is my role if there's an agent on the other side? So let's say you're on a plaintiff side firm.
- [42:13]
Cain
Okay.
- [42:14]
Ryan Anderson
Okay. And the claims examiner adjusters got an AI agent writing back to you and you've got an agent on your side writing back and forth. Right. He said, well then what is my role? I said, but maybe that suggests that the most important part of your role isn't in those emails. Like not, it's not, it's not happening there. Right. So my thought is not sure you should be adjudicating your value there. Right. Like I'm not sure that that's giving the outcomes you may think it is. So I think people are going to become way more invested in human contact because the, I mean even the level now we have with automated messages and things going back and forth is already kind of atrocious and people are overloaded. This, this is just tip of the iceberg with that.
- [42:56]
Cain
Yeah, it's not sustainable with the volume of emails we get on a daily basis, whether it comes to court notifications or client emails or like it just, you name it, I mean, just, it's not sustainable. I do wonder, the AI, the agentic workflows, how is that different? I kind of got the idea and maybe it's just the fact that the AI is doing a little bit quote unquote thinking. It's not thinking, but you know what I mean, processing. Where. How is it different from like a decision diamond and a some sort of automation software where certain factors are met and then these things are done based on that decision diamond. How is the agentic workflows different from that?
- [43:33]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah, so I think the difference is. So with some of those automations you're talking about, so they are, like I said, they can, they need to be very, you know, determinate and predetermined in order to function.
- [43:46]
Cain
And the agentic.
- [43:47]
Ryan Anderson
And the agentic can have that wiggle room space where we don't have to grant a cognition or worry that we're in some kind of sci fi movie exactly yet. But, but there is some kind of room for giving descriptors that are not perfectly aligned with whatever it finds in a dark. You know, that space is really, it's really valuable because it is that threshold of something that looks certainly a lot like intelligence, behaves certainly a lot like intelligence. And I've told people before, you can think there's a really magnificent difference between wetware in your head and hardware in a machine. If you can't tell on the basis of response whether it is or not, maybe that's not where the value really lies. So being able to ask a question to a machine like a lot of people have gotten really, there's been a lot of coverage in legal tech and legal tech press and elsewhere about generative AI, let's say in the last two years, and people getting obsessed with the idea of hallucinations. There are a couple of things I'd.
- [44:48]
Cain
Say tell people I know what hallucinations are. Tell people if they don't know what those are. Sure.
- [44:52]
Ryan Anderson
So hallucination is some kind of fabrication by a generative AI system in response to a question or query. It's getting where it's essentially making up information. So there's been a lot of focus on that. I do think if you're someone working in legal research, it's a very serious question. It's a big deal. It's a big deal in that space. Right. But one of the reasons it's more of a big deal is because what's happening with AI and agentix systems like we're talking about is it's changing the interaction with the tech, that's one of the bigger adjustments. So if you talk about like historically standard database, you do a lookup, you're gonna get the answer. The answer in there, that's the only source, you know where it's coming from, you know that that's that end state. You're expecting to get the same thing over and over again. If you're using something like generative AI, you can get different responses every time. You have to be careful of not doing a bunch of anthropomorphic kind of talk where you say like the AI is lying to you. No, it's not like I promise it doesn't care or have feelings about it. It's not, it's not like that. But it's trying to find an answer maybe where it doesn't have one. So it's creating one. And so there's a lot of people focus a lot. I don't know that that's actually where legal is going to get the biggest values from the generative piece. There is a lot of value there. But I think things like quality control, you get a lot of value there where you can say, you know, when I expect this information coming in, I want to see something between, you know, these parameters or something very vague that's helpful for checking what's going on. Like an email comes into the system, I want it to check if like there was a court order for an appearance there. I'd like the machine to read through and be able to not have to find a particular word or phrase or the address it came from to know that that concerns that, but to be able to use pretty vague parameters I've given. So this kind of interaction that's more fluid with machines, that's the part that's making a lot of people either upset about results they're getting or, or worried about it in other ways because that kind of interaction feels more like interacting with other people. Also the other thing I'd say is like everybody's been there. As a first year associate, you made up some stuff too or misremembered some things. That stuff will get better over time, but there's been a lot of focus on it because I think it gives people a lot to talk about without thinking about what's the other potential we're not thinking about with how we're using this or interacting or thinking about how that relationship with machines changes over time.
- [47:14]
Cain
Yeah. By the way, when I said sure, I didn't mean the made up part, I meant the make a mistake and misremember. So I'm clear that plays back. So you know, I do where it's funny, I'm not generally someone that's worried as much about the tech, but I do worry a Little bit about the guardrails. When it comes to an email conversation can go a bajillion different ways. Right. And it could turn. And I do wonder, and I'm sure you could create some sort of mechanism where it alerts the attorney some human needs to come into this, this conversation now. But I do also worry about a few different scenarios. There's a lot more but like acceptance of an offer accidentally, you know, just because the way they, the AI phrases something that it's interpreted as an acceptance of an offer. Another one might be where the review of a settlement release. Where in Missouri. I'll give you, you can draft a settlement release. And it looks like, and this is, I think this is an intentional thing by some of the bigger insurance companies where it looks like it applies to the parties that are listed. And actually the case law says no, you actually have to specifically set out or fight. You can word it in a different way where it doesn't cover all other parties. And the reason why that's relevant is that maybe you want to settle with defendant A but not defendants B through D. Right. But if you sign that release, it gets the case kicks the case completely. Right. And I, I worry about it maybe like analyzing a release like that. I'm just giving a couple. Just random.
- [48:40]
Ryan Anderson
No, it's a good, it's. No, it's so it's a good one. I. So I would say the same way that applies in legal applies to stuff we do. So you know, if an AI is helping my developers to generate code, they're still responsible for the code that comes out of their machine.
- [48:55]
Cain
Sure.
- [48:56]
Ryan Anderson
I would really worry about anybody who says there's not going to be just, just let the AI just go. I mean I wouldn't do that right now with my work. I wouldn't expect an attorney to want to do that right now either. I guess the place where I have the most concern about the misapplication or misuse of that kind of thing is when people are trying to do consumer focused tools that are masquerading as doing law for them or acting like a legal professional.
- [49:27]
Cain
Oh, interesting.
- [49:28]
Ryan Anderson
We get close to that line of law without a license. But so consumer facing tools. I think that's a thing all of us need to be wary of. Not in a, not as like a protectionist racket on the profession but because that's a real vulnerability that somebody thinks well this is AI so it's somehow superhuman. It's gonna be even better than a lawyer. Like that's a concern. I have of people who have tried to turn it towards like, yeah, you don't need a lawyer, just jump on an AI and see what comes out. I mean, I wouldn't do that.
- [49:59]
Cain
You know, it's funny because I actually think I agree with you because, like, you know, I might think I'm talking to Cain. In reality, I'm talking to AI. So that's, that's an issue. But I also think that in that same thought is that some of the best, best gains can be made in that same area where you're communicating with clients and increasing that customer service part of it. So that there is a. That is going to be an interesting area in the next, you know, couple years. I mean, like, I, I think originally I was saying what was really made me angry about this whole chat GPD when it came out is that we were like, we were developing AI for our firm based on some accounting. Our Kashif R CTO had a connection with an accounting firm that was developing AI and we were working with them to develop our own AI. And then Chad GPT came out. Just. It kind of disrupted everything. It's one of the things where, like, I mean, I do have some concerns when it comes to just the, where the AI, it's happening so fast. I mean, I thought originally it's gonna be five years, you know, but it's changing rapidly so far. I think in two years it's going to be. What we're going to be seeing is way different from what we're seeing now. So I wonder what your thoughts are on that.
- [51:02]
Ryan Anderson
So the reality of this is, I'll give it. This is one of those, you know, life comes at you fast things.
- [51:07]
Cain
Yeah.
- [51:07]
Ryan Anderson
Ten years ago when I was teaching about some of this stuff, the models that my team has access to today, I would have told you 10 years ago were about 30 years away.
- [51:17]
Cain
Whoa. Okay.
- [51:18]
Ryan Anderson
That's way off. So. And one of the reasons is size and scale. We haven't hit any walls with that really yet. There's all the time people wanting to get stuff printed and published of. Have we hit a wall with AI gains? Have we hit a wall? One thing I would tell everybody is when people are putting, you know, when the largest companies in the world are putting about $200 billion a year at minimum into the research side of things like this, we're not going to hit a wall. Well, so like Microsoft, those. They're putting in this fiscal year 80 billion into AI data centers. Just the data centers.
- [51:53]
Cain
And that's so that they can, they can because like the, there's a problem with the heat, there's a problem with the electricity, all that kind of stuff. Like there. Yeah, there's the infrastructure. But you have like companies like Nvidia, which I talked about this in the guild last week, is that, I mean they just released that desktop supercomputer, $3,000.
- [52:11]
Ryan Anderson
Sitting on your desktop as a supercomputer three.
- [52:12]
Cain
It's cheaper than an iMac. A MacBook.
- [52:14]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah, it's a, it's pure magic.
- [52:16]
Cain
That is already happening. They just, I mean that is wild that that's happening already.
- [52:22]
Ryan Anderson
So the, the size of the frontier models and what they can do is a bit mind bending when you get into it. They're also the cadence of releases like you're talking about. So you know, I go through cycles where there, you know, maybe only a few days in the month where somebody isn't releasing something new or tweaking something in their models. There's also, because of the explosive investment, there's just a lot of creative people doing a lot of fascinating things with this and people are finding new ways of utilizing what's out there all the time and of completely remaking the field though month after month, which is really astounding to watch. And even for myself, the perpetually dry sponge, it's a lot to take in.
- [53:10]
Cain
How do you stay on top of it? Because it's just, it's coming so quickly. I mean I feel like every time I'm catching up. Yeah, like that's really.
- [53:17]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah, that's part of it too. I do a lot of aggregation for different news and feeds. I mean when you're talking about stuff that can come out, that's garbage though. I had fine tuned, you know, my Google News feed over many years of what stuff I wanted to receive. I won't name which player, but a very large player in the space, his name everybody would recognize, decided it was a great idea to start publishing gen AI driven articles about legal and it ruined my feed. It took some work on my side to pull that out. Now I've got. And this is where we get into weird future stuff. And I would say weird future is the appropriate term here, not like necessarily the dreamed of or enlightened future. I've got AI threading through my feed to pull out other AI junk.
- [54:05]
Cain
Oh, I love it.
- [54:06]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah. And this. So okay, so on the side of like plaintiff side work, one thing that we're going to see that's going to be interesting to figure out how we all keep up with fake claims and Larger, you know, like mass tort stuff. I am dreading the wave of that. So if you want to create entirely fake profiles with pictures and images that seem to have the right, you know, images of someone, the work sites, all of the documentation you would need for certain torts like that, they were. They worked in this shipping yard. They did all these things. Probably, you know, someone who's clever enough right now could do that in eight minutes, have machines whip that up.
- [54:41]
Cain
You are spot on. It's funny, I don't even know if we should even be talking about this, but I'm going to. I had not. That never crossed my mind. You could create 8,000 new injury claims. Okay. And you could file all of those claims until they got to litigation. And if they didn't go anywhere after litigation, you just drop it. Or before litigation, you just drop it. Because you could go through and it. You. I could see how you could easily say insured, you know, you know, Suzanne, whatever hit my client, right. Make up all these pictures and just say that she's lying. Be like she, she denies it. Right. But she's lying because you can get her license plate. You can make like you can do all these things. So, no, she wouldn't fix it herself or something, you know, and you could then go and settle all these claims. Now the thing that the insurance companies do is they've got pretty good algorithms.
- [55:32]
Ryan Anderson
Yes.
- [55:32]
Cain
They're going to figure it out eventually.
- [55:33]
Ryan Anderson
Right.
- [55:34]
Cain
But you could, you could go to get a good head start. That's scary.
- [55:38]
Ryan Anderson
So, I mean, I worry about things like that, where we're going to have to have, you know, AI on one side, AI on another side, checking for what people are doing everywhere where there's a human vulnerability, there's someone who wants to take advantage of it. Right. So who knows what's going to happen with that? Right. Right now, I would say the, you know, one advantage you would have, but it's. But it's only a temporary thing against gamers is a lot of this tech is very expensive to utilize like that at scale.
- [56:06]
Cain
Yeah.
- [56:06]
Ryan Anderson
That won't always be the case.
- [56:08]
Cain
No. So what is your.
- [56:09]
Ryan Anderson
But that's another reason why I'm, I'm not terribly fond of, like, the idea of the open source models.
- [56:14]
Cain
Interesting.
- [56:15]
Ryan Anderson
For me, it's very much like if Zuckerberg were saying, I'm going to open source the Manhattan Project. I mean, we say AI and like have it as a hidden mystery box behind, but I'm not sure about the efficacy of that. At the end of the Day like there's a lot of things that should be open source. Some of these frontier models. I'd like to see some more validation and you know, know what's going to be some of the consequences coming from this before we just open source this things.
- [56:47]
Cain
So you have Xai is open source, I believe is so is Facebook as metas. Is there's chat. Is. Is chatgpt like OpenAI? I didn't think so.
- [56:55]
Ryan Anderson
It's closed.
- [56:56]
Cain
And Gemini's closed. Right. So what are the other open ones?
- [56:59]
Ryan Anderson
So there are a lot of spinoffs. First of the Llama models which are meta or Facebook. Right. So there's a lot of variations people have created because once it goes open source. Yeah, they just got people riffing off of it. I think Mistralaya, which is the largest one in Europe out of France, I think that's open source as well. Those are the only big ones right now.
- [57:18]
Cain
What is your favorite AI tool?
- [57:20]
Ryan Anderson
Favorite? You got to pick one notwithstanding all file line suite.
- [57:24]
Cain
Right, Exactly. You can't mention anything. Filevine. You got to pick a non.
- [57:28]
Ryan Anderson
No, no, no. That's very fair. I am totally fascinated right now with the latest Gemini model that's used in Google AI Studio. Have you ever used that?
- [57:39]
Cain
No.
- [57:39]
Ryan Anderson
Google AI Studio. So it's kind of a parlor trick, a party trick kind of thing. But I can't get enough of it. If you upload sources to it or feed it different information documents, things like this, it will create a podcast between two hyper realistic voices that you can now interact with.
- [57:58]
Cain
Like Google. It's like Notebook. LM kind of.
- [58:00]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah.
- [58:00]
Cain
Is it the same thing or they.
- [58:02]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah, yeah, it's part of it. It's the same. Same model set. Yeah.
- [58:04]
Cain
Okay, got you. So I'm familiar with these. Yeah, I've seen that. It's funny because I hadn't notice I. I was using. I was an early adopter of NotebookLM and at some point they added that feature. I didn't even notice it. I was so used to using it.
- [58:15]
Ryan Anderson
Right.
- [58:15]
Cain
And then it's like someone else had mentioned, I was like, oh, that's there. I was like I had ignored that button that you can create the, the voices and all that.
- [58:22]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah. And. And it just is something that feels magical. Like over the holidays, you know, my wife's grandfather is a famous professor in computer science and being able to create for somebody in their 90s in a couple minutes a podcast about their life and work, that was just really fun.
- [58:39]
Cain
That's amazing.
- [58:39]
Ryan Anderson
So we're sitting down over the Holidays. I feed stuff about his resume, cv, background, write some snapshots from his books and things, a couple of his articles from early on his career. Three minutes later we're sitting there listening to a 20 minute broadcast about his life and what his contributions were to the sciences. It's really, you know, it was like AI, but very moving, rich, enriching experience. Right?
- [59:03]
Cain
Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I'm going to, I'm going to steal that idea. What's your favorite source of AI news? So not like Google, not your Google News feed. Like what's your favorite source that you like to go to if you want to find out like what's up and coming, what's new, all that.
- [59:17]
Ryan Anderson
So that two really bad habits I have, which is X or Twitter and Blue sky.
- [59:25]
Cain
Yeah, my, that's my problem with X. I just go to like to try to find because like there's some really good. Every hour there's new stuff.
- [59:32]
Ryan Anderson
There's all the time, new things. It's also really interesting for, for where Fireline is. It's always, I'm always really interested too in people who are like, you know, one, two guys or gals, startups that are just jamming away doing stuff that is, you know, crazy ideas that may never work out, but just brilliantly strange things. Like the, the kid last year who was making the little kind of friend egg you, you wear on you with AI. Kind of very pointless. I don't see everybody who's gonna wear this necklace around and have their little AI buddy with him. It was also very dystopian. Cause it's kind of if you watch the ad for it. I remember my team watched his ad. It was kind of like the sad end of if everybody's just social media or AI interacting and people aren't meeting where like the friend is keeping them company. Cause they didn't get the date. Like go out and try to get another date. Please don't sit with the AI egg. Don't do that with your life. But, but you get fascinating stuff like that where people are doing weird things and you can get interesting ideas from it, even if some of them are just off the wall.
- [60:35]
Cain
Yeah. So I pulled my phone out because I want to see if you know any of these. Like, do you follow Rowan Chung by chance?
- [60:41]
Ryan Anderson
No.
- [60:41]
Cain
So it's the rundown AI. It's at the rundown. He's, he's really good. And then another good, good one is AI Samurai. Oh yeah, I like AI Samurai. That's another good one. So there's a. Any, Any good. Any people I could follow that you. That you can think of?
- [60:55]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah, I'd have to.
- [60:56]
Cain
There's so many of them.
- [60:57]
Ryan Anderson
I'd have to pull up my phone.
- [60:58]
Cain
I'll get in from you tomorrow. You mentioned like a couple things, but what else is on the horizon that are just over the horizon that you think that most lawyers don't know about that's coming that could either give them an advantage if they start now or that we're not currently prepared for.
- [61:18]
Ryan Anderson
So a couple different things. One is that. So I really do think on, you know, continuing from some other earlier threads, we now are at the point where other kinds of interaction with your software is going to be possible like voice and other things. So I think dictation for some people never went away. But I think for people who are basically exactly aligned in our age group, it really did. Everybody started typing and only typing. And that's like your interaction with your devices staying limited to just your fingers on your keyboard. I don't think that's gonna remain the state of affairs. One of the reasons is. So this is my, my wackiest theory. I'll give it.
- [61:57]
Cain
Okay, this is. Okay, great.
- [61:59]
Ryan Anderson
This is, this is my weirdest take. No one agrees with me right now on this. I've rarely, and even when I've talked to people about, I've rarely have anybody who's like this is cool. Everybody's like, this sounds insane. But here's my take.
- [62:12]
Cain
Depending on your what you say, I, I mean I might, I might hope you're wrong. So let's see.
- [62:17]
Ryan Anderson
I think that you will end up with case matter management, especially in litigation that ends up. I know. And this one I wouldn't know how far out it is because this too wackadoodle for anybody want to pursue right now. Look more like gaming. Okay, here's my theory. Why now People react strongly usually to that word because they associate gaming with frivolous.
- [62:39]
Cain
I'm thinking gamify is what you're thinking. Like you're game of going to gamify it.
- [62:42]
Ryan Anderson
I mean more like a gaming. Gaming. Here's my theory. Why one is it's a format where you've got like 30 years of user interface and testing and knowing that it works really well for people. The other thing is that it brings in a lot more of a person. So the example I like to give is there's a reason why it felt easier to keep track of all your redwells and files than all your digital files. And that's because it engages a lot more of you. So you've got cognitive part. You thought of the client's file, you know where to go to look it up.
- [63:18]
Cain
Yeah. You walk over the file, walk over.
- [63:20]
Ryan Anderson
You have physical associations. You open the filing cabinet, which, by the way, filing cabinets were made to be about as deep as the average woman who was employed as an assistant at a large company that her arm could reach back. All these things have physical attributes. They were built into our environment to try to match to human scale. So it engages all these different sensory parts, parts of you. Gaming. When people are like questing for something, they'll remember where the loot box was of where they stored stuff in a deeper way than you talk about. Where is the file for Jones vs Smith? With this item in my digital box, where all the folders look the same, there's just different words on them. I think whether you call it gaming or something, I don't really care about that part. But where it feels more engaged with the totality, I think that'll actually get people further involved. And right now it kind of has that feeling of sounding like it's making it more frivolous, which is why people jump back at it. And I get that. But what I'm actually talking about is a way to engage you more. Now, what that looks like, I don't know, because I didn't like the idea of everybody wearing around a headset all the time. So I'm kind of glad the Apple Vision stuff didn't.
- [64:29]
Cain
Okay, so like, more like the metaverse stuff or like. Or do you think it's going to be more like the metaverse stuff?
- [64:34]
Ryan Anderson
I would guess it's more like an augmented type experience where you could use attributes of like your physical desk at your office. Like, you have your glasses on.
- [64:42]
Cain
You're wearing the glasses.
- [64:43]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah. And you can have the pile of papers that feel more tangible as, like, papers of where you've aligned them.
- [64:49]
Cain
You take up the document, it analyzes it or something.
- [64:51]
Ryan Anderson
Right? Yeah.
- [64:52]
Cain
Okay.
- [64:52]
Ryan Anderson
I think so more immersive stuff to use more of you. I think we're going to end up with a lot of that because I think it'll improve outcomes so people will move to it. So. So that's one. Go ahead.
- [65:02]
Cain
Okay, that's. I mean, that's. I find that more believable. I. I think it is challenging. Whenever you call it gaming, I think that that may be the push, but I do. I can't say I disagree with you at all. And the augmented part of it especially, I Could, I could totally see that. I also get the idea of instead of me looking at those folders, you know, that are on screen, like there's another way of me. I, I actually like that idea. That sounds better.
- [65:24]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah. It's like we, we all got used to a setup that is really learned habit that now that's somehow normal. But your digital files don't, they don't really feel normal in the same way. So I think the way we can make that experience. But like I said, there's a reason why paper will still win for people. And it's not because people aren't advanced enough yet. The tech isn't there. Like, you know, the coding. How many people do you know have this special coding on their iPad to make it feel more like paper with special tips they buy for the Apple pencil and stuff. It's just not there yet. It'll get closer. But you need tactile elements like that or more immersive type experiences, I think in ways that aren't just for gaming, but gaming leads the way on a lot. Look, all the GPU production that's now being used for AI, that all got spurned by use for gaming. One of the most insane demonstrations you could see is Nvidia talking about the fact that what they're, you know, using AI to do with gaming is where they only have to render, you know, 2% of the pixels and AI is taking care of the rest instead of needing to re. Render a whole kind of world around you. So I think, I think that's more humane way to engage our work. So that, that's the strangest one that I sometimes throw out there. But I, but I, I want to work that way.
- [66:43]
Cain
So what are your thoughts on the metaverse though? Because I asked you about that. I do. Because if you said it was more like the metaverse, I was going to, I was going to vehemently disagree with you. Yeah, but. So what are your, what are your thoughts on like those virtual worlds that.
- [66:56]
Ryan Anderson
I don't get it?
- [66:57]
Cain
Okay, so I'm with. Do you think it's going to be widely adopted? Because I don't, I. From the beginning I've said this, I think to this point I've been right. I do. Do you think it's going to be widely adopted?
- [67:07]
Ryan Anderson
That's one where I, you and I won't. But if you ask me, what does that look like generationally, a little bit harder to say. You know, my son's turning 15 this year. He thinks some of those experiences are way more fun than I do and more engaging. My general. I haven't found anything interesting about the metaverse. Like, you know, if someone said, do I want to call up or go to the physical address of your law firm? That seems much more engaging to me than going in, like, a little, you know, cube in the metaverse to go into your law. From there. I don't get. That's not the reality that I really want. Like, that feels like more disengaged humans. Like I said, I like a phone call and a human voice and things like that. I. I don't want to be working in that space that's completely walled off. I don't feel like clients want that. But I also would be open to the fact that, yeah, there. There may just be people much younger who will feel much more at home with it.
- [68:05]
Cain
I've heard one use case that I thought was a good idea.
- [68:07]
Ryan Anderson
What's that?
- [68:08]
Cain
And, I mean, this only applies in very select scenarios, and there's probably better ways of doing it, but I thought this was a good potential use case. If there was someone that needed to meet with an attorney and it needed to be an anonymous in some way where they didn't want them to know who they were. It could be a domestic violence victim, you name it. I thought in situations like that that you could find an application for it that's like, okay, they need to speak to an attorney about something. They don't really want their name. But. But the problem is, there's a lot of problems with that. Let's. Let's say that that is the use case. Right. What's to say that the husband or spouse. Let's just say spouse. Let's keep it more generic. Spouse that is doing the abusing is the one that's faking, goes to the attorney.
- [68:52]
Ryan Anderson
Right.
- [68:53]
Cain
The anonymity. And now they've just blown attorney client privilege for the other spouse because they know they've been going there. So there's a lot of other issues with it.
- [69:01]
Ryan Anderson
The other thing I would. I would say there is just the same way we talked about email. My worry there is, like, explosion of all the people I'm meeting with in the metaverse aren't people anymore.
- [69:10]
Cain
Yeah.
- [69:10]
Ryan Anderson
And I'm really just interacting with bots. And what is that interaction about? Like, what's it there to satisfy and who's paying for that exchange? Because it. It costs a lot to run the models. Like, so even if the price goes down, to what end am I being served this productized version? And I think there's enough sophisticated models with voice. I mean, just think about the way people get, like, scammed and catfished today, talking to other people who aren't real, with stuff that isn't very sophisticated, where you're like, really, you can't completely hear or see that. That's not like the woman in France who just paid out, what was it, €850,000 to the fake Brad Pitt. And you look at those images and.
- [69:51]
Cain
You'Re like, oh, it's playing on weaknesses.
- [69:53]
Ryan Anderson
That's what it is. Right. But. So if I'm spinning around in a metaverse that's totally cut off, like, I. My assumption would be most those people I'm hanging out with aren't people. And then it's okay. I guess it's like entertainment, but I don't know.
- [70:08]
Cain
Yeah.
- [70:09]
Ryan Anderson
Yeah.
- [70:09]
Cain
All right. So the last thing I want to ask you about is I really like.
- [70:12]
Ryan Anderson
People in office and being around other humans.
- [70:14]
Cain
Yes.
- [70:14]
Ryan Anderson
So I. That's the thing about the, like, headset on world that I'm not into.
- [70:19]
Cain
I think if. If Covid has taught us anything, I think. I think that it's that people want to be around other people.
- [70:24]
Ryan Anderson
I think so.
- [70:25]
Cain
I think that that's important. But I want to ask you about one last thing, and if you've not read this book, then there may not be much to say. But have you read the book by Cal Newport, A World Without Email?
- [70:35]
Ryan Anderson
So I've read parts of it, yes.
- [70:37]
Cain
Okay. So you understand the concept. I just wonder what your thoughts are on it and how much of that you try to apply to what you're doing at File on, or do you even give it any thought?
- [70:45]
Ryan Anderson
Well, I'll give you my take on how I look at stuff we build up in legal and how I bracket it in my brain. And then what goes in what bucket? So I think we've got three categories of things, basically in legal stuff. So you've got what I think of as records or archives. So you got documents, video, whatever it may be the difference, but whatever it is, that's record, that's telling us what was the state of affairs or what happened to help us establish veracity of any set of events that may have occurred or maybe alleged to have occurred, all those kinds of things. Then I think you've got documents that actually become things. So motions and order. Right. And things that actually do the action itself. Right.
- [71:30]
Cain
Things.
- [71:30]
Ryan Anderson
We file all those kinds of things. And then you've got all the comms that swarm around those two other categories. They're about Those things. And like, I think most things you can boil in some out of one of those categories. So it's either establishing something, trying to do something, or trying to talk about establishing or doing a thing. That's kind of how I break it down. Email is a lot of the times the comms that go back and forth in there are not about establishing the state of affairs or trying to make a new state of affairs, like those first two categories I mentioned. There is a hell of a lot of that that goes back and forth that is comms about itself. My favorite email remains that. Do you have this? Never mind. Yes, I have this and that. That goes six, you know, threads deep. And all of us have about 20,000 of those lodged somewhere in whatever system, wherever we've stored them to the end of our lives. And the best hope is that, like, with things like agentic systems, we really up the threshold on the idea that, well, that you need that kind of calm or putting human energy into that communication because those kinds of, like, transactional comms about communications themselves, very empty items. And like, if you go for the substance of what everybody does, it tends to not be just in that comms for comms sake category.
- [72:57]
Cain
So with that in mind, how is that going to evolve filevine from what it is currently, the product, not, not the company, the product from where it is now? Because I, I do wonder, like, why not just three buckets whenever you go into filevine, like, you know what I mean? Like, so how is it going to evolve that product in the future?
- [73:16]
Ryan Anderson
So this is one of the things, like when you talked about conflicts between how people think about stuff and, and what people want to see right now. But I'll give you my idea.
- [73:25]
Cain
Okay? So that's what I want. I don't. Yeah, don't tell me where five lines go. I want to know what your idea is that, that I think it's more interesting.
- [73:31]
Ryan Anderson
Okay. My, my ultimate vision for what you're looking at is like, put us put aside the gaming scenario, right? But just what we're talking about with the data flow, I think about it much more in terms of, like, think about how you use Spotify playlists. A lot of legal work is like putting together playlists and doing remixes. So you got these riffs, Greatest hits. Everybody's got those. Like anybody who said you don't have a greatest hits folder? Come on, come on. There's every. Everybody has the msj. They wrote that they thought was just. Yeah. And then you reuse some different pieces. So like a mixtape or like a playlist, you've got pieces of that that you're rehashing, reusing, but using them in new ways. You've got new stuff. And this is a way that, like Spotify or Tidal or whatever, whatever you do your streaming on, they keep doing a better and better job of, which is also, like, suggestions that riff off of those past ones. Plus a playlist. When you're talking about, I don't know if you've ever done this or followed someone else's playlist.
- [74:28]
Cain
No.
- [74:29]
Ryan Anderson
So when Spotify does that or some other streaming apps, it's not very intrusive. Right. Like, so my senior dev, if I want to see what he's riffing on, I can see it, but I don't have to, like, pry into his. I can just see what he's jamming on if he's chosen to share it with me. A lot of stuff in work, like, it's nice to know what someone's riffing on, but you don't have to delve into every bit of what they're doing. In fact, like we talked about, in most firms, if you have to do that, you've probably got a problem with your team member. The reason you're delving into everything they're doing is because you don't trust anything they're doing. And that's a human trust problem, not a tech thing. So if I can see what someone's riffing on in their playlist and maybe say, oh, he's listening to that track, maybe I'll listen and see if that's any good, too. The new Post Malone record. I don't know. Post Malone country. I live in Utah. We'll try it. Yeah, it's fine. But you can see something, choose to riff off of it. Have that added to the way that you work a particular type of case. And just like a playlist, there's a type of way you work that fits the morning routine and schedule playlists. You can pick up, pause them, put them back down, jump in the car. Now it transfers over to the other location, you start it back up again, jamming out. So I'm thinking much more about the data flowing around you in that kind of naturalized way where you can remix all the time to make better tracks, better playlists. But also, you're not spending all your time being the playlist manager. That's what I think about it.
- [75:56]
Cain
I love it. That's a great way to spot, great way to end it. So thanks, Kane. Appreciate it.
- [75:59]
Ryan Anderson
Oh, my pleasure.
- [76:13]
Unknown
This spring, we're Taking the Maximum Layer Mastermind to Maui the perfect setting to reset, refocus and recharge April is a pivotal time to assess your law firm's progress and fine tune your strategies to ensure 2025 is a year of unparalleled growth. Our Maui Mastermind is designed to help you identify opportunities, overcome challenges, and take bold steps forward. This two day event blends high impact business training with transformative hot seats. On day one, you'll gain insights and tools to propel your firm's success, while day two is dedicated to Mastermind hot Seats where you'll receive personalized advice and strategies tailored to your goals. You'll leave Maui with a clear, actionable plan and the confidence to implement it immediately. Don't miss this opportunity to Mastermind with us in paradise on April 10th and 11th. To learn more about this event and grab your ticket, head to maxlawevents.
- [77:06]
Ryan Anderson
Com.