vLex’s Autumn ’24 Update: Show and Tell with Ed Walters - The Geek In Review

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[00:00]
Ed Walters
Foreign.
[00:08]
Greg Lambert
Welcome to the Geek and Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I'm Greg Lambert and I have a special show here. We're gonna, we're gonna drop this show a little early this week and I have with us this week Ed Walters from Velix. Ed's been on the show multiple times, so welcome back, Ed.
[00:31]
Ed Walters
Thanks Greg. Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:34]
Greg Lambert
All right, so we, we talked earlier this week and made sure that we could get you on because the Velux has a kind of a number of upgrades that are coming out for the autumn 2024 release. And so I wanted let's do a little show and tell on, on some things that are, are going on. So first of all, let's talk a little bit about what advancements Velix is launching.
[01:04]
Ed Walters
Autumn yeah, so in the autumn 2024 release, this is much more of a platform. I mean, you'll see like a lot of new workflows. But I would say that the Visa until this point has been an amazing research tool. I think one of the best in the world. Very proud of what we've done up until now. The autumn 2024 release is really more a platform. It is not just research tasks. There's drafting tasks, there's transactional tasks. You'll see all kinds of cool redlining tools. And then sort of beyond that, there are major kind of architectural upgrades. For example, prompt assist. If you ask a question that could have a number of different meanings, face and AI will focus that. It will ask follow up questions to you. It will say, I think this is what we're trying to do here before going and running the task. So users have that kind of control and can see and can audit, you know, exactly what's being prompted behind the scenes.
[02:08]
Greg Lambert
So, so on the prompt assist and, and I kind of know the answer to this because we talked about it before, but we're both big fans of tools like Perplexity where you're using AI on the, on the open web. And one of the things that I, I really like is that, you know, I can give it a good solid question or a good prompt and you know, go out and search this and bring me back information on that. But one of the things that I've really enjoyed with it is it gives me like four or five really good follow up questions to ask. Some sometimes things I would know to ask, but sometimes it's not some things I know to ask, especially if it's in an area that I'm not familiar with. So is it similar to what what users see in a tool like Perplexity?
[02:51]
Ed Walters
Exactly. And I think like Perplexity, it will show the hypothesis, it will show what we think you're asked and it will ask follow up questions. If you say what are the risks in this contract, Vincent AI will come back and say risks, to whom do you represent Party A or party B? And I'll show you the, you know, the kind of risk profile based on that. But it's not, it's no longer just kind of a, you know, all that stuff is being processed behind the scenes and you can't really see it and you don't really know if you're getting what you were asking. I would say related to that. Visims in the autumn 24 release also includes multi turn questions. So if you ask a question and get something back now, you can also ask follow up questions, you can drill it down, specify a lot more like this or this different voice. And that's also really important. And I think that the two things you'll see here are really based on user control. You and I have had this conversation before. It's very important to us that we're building kind of ethical, trustworthy, responsible AI tools. And the hallmark of that, as you've heard me say before, is really transparency, auditability, accountability. So with prompt assist and with these kind of multi turn conversations, conversations, you really have that kind of hallmark of transparency and auditability.
[04:28]
Greg Lambert
I want to drill down a little bit into. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and we were talking that workflow tools seem to be the kind of soup du jour of, of the legal market right now is much, much more focused on workflow. So before I ask you about what you're doing, I want you to define what you're meaning by workflow tools. When you say workflow, what are you meaning when it comes to what Vincent is doing here?
[05:05]
Ed Walters
Yeah, that's a great question. So when people are using these tools, they're not usually trying to edify themselves. They're to trying, you know, if I do a research task, it's not to make myself a smarter lawyer. If I'm analyzing a red line, it's not, you know, because I have an academic curiosity. Usually I'm trying to put something together. I am writing a response brief. I am trying to make the next turn of this red line. It's not about the kind of research task separated from the work, it puts it right in the work. If I'm drafting a response and I asked an associate for a research memo and that associate came back and delivered a stack of papers that I would then read and synthesize for myself and be better informed to draft a reply or something that's helpful, but it's not as helpful as here's a draft of the reply based on my research that you can now edit. And that's the difference to me between like research and workflow. The workflow tools start the process so that lawyers are information professionals, are like in the process of doing what they're doing, not outside that process.
[06:22]
Greg Lambert
Okay. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the workflow tools because I know you have things like, you know, analyzing contracts, exploring a collection you got, analyze the deposition, building an argument. What are some of the tools that you're most proud of. And then if you want to jump in and show some, you can share your screen if you want.
[06:50]
Ed Walters
Yeah, sure. Well, so I'll just say that this is not like adding a couple of new workflow tools into Vincent. This is I think something like triple or quadruple the number of different kinds of tools that are available. And this is really more of a platform than a discrete set of individual tools. So now when you are working on a contract, you can analyze red lines, you can analyze the contract itself, you can put together elements of the closing buyer when the contract is done. When you work on the litigation, you can do the same sort of research tasks as before, but now you can begin drafting the responses. You can analyze opponents briefs, you can do all kinds of follow up work. You can find things that are related to this litigation in Docanor and this lucky. The other thing that I should really add in a big way, this is the first time you're really starting to see the union of VL AI and docket alarm for the first time. We're pulling these docket alarm stills into Vincent. We're calling it Vita Vincent in docket Alarm there was a small dissenting faction inside of the UX that one would call Diva. Do you dockets and Vincent AI. But we're going to call Vita and so these Vincent tools in docket or the 825 million dockets, briefs, motions, complaints, answers from that litigation workflow are now you're starting to see them in this platform as well. And I'll show a couple of those. That's also free side. Okay, let's kick it off. Can that show.
[08:39]
Greg Lambert
Let's jump in to the show part of the show and tell.
[08:42]
Ed Walters
Yeah, okay, good. So you'll remember Vincent AI as being like three or four excellent workflows in the past. Now you'll see and first of all, you can just right off the bat do anything. You can start typing like right here. What would you like to do? And you can just really ask the question. You will recall this is not just a tool for the us it has been a tool that is global. We first launched it, it was us, uk, Spain and Ireland. Now we're adding all these other countries. With this autumn 24 release, we're also adding France, Portugal and Brazil. You can search any one of these.
[09:29]
Greg Lambert
To search them, do you need to enter it in. In French or Portuguese?
[09:34]
Ed Walters
That's a great question. No, you can actually query them in any language. This is the VIS database is a vector which is like kind of in math that creates this concept based map of all the concepts of all the ideas in the statutes and traditional opinions. It doesn't really matter what language it's in. So I can search the French database in English, I will get authorities in French, summarize in English with an answer in English.
[10:04]
Greg Lambert
Okay.
[10:04]
Ed Walters
And I can actually search the US Spain and France and all of the individual documents will be in their native languages, but they'll all be summarized in my language, in my case English. And then you get back to the answer in English. But you can flip that as well. If you're, if you're in the Jackson Walker office in Spain and you are a native Spanish speaker, you can search in Spanish over the US database and get back answers in Spanish. I think that's unique. I mean, I think Vincent is the only kind of global platform where the laws of many different countries are available in a single platform, which for global law firms is very powerful.
[10:51]
Greg Lambert
Yeah, I think for that it is very unique at this point.
[10:58]
Ed Walters
Yeah, I mean, you know, we will continue to push people to. We'll drag them into the future, but at least for, for right now we are way out ahead of the market. Those are all discrete search tasks and other platforms. All right, let me show a couple of these.
[11:15]
Greg Lambert
Yeah, please do.
[11:17]
Ed Walters
So you will recognize a few of these like the kind of research questions and build an argument. But now we have these tools like the analyze a contract or red line analysis, a native 50 state survey by run a question, both 50 states. I can get back the answer in a table that summarizes what in 10 minutes all of the law for all 50 states. The Autumn 24 release also includes collections for the first time, instead of working on a Siebel document, I can add like an entire folder of documents here I've got 22, but I have 22 iron of them as well.
[11:56]
Greg Lambert
Okay.
[11:57]
Ed Walters
And so here I can say, you know, if all of these documents have, whether it's the salary, compensation dates, Stevo and it will go through the entire collection and pull out from, you know, across multiple documents. Right. The answer to this question based on the entire collection and one thing I'll show while this is running is in addition there is in the native diligence feature in here as well.
[12:35]
Greg Lambert
Now one, one of the things while this is coming up, one of the things that generative AI was notorious for and may still be is that especially when it comes to extracting specific information, if it doesn't find that information, it may make up that information. So how are you kind of, you know, if you're looking for the CEO's salary, if it's not in there, how do you keep it from making it up?
[13:08]
Ed Walters
That's a great question. I think that the, one of the most powerful features in business AI is the answer I don't know. And we built it from scratch to say like if you don't, we're, we're building confidence scores, you know all these answers, you know, if the confidence score is not very, very high, it's instructed to say I don't know, not to create an answer or give a low confidence answer.
[13:34]
Greg Lambert
Okay. And then also in your answer and I'm sure you're about to show this, can you psych back to the document where it, where it's finding the information?
[13:43]
Ed Walters
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let me show you actually in the analyze the contract feature I'm going to drag in an asset purchase agreement. This is the Garden City Hospital asset purchase agreement. It's a PDF basically right away identifies this is an asset purchase agreement between Garden City Hospital and Prime Healthcare Services. And then automatically it says here are some things we can do with this transactional document, this asset purchase agreement. And you can see this is all based on what kind of document it is. This is not, you know, for just anything. So when I say will show me all of the post closing obligations, if I, if my law firm did an asset participate at the end of the process I would have like a couple of team members go through and read the contract and say now Garden City, here are some things we need to do after the closing. And then I take a couple of lawyers couple of days to go through and identify what's required of the parties after the closing. We just did it in, I don't know what was that, 30 seconds?
[15:10]
Greg Lambert
Maybe 30 seconds, maybe 45.
[15:13]
Ed Walters
But this was, this was your point before. For every one of these obligations, we are setting back chapter reverse what section of the asset purchase agreement that obligation derives from. And here we. By the way, I mean, I don't know if your listeners are familiar with APAs, but there's not like a section that says post closing obligations. You know, here's a list of them. You can see we're pulling this from multiple sections of the contract. And these are based on business kind of deep understanding of what's going on in an asset purchase agreement.
[15:51]
Greg Lambert
Gotcha. Now, one of the things that you mentioned in the press release that went out is that you can create these multi document collections like we're seeing here. And you can enable teams to store and work with playbooks. You can have them work with knowledge management resources and document libraries such as style guides. So you know, can you talk to us a little bit more about kind of the use cases that you see with these collections?
[16:25]
Ed Walters
Yeah, so the idea with a collection is that sometimes you have a team that is working on something together. I think in especially big matters, if you're doing like a due diligence project or you are working on kind of a complex transactional deal, it's not going to be like one document that you're working from. Right. They'll have like leases and you know, HR obligations, They'll have environmental risk mitigation. There'll be like a bunch of different documents that the team is working from. And so with collections, instead of each person like individually uploading all of those documents, you can create like a secure repo for those documents in business AI and then control who in your team has access to it. And then they can all work from that same set collaboratively instead of individually on those documents.
[17:25]
Greg Lambert
Okay, that sounds very interesting. So what do you want to show us next?
[17:30]
Ed Walters
Yeah, so I mean there's way too much to show each individual one. But I will just point out this is not just research tasks now. This is now transactional documents. There are docket tasks in here. In here. One of the things I'm really excited about, I'm previewing it today. But these Vita skills, there's so much information and so much intelligence baked into the experience database of dockets for litigators have a lot of information about what different parties do in a litigation strategy, how law firms approach litigation, what judges do. And I think in the past we've seen like individual point solutions for this, but now I think for the first time with these Vita tasks, you can use Vincent AI to understand in a deep way what a lawyer does, what a law firm does. You know, if you want to find something that is like a case that you're working on, you can use Vita to pull similar matters. And so this is, this is new. I think in the past we have kind of pre chewed analytics about docket information and they're great to me, in some sense, Docker Alarm is a tool that does that as well.
[18:55]
Greg Lambert
Right.
[18:55]
Ed Walters
But I keep, because of the size of that database and because we have invested probably at this point a decade in structuring all of that data using Sally tags, we are able to derive these really interesting AI insights from that data in a way that no one's been able to do for. Not in a preachy way, in a way that allows, you know, individual lawyers or information professionals, law librarians, to create their own queries, their own research tasks that will search across everything and then return these just kind of amazing insights.
[19:37]
Greg Lambert
Yeah, I could see something like this and it's just me talking off the top of my head, knowing what you've shown me so far. But I could also see our marketing team wanting to get in on this and look at experience, not just for ourselves, but maybe others. I can see our recruiting team looking at this as well to find experts in the field that maybe help, you know, for trying to plug a hole, you know, that might be a way. Is that, Are you, are you seeing beyond just the legal research and just the analytics for the case at hand, an expanded view of what a law firm or others could use Vincent and Vita for?
[20:23]
Ed Walters
Absolutely, depending. So in some ways we have created a generation of tools that will go through and the whole company is based on creating one kind of insight from that data. And then law firms subscribe to the product that does that one slice. I'm just doing expert witnesses. I'm just doing insights, life charges. I'm just doing dependent intelligence about another law firm. I'm just doing kind of information for lateral hires about what litigators are very good. And what I'm saying here is that exactly as you point out, this is document warrant that allows you to do all of them, look all of them in place over a bigger document set than anyone's got.
[21:15]
Greg Lambert
Excellent. And in speed, I can tell already this is faster than it used to be.
[21:21]
Ed Walters
Yeah, yeah, by a lot. This is in some strength because in some sense because the LLMs have gotten faster. But you'll see the responses are much faster. I'm Currently not showing it off. I'm running one of the slowest things you can do, like an entire 50 state survey. This would take, I don't know, the person, year or something. It's 50 different tasks behind the scenes. You saw the prompt assist when I ran that query. Dixon said, like, here's what I think you're asking, and if it is, check this box and let's go. This one might take 10 minutes, but what it's going to go through and do is answer this question in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, all 50 states. And then it will create a summary table that shows all the answer in about 10 minutes. But then for each one of them, you can pull the research memo and see the citing sources. You can see all the authorities behind that answer. You can get a full research memo answering the question, just for Alaska, just for Arkansas. And critically, if we're asking something on the frontier and there's no good answer, it will actually say for some jurisdictions, you know, there's not really anything here. It won't invent something or hallucination. Right?
[22:45]
Greg Lambert
Yeah. And 50 state surveys, and I'm going outside the press release now, I think, is one of the things that, it's one of the things that most of our especially business clients want, but it's one of those things that nobody wants to do. Yeah, you know, they don't want to, we don't want to. We don't want to charge them a huge sum of money to do it. They don't want to pay a huge sum of money to do it. But traditionally, it takes a lot of effort to create and, and maintain 50 state surveys, you know, especially on nuanced ideas. So, you know, in, in your view, do you see this, this type of action tool helping kind of solve that pain point that we have with our clients where we know it has to be done. It's really hard, it's really expensive, but we really don't want to charge for it and we really don't want to spend a lot of time on it. It's this weird paradox when it comes to this. So where do you see tools like this taking and approaching that problem?
[24:00]
Ed Walters
Also, I think you've really hit the nail on the head. If you're representing ExxonMobil, you know, their, their research questions, the things they need to, you know, scan that horizon for aren't just at Texas. You know, they're in all 50 states. They've got operations everywhere. And so they need to know what the law is everywhere. They need to track Developments, you know, in all 50 states. And so nobody wants to run the 50 state research projects and nobody wants to rerun them every month, every week. But I think if you have a tool that does that kind of grunt work for you, that sort of takes care of that behind the scenes, that creates like a new kind of product that your firm can offer to clients that makes it much easier. Now they'll take 10 minutes or one, but in 10 minutes I will have like a complete answer for all 50 states. Right. And that creates a new product that my firm can offer to clocks. We can then say like we will scan the horizon for you on 10 issues and just run this search once a month, once a week. A we get alerts for things that are new and man, that's just a recipe for Happier5 clients. I get it for 50 states, but I have to do the same thing across the 13 different country jurisdictions. Exxon also has operations in France and Portugal and Brazil. So this now allows, I think maybe a mid sized firm to have like a global footprint for the first time. They're presenting those fines.
[25:43]
Greg Lambert
Yeah, yeah.
[25:44]
Ed Walters
And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to empower law firms to offer these services to be more helpful to clients and to learn more business.
[25:53]
Greg Lambert
I want to go back real quick to the prompt assist or not the prompt assist, the new multi turn conversation feature. Is there a limit on the number of follow ups that you can do? Because I know in some other products there's like three to five follow ups, maybe 10 follow ups, which probably, if you're at 10, you need to probably start over anyway. Unless you're drilling, unless you're really drilling down. But yeah, did do you see, you know, what is the good part of that? And then also I think what would you kind of advise your users to, to be careful of with that? Because you can kind of go down a rabbit hole. I think.
[26:42]
Ed Walters
Yeah, it's a great question. I think maybe taking the Good Counsel a visit here, I will say I'm not really sure of the answer. I had not faced that question before and no one on Power Team has said to me, hey, the multi term thing has a limit of five turns or 10 turns. So I'm not aware that there's any limit. But with that said, Power Team might have built something architecturally behind the scenes. Well, Council, the risk of multi turn conversations is that if, if you really wanted to, you know, try to, to break this, if you got to like the 50th turn or something, you know, you probably could have if you were trying to push it to do something screwy, you know, 50 turns in a multi turn conversation. You probably could.
[27:33]
Greg Lambert
Yeah.
[27:35]
Ed Walters
But again, like the, the, the idea here is that it should be extremely useful for users, not that you couldn't abuse it with fhir. I mean, it's obviously useful for a million things. Can it be abused? Sure. I mean, that doesn't mean that it's not hyper useful.
[27:57]
Greg Lambert
Okay. Okay. Any other cool features you want to show or.
[28:03]
Ed Walters
Yeah, well, so I think maybe the last one I'll show is analyze a complaint. You've probably seen this before, but this is an update to it. So if I want to pull in the complete for Yoast vs Google, what will happen here is, you know, obviously Vincent reads the complaint and figures out what it is, what kind of lawsuit it is, and then just like a good law firm would, it will go through and analyze it. It'll figure out like, show me all the claims, extract a timeline of the facts. If I represent Google in this case, right. I might say show me the defenses for each claim or give some advice about legal strategy, about next steps, or I can do research tasks based on that complaint. I could say, you know, I. This is based on a reading of that complaint. It's a complaint for a violation of privacy under California law. Here's a good example. Propose defenses to each claim by whom you represent. So I'm going to say by representatives, Google. So I picked it here, Google. See. But so this will go through and we'll create a set of. It will go through and create a set of defenses that are specific to Google. And it would be different obviously for each defendant in the lawsuit. But I can go through and I can continue to ask these kinds of questions about individual defenses. I think you and I have run this together a couple of times. It used to take about two or three minutes.
[30:04]
Greg Lambert
Now you say this is obviously this.
[30:05]
Ed Walters
Is a lot faster.
[30:07]
Greg Lambert
Is this jurisdictional based? Can you limit it to specific jurisdictions?
[30:12]
Ed Walters
Yeah, here it is choosing California law because it seems to complete is filed in California courts, but it's actually going through for each one of them saying like this one is cause of action under the California business and professional code. So I'm going to do the defenses under California law. There was a federal court that had federal and state claims. They would do the same thing. You would, you know, pull the defenses based on, you know, based on where the cause of max use comes from.
[30:48]
Greg Lambert
And, and should for some reason the complaint not have enough information. Would it follow up with additional questions or is that something that the user would have to do?
[31:04]
Ed Walters
I think the user would probably have to do that here. But again, because it's multi turbine, I can go through and I can say tell me more about the intrusion upon seclusion claim.
[31:17]
Greg Lambert
Excellent.
[31:19]
Ed Walters
There's a lot here. I will walk you through.
[31:22]
Greg Lambert
Yeah, I was going to say I don't have you all day and half an hour tomorrow to go through all of these. So. Yeah, so Ed, I wanted to, you know, thank you very much for taking the time today to. Oh, do we have our 50 state.
[31:39]
Ed Walters
Yeah, I wouldn't do something else, but BISM is working in the background to fetch the 50 state survey. And as you can see for. For every one of the states I get like a summary insert in the table if I can pull the full answer.
[31:55]
Greg Lambert
I was going to say was what can you export it in? Because that tends to be, you know, I think we still unfortunately work in spreadsheets when it comes to 50 state surveys.
[32:05]
Ed Walters
Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, I think that's the right way to do it. So for the 50 state survey, when I get the answer, I think it is downloadable into Excel DB I don't know. I'll go back and check that.
[32:25]
Greg Lambert
Okay.
[32:26]
Ed Walters
But yeah, I think that's, I think that's the place where it should live.
[32:30]
Greg Lambert
Okay. Yeah, I was gonna say. Well, if, if not, I'm. I'm sure we've got good people in our.
[32:36]
Ed Walters
No, I mean this is. Take care of that. We should, we should be doing that behind the scenes. So read my take to put a bow on this. Here's my closing argument to you. Right. So you've seen these kinds of tools in Vincent before and other tools too, right? This is really not the addition of a couple of more workflow tools. This is the first time Vidson is really a platform. It is not just a platform for research. Although the research tools are amazing. It is now a platform for all kinds of legal work. Analyzing red lines, doing transactional documents, putting together closing buyers, doing research. It is not just in the US it is around the world. It localizes for each jurisdiction. If Jackson Walker London office is using it, they will spell and analyze with an S instead of a Z. But also if you're using it in Spain, will be in Spanish and you can work in Spanish. So I think, you know, in my, in my prior role at Fastcase, I think our bread and butter, the place where we were most popular was small law firms who used Fastcase like crazy. And that's still the case. I mean, fastcase is still by far the most popular legal research service amongst law firms. With the Vincent AI tools. With Velex, we also are finding like a very strong foothold in the world's largest firms in global law firms who represent clients around the world. We don't have just a question for Florida. We have a question for all 50 states or across the European and Latin America. And so in a way, we are now sort of serving the top of the market and in size and the smallest law firms and kind of, you know, converging on the middle market as well. So law firms that are have been sort of regional firms for a while now can do a little work. This is a really interesting development for the market. I think that the incumbents in this market have very strong brand advantages and distribution. But Vincent AI is better and in this autumn 24 release, like a lot better. And these guys are, you know, they're, they're working on products, they're making announcements about things they're going to do in the future. We deployed this last week. Law firms have been using this 24 release for.
[35:18]
Greg Lambert
It's already out.
[35:19]
Ed Walters
Yeah, they've been using this for a while. We don't really do vaporware, so we are announcing stuff that we have already done and that our clients are already using. And so this is a place where I think we are maybe punching above our weight a little bit. We are not a multi billion dollar global conglomerate, but I think our tools are more global and better than the tools from those incumbents.
[35:47]
Greg Lambert
Awesome. Well, Ed Walters from Velix, I appreciate you coming in and giving us a little show and tell on the autumn 2024 release for Velix and Docket Alarm and now Vita, although, you know, Diva, you know, for the fall 2025 release, maybe, maybe we switch the name out. So if the listeners and viewers want to learn more about it, what's the best place for them to reach out?
[36:18]
Ed Walters
Yeah, so you can go to belex.com forward/vincent and you'll see all the information about this AI there maybe in the show notes. There's a knowledge base for each individual skill so you can get more information about what they do. And if you include a link to that, you can find very specific information about each one of these workflow tools.
[36:44]
Greg Lambert
Well, again, thank you. I'll make sure I put those in the show notes. So thanks again, Edit.
[36:50]
Ed Walters
Thank you, Greg.
[36:51]
Greg Lambert
All right, and thanks to everyone for listening and watching the show and tell today. We'll be back with Marlene with our regular show next week. And so thank you very much.
[37:15]
Ed Walters
Hey, hey, don't take me away I could walk home by the North Star But I failed to notice that it's still daylight time the devil's back on ball the devil's back on ball and the devil's back on ball.

Summary10 min read

Podcast Summary: The Geek In Review – vLex’s Autumn ’24 Update: Show and Tell with Ed Walters

Release Date: September 12, 2024

Hosts: Greg Lambert & Marlene Gebauer
Guest: Ed Walters, vLex

Introduction

In the September 12, 2024 episode of The Geek In Review, hosts Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer delve into the latest advancements in the legal technology landscape with special guest Ed Walters from vLex. The episode, titled "vLex’s Autumn ’24 Update: Show and Tell with Ed Walters," provides an in-depth exploration of vLex’s significant platform upgrades aimed at enhancing innovation and creativity within the legal profession.

vLex’s Autumn 2024 Release Overview

Transition to a Comprehensive Platform

Ed Walters begins by outlining the transformative changes in the Autumn 2024 release of vLex. "The autumn 2024 release is really more a platform. It is not just research tasks. There's drafting tasks, there's transactional tasks. You'll see all kinds of cool redlining tools," says Ed [01:04]. This shift marks vLex’s evolution from a premier research tool to a multifaceted platform supporting various legal workflows.

New Workflows and Features

Ed emphasizes that the new release significantly expands the range of functionalities available to legal professionals. "It is now a platform for all kinds of legal work. Analyzing red lines, doing transactional documents, putting together closing buyers, doing research," he explains [32:25]. These enhancements aim to integrate seamlessly into the daily processes of lawyers, offering tools that support drafting, contract analysis, and transactional tasks.

Prompt Assist and Multi-Turn Conversations

Comparison to Perplexity

Greg Lambert draws a parallel between vLex’s new prompt assist feature and tools like Perplexity, highlighting their mutual ability to handle complex queries. "Is it similar to what users see in a tool like Perplexity?" Greg asks [02:51]. Ed confirms, stating, "Exactly. And I think like Perplexity, it will show the hypothesis, it will show what we think you're asked and it will ask follow up questions" [02:51]. This feature enhances user interaction by providing clarifying questions to ensure accurate responses.

Emphasis on Transparency and Auditability

Ed underscores the platform's commitment to ethical AI by ensuring transparency and accountability. "The hallmark of that, as you've heard me say before, is really transparency, auditability, accountability," he asserts [04:28]. This approach allows users to understand and verify the AI's decision-making process, fostering trust and reliability in the tool.

Defining Workflow Tools in the Legal Context

Difference Between Research and Workflow Tools

Greg seeks clarification on the term "workflow tools" within vLex’s offerings. "When you say workflow, what are you meaning when it comes to what Vincent is doing here?" he asks [04:28]. Ed responds by differentiating workflow tools from traditional research tools: "The workflow tools start the process so that lawyers are information professionals, are like in the process of doing what they're doing, not outside that process" [05:05]. This integration ensures that legal professionals can perform their tasks more efficiently without having to switch between disparate systems.

Detailed Look at New Workflow Tools

Contract Analysis and Redlining

Ed highlights the introduction of advanced contract analysis and redlining tools. "Now when you are working on a contract, you can analyze red lines, you can analyze the contract itself, you can put together elements of the closing buyer when the contract is done," he explains [06:50]. These tools streamline the review and modification of contractual documents, saving valuable time and reducing the potential for errors.

Native 50 State Survey

One of the standout features is the native 50 state survey tool. "The Autumn 24 release also includes multi turn questions... we can get back the answer in a table that summarizes what in 10 minutes all of the law for all 50 states," Ed elaborates [11:14]. This tool automates the complex process of gathering and summarizing legal information across multiple jurisdictions, a task that previously required extensive manual effort.

Multi-Document Collections

Ed introduces the concept of multi-document collections, which allows teams to manage and collaborate on extensive sets of documents efficiently. "With collections, instead of each person like individually uploading all of those documents, you can create like a secure repo for those documents in business AI and then control who in your team has access to it," he states [16:25]. This feature enhances collaboration and ensures that all team members are working with the most up-to-date information.

Addressing AI Challenges

Preventing AI Hallucination

A critical concern in AI-driven tools is the potential for incorrect or fabricated information, known as hallucination. Addressing this, Ed explains, "If the confidence score is not very, very high, it's instructed to say I don't know, not to create an answer or give a low confidence answer" [13:08]. This safeguard ensures that users receive reliable information and can trust the outputs provided by the platform.

Document Linking and Audit Trails

Ed demonstrates how the platform links responses back to specific sections of documents, enhancing the auditability of AI-generated insights. "For every one of these obligations, we are setting back chapter reverse what section of the asset purchase agreement that obligation derives from," he shows [15:09]. This feature provides a clear trail of where information originates, facilitating verification and further analysis.

Globalization and Multilingual Support

Support for Multiple Jurisdictions and Languages

vLex's Autumn 2024 release significantly expands its global footprint. Ed states, "You can query them in any language... It doesn't really matter what language it's in. So I can search the French database in English, I will get authorities in French, summarize in English with an answer in English" [09:29]. This multilingual capability allows legal professionals to conduct research across various jurisdictions without language barriers, making the platform invaluable for global law firms.

Unique Global Platform

Ed asserts the uniqueness of vLex’s global platform: "I think Vincent is the only kind of global platform where the laws of many different countries are available in a single platform, which for global law firms is very powerful" [10:03]. This consolidated access to international legal databases positions vLex as a leader in providing comprehensive legal research tools.

Integration with Docket Alarm and Vita Skills

Enhanced Litigator Insights

The integration with Docket Alarm introduces Vita Skills, which leverage vLex’s extensive docket database to provide deep insights into litigation strategies and behaviors. Ed explains, "These Vita skills... allow, you know, individual lawyers or information professionals, law librarians, to create their own queries, their own research tasks that will search across everything and then return these just kind of amazing insights" [18:54]. This feature empowers legal teams with data-driven insights to inform their litigation approaches.

Superior Data Structuring

Ed highlights the decade-long investment in data structuring: "Because of the size of that database and because we have invested probably at this point a decade in structuring all of that data using Sally tags, we are able to derive these really interesting AI insights" [19:37]. This meticulous data preparation ensures that the AI can generate accurate and meaningful insights.

Expanded Use Cases Beyond Research

Marketing and Recruiting Applications

Greg suggests potential uses of vLex’s tools beyond traditional legal research, such as in marketing and recruiting. "I could also see our recruiting team looking at this as well to find experts in the field," he proposes [19:37]. Ed agrees, expanding on the versatility of the platform: "We are now sort of serving the top of the market and in size and the smallest law firms and kind of, you know, converging on the middle market as well" [32:25]. This broad applicability makes vLex a valuable tool across various departments within law firms.

Expert Witnesses and Client Services

Ed discusses how vLex enables the creation of specialized services like expert witness identification and client-specific insights: "This is document warrant that allows you to do all of them, look all of them in place over a bigger document set than anyone's got" [21:15]. By automating and enhancing these processes, vLex helps firms offer more comprehensive and tailored services to their clients.

Performance Enhancements

Faster Processing Times

The Autumn 2024 update significantly improves the speed of data processing and response generation. Ed mentions, "The responses are much faster... this would take, I don't know, the person, year or something. It's 50 different tasks behind the scenes... it will create a summary table that shows all the answer in about 10 minutes" [21:21]. This acceleration transforms what was once a time-consuming task into a quick, near-instantaneous process, enhancing productivity and efficiency.

Handling Large-Scale Tasks

Ed showcases the platform's ability to handle large-scale inquiries, such as 50 state surveys, efficiently and accurately. "But critically, if we're asking something on the frontier and there's no good answer, it will actually say for some jurisdictions, you know, there's not really anything here. It won't invent something or hallucinate," he assures [22:44]. This reliability is crucial for maintaining the integrity of legal research and reporting.

Use Case Scenarios and Client Benefits

Streamlining Client Services

Ed elaborates on how vLex’s tools can revolutionize client services by automating routine yet complex tasks. "If you have a tool that does that kind of grunt work for you, that sort of takes care of that behind the scenes, that creates like a new kind of product that your firm can offer to clients," he explains [24:00]. This not only enhances the value provided to clients but also allows law firms to offer competitive and innovative services without incurring significant additional costs.

Global Compliance and Monitoring

For multinational clients, the ability to monitor and comply with laws across various jurisdictions is paramount. Ed states, "Exxon also has operations in France and Portugal and Brazil. So this now allows, I think maybe a mid sized firm to have like a global footprint for the first time" [25:42]. This global compliance capability is a significant advantage for firms serving large, international clients.

Prompt Assist Follow-ups and User Guidance

Multi-Turn Conversations Capability

Greg inquires about the limitations and best practices for using multi-turn conversations within the platform. "Is there a limit on the number of follow ups that you can do?" he asks [25:52]. Ed admits uncertainty about specific limits but emphasizes the platform’s flexibility: "We are not going to have like a hard limit, but you probably could have if you were trying to push it to do something screwy" [26:41]. He advises users to utilize this feature responsibly to maximize its utility without overcomplicating interactions.

Guidance on Effective Use

While the platform offers extensive capabilities, Ed acknowledges the potential for misuse. "The risk of multi turn conversations is that if you really wanted to, you know, try to, to break this... you probably could," he cautions [27:33]. He stresses the importance of using the tool to enhance productivity and maintain focus on relevant legal tasks.

Future Directions and Closing Remarks

Platform Evolution and Market Positioning

In his concluding remarks, Ed Walters emphasizes that the Autumn 2024 release transforms vLex into a comprehensive legal platform. "This is really not the addition of a couple of more workflow tools. This is the first time Vidson is really a platform," he states [32:25]. He highlights the platform’s superior global capabilities and rapid adoption by both large and small law firms, reinforcing vLex’s position as a leader in legal technology innovation.

Availability and Contact Information

Ed assures listeners that the new features are already in use and encourages them to explore further: "You can go to vlex.com forward/vincent and you'll see all the information about this AI there maybe in the show notes" [36:18]. He emphasizes that vLex is committed to continuous improvement and supporting its clients with cutting-edge tools.

Conclusion

The The Geek In Review episode featuring Ed Walters from vLex provides a comprehensive overview of the Autumn 2024 updates, showcasing significant advancements that position vLex as a leading platform in legal technology. From enhanced workflow tools and multilingual support to robust AI features ensuring transparency and reliability, vLex's latest release empowers legal professionals to work more efficiently and offer superior services to their clients.

Notable Quotes:

Ed Walters [01:04]: "The autumn 2024 release is really more a platform. It is not just research tasks."
Greg Lambert [02:51]: "Is it similar to what users see in a tool like Perplexity?"
Ed Walters [13:08]: "If the confidence score is not very, very high, it's instructed to say I don't know, not to create an answer."
Greg Lambert [25:52]: "Is there a limit on the number of follow ups that you can do?"
Ed Walters [32:25]: "This is the first time Vidson is really a platform."

For more information, listeners are encouraged to visit vlex.com/forward/vincent.

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Transcript73 lines

[00:00]
Ed Walters
Foreign.
[00:08]
Greg Lambert
Welcome to the Geek and Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I'm Greg Lambert and I have a special show here. We're gonna, we're gonna drop this show a little early this week and I have with us this week Ed Walters from Velix. Ed's been on the show multiple times, so welcome back, Ed.
[00:31]
Ed Walters
Thanks Greg. Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:34]
Greg Lambert
All right, so we, we talked earlier this week and made sure that we could get you on because the Velux has a kind of a number of upgrades that are coming out for the autumn 2024 release. And so I wanted let's do a little show and tell on, on some things that are, are going on. So first of all, let's talk a little bit about what advancements Velix is launching.
[01:04]
Ed Walters
Autumn yeah, so in the autumn 2024 release, this is much more of a platform. I mean, you'll see like a lot of new workflows. But I would say that the Visa until this point has been an amazing research tool. I think one of the best in the world. Very proud of what we've done up until now. The autumn 2024 release is really more a platform. It is not just research tasks. There's drafting tasks, there's transactional tasks. You'll see all kinds of cool redlining tools. And then sort of beyond that, there are major kind of architectural upgrades. For example, prompt assist. If you ask a question that could have a number of different meanings, face and AI will focus that. It will ask follow up questions to you. It will say, I think this is what we're trying to do here before going and running the task. So users have that kind of control and can see and can audit, you know, exactly what's being prompted behind the scenes.
[02:08]
Greg Lambert
So, so on the prompt assist and, and I kind of know the answer to this because we talked about it before, but we're both big fans of tools like Perplexity where you're using AI on the, on the open web. And one of the things that I, I really like is that, you know, I can give it a good solid question or a good prompt and you know, go out and search this and bring me back information on that. But one of the things that I've really enjoyed with it is it gives me like four or five really good follow up questions to ask. Some sometimes things I would know to ask, but sometimes it's not some things I know to ask, especially if it's in an area that I'm not familiar with. So is it similar to what what users see in a tool like Perplexity?
[02:51]
Ed Walters
Exactly. And I think like Perplexity, it will show the hypothesis, it will show what we think you're asked and it will ask follow up questions. If you say what are the risks in this contract, Vincent AI will come back and say risks, to whom do you represent Party A or party B? And I'll show you the, you know, the kind of risk profile based on that. But it's not, it's no longer just kind of a, you know, all that stuff is being processed behind the scenes and you can't really see it and you don't really know if you're getting what you were asking. I would say related to that. Visims in the autumn 24 release also includes multi turn questions. So if you ask a question and get something back now, you can also ask follow up questions, you can drill it down, specify a lot more like this or this different voice. And that's also really important. And I think that the two things you'll see here are really based on user control. You and I have had this conversation before. It's very important to us that we're building kind of ethical, trustworthy, responsible AI tools. And the hallmark of that, as you've heard me say before, is really transparency, auditability, accountability. So with prompt assist and with these kind of multi turn conversations, conversations, you really have that kind of hallmark of transparency and auditability.
[04:28]
Greg Lambert
I want to drill down a little bit into. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and we were talking that workflow tools seem to be the kind of soup du jour of, of the legal market right now is much, much more focused on workflow. So before I ask you about what you're doing, I want you to define what you're meaning by workflow tools. When you say workflow, what are you meaning when it comes to what Vincent is doing here?
[05:05]
Ed Walters
Yeah, that's a great question. So when people are using these tools, they're not usually trying to edify themselves. They're to trying, you know, if I do a research task, it's not to make myself a smarter lawyer. If I'm analyzing a red line, it's not, you know, because I have an academic curiosity. Usually I'm trying to put something together. I am writing a response brief. I am trying to make the next turn of this red line. It's not about the kind of research task separated from the work, it puts it right in the work. If I'm drafting a response and I asked an associate for a research memo and that associate came back and delivered a stack of papers that I would then read and synthesize for myself and be better informed to draft a reply or something that's helpful, but it's not as helpful as here's a draft of the reply based on my research that you can now edit. And that's the difference to me between like research and workflow. The workflow tools start the process so that lawyers are information professionals, are like in the process of doing what they're doing, not outside that process.
[06:22]
Greg Lambert
Okay. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the workflow tools because I know you have things like, you know, analyzing contracts, exploring a collection you got, analyze the deposition, building an argument. What are some of the tools that you're most proud of. And then if you want to jump in and show some, you can share your screen if you want.
[06:50]
Ed Walters
Yeah, sure. Well, so I'll just say that this is not like adding a couple of new workflow tools into Vincent. This is I think something like triple or quadruple the number of different kinds of tools that are available. And this is really more of a platform than a discrete set of individual tools. So now when you are working on a contract, you can analyze red lines, you can analyze the contract itself, you can put together elements of the closing buyer when the contract is done. When you work on the litigation, you can do the same sort of research tasks as before, but now you can begin drafting the responses. You can analyze opponents briefs, you can do all kinds of follow up work. You can find things that are related to this litigation in Docanor and this lucky. The other thing that I should really add in a big way, this is the first time you're really starting to see the union of VL AI and docket alarm for the first time. We're pulling these docket alarm stills into Vincent. We're calling it Vita Vincent in docket Alarm there was a small dissenting faction inside of the UX that one would call Diva. Do you dockets and Vincent AI. But we're going to call Vita and so these Vincent tools in docket or the 825 million dockets, briefs, motions, complaints, answers from that litigation workflow are now you're starting to see them in this platform as well. And I'll show a couple of those. That's also free side. Okay, let's kick it off. Can that show.
[08:39]
Greg Lambert
Let's jump in to the show part of the show and tell.
[08:42]
Ed Walters
Yeah, okay, good. So you'll remember Vincent AI as being like three or four excellent workflows in the past. Now you'll see and first of all, you can just right off the bat do anything. You can start typing like right here. What would you like to do? And you can just really ask the question. You will recall this is not just a tool for the us it has been a tool that is global. We first launched it, it was us, uk, Spain and Ireland. Now we're adding all these other countries. With this autumn 24 release, we're also adding France, Portugal and Brazil. You can search any one of these.
[09:29]
Greg Lambert
To search them, do you need to enter it in. In French or Portuguese?
[09:34]
Ed Walters
That's a great question. No, you can actually query them in any language. This is the VIS database is a vector which is like kind of in math that creates this concept based map of all the concepts of all the ideas in the statutes and traditional opinions. It doesn't really matter what language it's in. So I can search the French database in English, I will get authorities in French, summarize in English with an answer in English.
[10:04]
Greg Lambert
Okay.
[10:04]
Ed Walters
And I can actually search the US Spain and France and all of the individual documents will be in their native languages, but they'll all be summarized in my language, in my case English. And then you get back to the answer in English. But you can flip that as well. If you're, if you're in the Jackson Walker office in Spain and you are a native Spanish speaker, you can search in Spanish over the US database and get back answers in Spanish. I think that's unique. I mean, I think Vincent is the only kind of global platform where the laws of many different countries are available in a single platform, which for global law firms is very powerful.
[10:51]
Greg Lambert
Yeah, I think for that it is very unique at this point.
[10:58]
Ed Walters
Yeah, I mean, you know, we will continue to push people to. We'll drag them into the future, but at least for, for right now we are way out ahead of the market. Those are all discrete search tasks and other platforms. All right, let me show a couple of these.
[11:15]
Greg Lambert
Yeah, please do.
[11:17]
Ed Walters
So you will recognize a few of these like the kind of research questions and build an argument. But now we have these tools like the analyze a contract or red line analysis, a native 50 state survey by run a question, both 50 states. I can get back the answer in a table that summarizes what in 10 minutes all of the law for all 50 states. The Autumn 24 release also includes collections for the first time, instead of working on a Siebel document, I can add like an entire folder of documents here I've got 22, but I have 22 iron of them as well.
[11:56]
Greg Lambert
Okay.
[11:57]
Ed Walters
And so here I can say, you know, if all of these documents have, whether it's the salary, compensation dates, Stevo and it will go through the entire collection and pull out from, you know, across multiple documents. Right. The answer to this question based on the entire collection and one thing I'll show while this is running is in addition there is in the native diligence feature in here as well.
[12:35]
Greg Lambert
Now one, one of the things while this is coming up, one of the things that generative AI was notorious for and may still be is that especially when it comes to extracting specific information, if it doesn't find that information, it may make up that information. So how are you kind of, you know, if you're looking for the CEO's salary, if it's not in there, how do you keep it from making it up?
[13:08]
Ed Walters
That's a great question. I think that the, one of the most powerful features in business AI is the answer I don't know. And we built it from scratch to say like if you don't, we're, we're building confidence scores, you know all these answers, you know, if the confidence score is not very, very high, it's instructed to say I don't know, not to create an answer or give a low confidence answer.
[13:34]
Greg Lambert
Okay. And then also in your answer and I'm sure you're about to show this, can you psych back to the document where it, where it's finding the information?
[13:43]
Ed Walters
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let me show you actually in the analyze the contract feature I'm going to drag in an asset purchase agreement. This is the Garden City Hospital asset purchase agreement. It's a PDF basically right away identifies this is an asset purchase agreement between Garden City Hospital and Prime Healthcare Services. And then automatically it says here are some things we can do with this transactional document, this asset purchase agreement. And you can see this is all based on what kind of document it is. This is not, you know, for just anything. So when I say will show me all of the post closing obligations, if I, if my law firm did an asset participate at the end of the process I would have like a couple of team members go through and read the contract and say now Garden City, here are some things we need to do after the closing. And then I take a couple of lawyers couple of days to go through and identify what's required of the parties after the closing. We just did it in, I don't know what was that, 30 seconds?
[15:10]
Greg Lambert
Maybe 30 seconds, maybe 45.
[15:13]
Ed Walters
But this was, this was your point before. For every one of these obligations, we are setting back chapter reverse what section of the asset purchase agreement that obligation derives from. And here we. By the way, I mean, I don't know if your listeners are familiar with APAs, but there's not like a section that says post closing obligations. You know, here's a list of them. You can see we're pulling this from multiple sections of the contract. And these are based on business kind of deep understanding of what's going on in an asset purchase agreement.
[15:51]
Greg Lambert
Gotcha. Now, one of the things that you mentioned in the press release that went out is that you can create these multi document collections like we're seeing here. And you can enable teams to store and work with playbooks. You can have them work with knowledge management resources and document libraries such as style guides. So you know, can you talk to us a little bit more about kind of the use cases that you see with these collections?
[16:25]
Ed Walters
Yeah, so the idea with a collection is that sometimes you have a team that is working on something together. I think in especially big matters, if you're doing like a due diligence project or you are working on kind of a complex transactional deal, it's not going to be like one document that you're working from. Right. They'll have like leases and you know, HR obligations, They'll have environmental risk mitigation. There'll be like a bunch of different documents that the team is working from. And so with collections, instead of each person like individually uploading all of those documents, you can create like a secure repo for those documents in business AI and then control who in your team has access to it. And then they can all work from that same set collaboratively instead of individually on those documents.
[17:25]
Greg Lambert
Okay, that sounds very interesting. So what do you want to show us next?
[17:30]
Ed Walters
Yeah, so I mean there's way too much to show each individual one. But I will just point out this is not just research tasks now. This is now transactional documents. There are docket tasks in here. In here. One of the things I'm really excited about, I'm previewing it today. But these Vita skills, there's so much information and so much intelligence baked into the experience database of dockets for litigators have a lot of information about what different parties do in a litigation strategy, how law firms approach litigation, what judges do. And I think in the past we've seen like individual point solutions for this, but now I think for the first time with these Vita tasks, you can use Vincent AI to understand in a deep way what a lawyer does, what a law firm does. You know, if you want to find something that is like a case that you're working on, you can use Vita to pull similar matters. And so this is, this is new. I think in the past we have kind of pre chewed analytics about docket information and they're great to me, in some sense, Docker Alarm is a tool that does that as well.
[18:55]
Greg Lambert
Right.
[18:55]
Ed Walters
But I keep, because of the size of that database and because we have invested probably at this point a decade in structuring all of that data using Sally tags, we are able to derive these really interesting AI insights from that data in a way that no one's been able to do for. Not in a preachy way, in a way that allows, you know, individual lawyers or information professionals, law librarians, to create their own queries, their own research tasks that will search across everything and then return these just kind of amazing insights.
[19:37]
Greg Lambert
Yeah, I could see something like this and it's just me talking off the top of my head, knowing what you've shown me so far. But I could also see our marketing team wanting to get in on this and look at experience, not just for ourselves, but maybe others. I can see our recruiting team looking at this as well to find experts in the field that maybe help, you know, for trying to plug a hole, you know, that might be a way. Is that, Are you, are you seeing beyond just the legal research and just the analytics for the case at hand, an expanded view of what a law firm or others could use Vincent and Vita for?
[20:23]
Ed Walters
Absolutely, depending. So in some ways we have created a generation of tools that will go through and the whole company is based on creating one kind of insight from that data. And then law firms subscribe to the product that does that one slice. I'm just doing expert witnesses. I'm just doing insights, life charges. I'm just doing dependent intelligence about another law firm. I'm just doing kind of information for lateral hires about what litigators are very good. And what I'm saying here is that exactly as you point out, this is document warrant that allows you to do all of them, look all of them in place over a bigger document set than anyone's got.
[21:15]
Greg Lambert
Excellent. And in speed, I can tell already this is faster than it used to be.
[21:21]
Ed Walters
Yeah, yeah, by a lot. This is in some strength because in some sense because the LLMs have gotten faster. But you'll see the responses are much faster. I'm Currently not showing it off. I'm running one of the slowest things you can do, like an entire 50 state survey. This would take, I don't know, the person, year or something. It's 50 different tasks behind the scenes. You saw the prompt assist when I ran that query. Dixon said, like, here's what I think you're asking, and if it is, check this box and let's go. This one might take 10 minutes, but what it's going to go through and do is answer this question in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, all 50 states. And then it will create a summary table that shows all the answer in about 10 minutes. But then for each one of them, you can pull the research memo and see the citing sources. You can see all the authorities behind that answer. You can get a full research memo answering the question, just for Alaska, just for Arkansas. And critically, if we're asking something on the frontier and there's no good answer, it will actually say for some jurisdictions, you know, there's not really anything here. It won't invent something or hallucination. Right?
[22:45]
Greg Lambert
Yeah. And 50 state surveys, and I'm going outside the press release now, I think, is one of the things that, it's one of the things that most of our especially business clients want, but it's one of those things that nobody wants to do. Yeah, you know, they don't want to, we don't want to. We don't want to charge them a huge sum of money to do it. They don't want to pay a huge sum of money to do it. But traditionally, it takes a lot of effort to create and, and maintain 50 state surveys, you know, especially on nuanced ideas. So, you know, in, in your view, do you see this, this type of action tool helping kind of solve that pain point that we have with our clients where we know it has to be done. It's really hard, it's really expensive, but we really don't want to charge for it and we really don't want to spend a lot of time on it. It's this weird paradox when it comes to this. So where do you see tools like this taking and approaching that problem?
[24:00]
Ed Walters
Also, I think you've really hit the nail on the head. If you're representing ExxonMobil, you know, their, their research questions, the things they need to, you know, scan that horizon for aren't just at Texas. You know, they're in all 50 states. They've got operations everywhere. And so they need to know what the law is everywhere. They need to track Developments, you know, in all 50 states. And so nobody wants to run the 50 state research projects and nobody wants to rerun them every month, every week. But I think if you have a tool that does that kind of grunt work for you, that sort of takes care of that behind the scenes, that creates like a new kind of product that your firm can offer to clients that makes it much easier. Now they'll take 10 minutes or one, but in 10 minutes I will have like a complete answer for all 50 states. Right. And that creates a new product that my firm can offer to clocks. We can then say like we will scan the horizon for you on 10 issues and just run this search once a month, once a week. A we get alerts for things that are new and man, that's just a recipe for Happier5 clients. I get it for 50 states, but I have to do the same thing across the 13 different country jurisdictions. Exxon also has operations in France and Portugal and Brazil. So this now allows, I think maybe a mid sized firm to have like a global footprint for the first time. They're presenting those fines.
[25:43]
Greg Lambert
Yeah, yeah.
[25:44]
Ed Walters
And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to empower law firms to offer these services to be more helpful to clients and to learn more business.
[25:53]
Greg Lambert
I want to go back real quick to the prompt assist or not the prompt assist, the new multi turn conversation feature. Is there a limit on the number of follow ups that you can do? Because I know in some other products there's like three to five follow ups, maybe 10 follow ups, which probably, if you're at 10, you need to probably start over anyway. Unless you're drilling, unless you're really drilling down. But yeah, did do you see, you know, what is the good part of that? And then also I think what would you kind of advise your users to, to be careful of with that? Because you can kind of go down a rabbit hole. I think.
[26:42]
Ed Walters
Yeah, it's a great question. I think maybe taking the Good Counsel a visit here, I will say I'm not really sure of the answer. I had not faced that question before and no one on Power Team has said to me, hey, the multi term thing has a limit of five turns or 10 turns. So I'm not aware that there's any limit. But with that said, Power Team might have built something architecturally behind the scenes. Well, Council, the risk of multi turn conversations is that if, if you really wanted to, you know, try to, to break this, if you got to like the 50th turn or something, you know, you probably could have if you were trying to push it to do something screwy, you know, 50 turns in a multi turn conversation. You probably could.
[27:33]
Greg Lambert
Yeah.
[27:35]
Ed Walters
But again, like the, the, the idea here is that it should be extremely useful for users, not that you couldn't abuse it with fhir. I mean, it's obviously useful for a million things. Can it be abused? Sure. I mean, that doesn't mean that it's not hyper useful.
[27:57]
Greg Lambert
Okay. Okay. Any other cool features you want to show or.
[28:03]
Ed Walters
Yeah, well, so I think maybe the last one I'll show is analyze a complaint. You've probably seen this before, but this is an update to it. So if I want to pull in the complete for Yoast vs Google, what will happen here is, you know, obviously Vincent reads the complaint and figures out what it is, what kind of lawsuit it is, and then just like a good law firm would, it will go through and analyze it. It'll figure out like, show me all the claims, extract a timeline of the facts. If I represent Google in this case, right. I might say show me the defenses for each claim or give some advice about legal strategy, about next steps, or I can do research tasks based on that complaint. I could say, you know, I. This is based on a reading of that complaint. It's a complaint for a violation of privacy under California law. Here's a good example. Propose defenses to each claim by whom you represent. So I'm going to say by representatives, Google. So I picked it here, Google. See. But so this will go through and we'll create a set of. It will go through and create a set of defenses that are specific to Google. And it would be different obviously for each defendant in the lawsuit. But I can go through and I can continue to ask these kinds of questions about individual defenses. I think you and I have run this together a couple of times. It used to take about two or three minutes.
[30:04]
Greg Lambert
Now you say this is obviously this.
[30:05]
Ed Walters
Is a lot faster.
[30:07]
Greg Lambert
Is this jurisdictional based? Can you limit it to specific jurisdictions?
[30:12]
Ed Walters
Yeah, here it is choosing California law because it seems to complete is filed in California courts, but it's actually going through for each one of them saying like this one is cause of action under the California business and professional code. So I'm going to do the defenses under California law. There was a federal court that had federal and state claims. They would do the same thing. You would, you know, pull the defenses based on, you know, based on where the cause of max use comes from.
[30:48]
Greg Lambert
And, and should for some reason the complaint not have enough information. Would it follow up with additional questions or is that something that the user would have to do?
[31:04]
Ed Walters
I think the user would probably have to do that here. But again, because it's multi turbine, I can go through and I can say tell me more about the intrusion upon seclusion claim.
[31:17]
Greg Lambert
Excellent.
[31:19]
Ed Walters
There's a lot here. I will walk you through.
[31:22]
Greg Lambert
Yeah, I was going to say I don't have you all day and half an hour tomorrow to go through all of these. So. Yeah, so Ed, I wanted to, you know, thank you very much for taking the time today to. Oh, do we have our 50 state.
[31:39]
Ed Walters
Yeah, I wouldn't do something else, but BISM is working in the background to fetch the 50 state survey. And as you can see for. For every one of the states I get like a summary insert in the table if I can pull the full answer.
[31:55]
Greg Lambert
I was going to say was what can you export it in? Because that tends to be, you know, I think we still unfortunately work in spreadsheets when it comes to 50 state surveys.
[32:05]
Ed Walters
Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, I think that's the right way to do it. So for the 50 state survey, when I get the answer, I think it is downloadable into Excel DB I don't know. I'll go back and check that.
[32:25]
Greg Lambert
Okay.
[32:26]
Ed Walters
But yeah, I think that's, I think that's the place where it should live.
[32:30]
Greg Lambert
Okay. Yeah, I was gonna say. Well, if, if not, I'm. I'm sure we've got good people in our.
[32:36]
Ed Walters
No, I mean this is. Take care of that. We should, we should be doing that behind the scenes. So read my take to put a bow on this. Here's my closing argument to you. Right. So you've seen these kinds of tools in Vincent before and other tools too, right? This is really not the addition of a couple of more workflow tools. This is the first time Vidson is really a platform. It is not just a platform for research. Although the research tools are amazing. It is now a platform for all kinds of legal work. Analyzing red lines, doing transactional documents, putting together closing buyers, doing research. It is not just in the US it is around the world. It localizes for each jurisdiction. If Jackson Walker London office is using it, they will spell and analyze with an S instead of a Z. But also if you're using it in Spain, will be in Spanish and you can work in Spanish. So I think, you know, in my, in my prior role at Fastcase, I think our bread and butter, the place where we were most popular was small law firms who used Fastcase like crazy. And that's still the case. I mean, fastcase is still by far the most popular legal research service amongst law firms. With the Vincent AI tools. With Velex, we also are finding like a very strong foothold in the world's largest firms in global law firms who represent clients around the world. We don't have just a question for Florida. We have a question for all 50 states or across the European and Latin America. And so in a way, we are now sort of serving the top of the market and in size and the smallest law firms and kind of, you know, converging on the middle market as well. So law firms that are have been sort of regional firms for a while now can do a little work. This is a really interesting development for the market. I think that the incumbents in this market have very strong brand advantages and distribution. But Vincent AI is better and in this autumn 24 release, like a lot better. And these guys are, you know, they're, they're working on products, they're making announcements about things they're going to do in the future. We deployed this last week. Law firms have been using this 24 release for.
[35:18]
Greg Lambert
It's already out.
[35:19]
Ed Walters
Yeah, they've been using this for a while. We don't really do vaporware, so we are announcing stuff that we have already done and that our clients are already using. And so this is a place where I think we are maybe punching above our weight a little bit. We are not a multi billion dollar global conglomerate, but I think our tools are more global and better than the tools from those incumbents.
[35:47]
Greg Lambert
Awesome. Well, Ed Walters from Velix, I appreciate you coming in and giving us a little show and tell on the autumn 2024 release for Velix and Docket Alarm and now Vita, although, you know, Diva, you know, for the fall 2025 release, maybe, maybe we switch the name out. So if the listeners and viewers want to learn more about it, what's the best place for them to reach out?
[36:18]
Ed Walters
Yeah, so you can go to belex.com forward/vincent and you'll see all the information about this AI there maybe in the show notes. There's a knowledge base for each individual skill so you can get more information about what they do. And if you include a link to that, you can find very specific information about each one of these workflow tools.
[36:44]
Greg Lambert
Well, again, thank you. I'll make sure I put those in the show notes. So thanks again, Edit.
[36:50]
Ed Walters
Thank you, Greg.
[36:51]
Greg Lambert
All right, and thanks to everyone for listening and watching the show and tell today. We'll be back with Marlene with our regular show next week. And so thank you very much.
[37:15]
Ed Walters
Hey, hey, don't take me away I could walk home by the North Star But I failed to notice that it's still daylight time the devil's back on ball the devil's back on ball and the devil's back on ball.