This week we catch up with Jeff Pfeifer and Serena Wellen from LexisNexis to discuss the rapid development of AI tools for the legal industry over the past year. Pfeifer and Wellen give us an insider’s view of what it took to bring their Lexis+ AI tool to the market and the balance between speed to market and getting solid customer guidance on what they need in a legal-focused Generative AI tool. Between the initial version released to a select group of customers and the current version, the...

This week, we cover the highlights of the recent Knowledge Management and Innovation for Legal Conference with our guests, Patrick DiDomenico, founder of Inspire KM Consulting and the organizer of the conference; Tanisha Little, Director of Knowledge Management at Simpson Thatcher; and Sara Miro, Director of Knowledge at Sullivan Cromwell. In a time of Generative AI Hype, the basic ideas behind Knowledge Management have never been more relevant. As much as we believe in the future of a...

Vanderbilt Law School recently launched an exciting new initiative called the Vanderbilt AI Legal Lab (VAILL) to explore how artificial intelligence can transform legal services and access to justice. In this episode, we spoke with VAILL's leadership – Cat Moon,(👑) Director of Innovation at Vanderbilt's Program on Law and Innovation (PoLI), and Mark Williams, Associate Director for Collections and Innovation at the Massey Law Library – about their vision for this pioneering lab.  VAILL's...

On a special “on location” episode of The Geek in Review, Greg Lambert sits down with vLex’s Damien Riehl for a hands-on demonstration of the new generative AI tool called Vincent AI. While at the Ark KM Conference, Riehl explains that vLex has amassed a huge legal dataset over its 35 year history which allows them to now run their own large language models (LLM). The recent merger between vLex and Fastcase has combined their datasets to create an even more robust training corpus. Riehl...

This week on The Geek in Review podcast Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert featured guests Colin Levy, Ashley Carlisle, and Dorna Moini discussing Levy's recently published book "Handbook of Legal Tech." Levy edited the book and contributors included Moini, Carlisle's CEO, Tony Thai, and many more legal technology experts. The book provides an overview of key technologies transforming the legal industry like automation, AI, blockchain, document automation, CLM, and more. Levy shared how he...

On this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert delve into how AI can transform legal writing with ClearBrief founder and CEO Jacqueline Schafer. As a former litigator, Schafer experienced firsthand the frustrating scramble to finalize briefs and prepare filings. She founded ClearBrief in 2020 to leverage AI to analyze documents and suggest relevant evidence and citations to streamline drafting. ClearBrief integrates into Microsoft Word to align with lawyers’...

On this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert explore innovations in legal search with Paulina Grnarova and Yannic Kilcher, co-founders of DeepJudge. This semantic search engine for legal documents leverages proprietary AI developed by experts with backgrounds from Google and academic AI research. As PhDs from ETH Zurich, Grnarova and Kilcher recognized lawyers needed better access to institutional knowledge rather than constantly reinventing the wheel....

[Ed. Note: This episodes discusses sensitive issues including depression and suicide. -GL] Mental health and wellbeing issues have long posed challenges in the legal profession.  However, in this thoughtful episode of The Geek in Review podcast, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert have an enlightening discussion with three experts on concrete ways to foster greater wellness. Defining wellbeing holistically, Bree Buchanan, co-founder of the Well-Being in Law Movement, explains it...

On this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interview Thomas Suh, Founder and CEO, and Ken Block, Senior Account Executive of LegalMation. The company provides AI-powered tools to help litigators automate repetitive tasks and work more efficiently. The conversation focuses on LegalMation's products, overcoming resistance to adopting new legal tech, and predictions for the future evolution of legal service delivery. Suh provides background on founding...

In this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert have an illuminating discussion with Christina Wojcik, the new Managing Director of Corporate for LexFusion. Christina has over 20 years of experience pioneering innovation in the legal services and technology space. The conversation covers Christina's diverse background and journey into legal tech, including formative experiences at companies like Pangea3, IBM, Seal Software, and Citi. She shares key lessons...

This episode of The Geek in Review podcast provides an in-depth look at how the AI assistant Paxton, created by Tanguy Chau and Mike Ulin, is transforming legal work. The hosts speak with the founders of Paxton to explore the pain points their technology aims to solve and how generative AI can enhance lawyers' capabilities. Tanguy and Mike discuss their backgrounds in AI, regulatory compliance, venture capital, and management consulting. This diverse experience informed their vision for...

On this episode of The Geek in Review podcast, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interview Kris Martin, Executive Vice President at Harbor, to discuss innovation, AI, and the future of technology in the legal industry. They open the show by talking about Harbor's upcoming LINKS conference and its keynote focused on exploring human potential in the age of AI. Kris provides background on how the conference originated from an annual survey Harbor conducts to take the pulse of the legal...

This week we are joined by Brandon Wiebe, General Counsel and Head of Privacy at Transcend. Brandon discusses the company's mission to develop privacy and AI solutions. He outlines the evolution from manual governance to technical solutions integrated into data systems. Transcend saw a need for more technical privacy and AI governance as data processing advanced across organizations. Wiebe provides examples of AI governance challenges, such as engineering teams using GitHub Copilot and...

This week on The Geek in Review, hosts Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer spoke with Katie DeBord and Kristin Zmrhal, two vice presidents from legal tech company DISCO. Greg kicked off the episode by discussing his recent work with a Houston nonprofit called Project Remix Ventures that helps at-risk youth. He took their leader on a visit to innovation hub The Ion to showcase reinventing old spaces for new purposes, like DISCO has done with legal tech. The hosts then welcomed Katie DeBord, who...

In this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer interview three guests from UK law firm Travers Smith about their work on AI: Chief Technology Officer Oliver Bethel, Director of Legal Technology Sean Curran, and AI Manager Sam Lansley. They discuss Travers Smith's approach to testing and applying AI tools like generative models. A key focus is finding ways to safely leverage AI while mitigating risks like copyright issues and hallucination. Travers Smith built...

In this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interview Laura Leopard, founder and CEO of Leopard Solutions, about succession planning challenges facing law firms. Leopard explains that many firms have partners nearing retirement age but no concrete plans for transitioning clients and leadership. This lack of succession planning threatens law firms' futures. Laura mentions that to make matters worse, the path to equity partnership is getting longer, making it...

The Geek in Review podcast hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interviewed Nicole Clark, CEO of Trellis, about their new Law Firm Intelligence tool (LFI). This tool allows law firms to analyze aggregated and normalized state trial court data to gain competitive intelligence across cases, practice areas, and performance. Collecting this unstructured data from county courts is very challenging, but provides valuable business insights. The Law Firm Intelligence tool enables firms to identify...

Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle of HyperDraft, return to The Geek in Review podcast to provide an update on the state of generative AI in the legal industry. It has been 6 months since their last appearance, when the AI Hype Cycle was on the rise. We wanted to get them back on the show to see where we are on that hype cycle at the moment. While hype around tools like ChatGPT has started to level off, Tony and Ashley note there is still a lot of misinformation and unrealistic expectations about...

The Geek in Review podcast welcomed Kriti Sharma, Chief Product Officer of Legal Tech at Thomson Reuters, to discuss AI and ethics in the legal industry. Kriti talks to us about the importance of diversity at Thomson Reuters and how it impacts product development. She explained TR's approach to developing AI focused on augmenting human skills rather than full automation. Kriti also discusses the need for more regulation around AI and the shift towards human skills as AI takes on more...

In this episode of The Geek in Review podcast, host Marlene Gebauer and co-host Greg Lambert discuss cybersecurity challenges with guests Jordan Ellington, founder of SessionGuardian, Oren Leib, Vice President of Growth and Partnership at SessionGuardian, and Trisha Sircar, partner and chief privacy officer at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP. Ellington explains that the impetus for creating SessionGuardian came from working with a law firm to secure their work with eDiscovery vendors and contract...

For the Fourth of July week, we thought we'd do something fun and probably a little weird. Greg spoke with an AI guest named Justis for this episode. Justis, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, was able to have a natural conversation with Greg and provide insightful perspectives on the use of generative AI in the legal industry, specifically in law firms. In the first part of their discussion, Justis gave an overview of the legal industry's interest in and uncertainty around adopting generative AI....

Isha Marathe, a tech reporter for American Lawyer Media, joined the podcast to discuss her recent article on how deep fake technology is coming to litigation and whether the legal system is prepared. Deep fakes are hyper-realistic images, videos or audio created using artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate fake content. They are easy and inexpensive to create but difficult to detect. Marathe believes deep fakes have the potential to severely impact the integrity of evidence and the...

Our guest this week is Kristina Satkunas, Director of Analytic Consulting at LexisNexis. Kristina discusses the recently released LexisNexis CounselLink Enterprise Legal Management Trends Report for 2023. This annual report provides insights and benchmarks on key metrics related to corporate legal spending and outside counsel relationships. The 2023 report found that law firm hourly rates increased 4.5% over the past year, the highest year-over-year increase in the 10 years LexisNexis has...

This week on The Geek in Review, Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert talk with Curt Meltzer, principal of Meltzer Consulting, LLC. Meltzer has over 40 years of experience in the legal and legal tech industry. He discusses his interest in pro bono and community outreach programs in law firms and legal tech companies. He notes that while 95% of AmLaw 200 law firms highlight pro bono work on their websites, many legal tech companies do not prioritize these efforts. Meltzer emphasizes that pro bono...

This week we bring in Christian Lang, the CEO and founder of LEGA, a company that provides a secure platform for law firms and legal departments to safely implement and govern the use of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3, Bard, and Claude. Christian talks with us about why he started LEGA, the value LEGA provides to law firms and legal departments, the challenges around security, confidentiality, and other issues as LLMs become more widely used, and how LEGA helps solve those...