How AI can transform and improve our legal system #61

Podcast
Written by Nick Halaris

Hi Everyone and Welcome Back!

This week on The Nick Halaris Show we are featuring Pablo Arredondo, the Vice President of CoCounsel at Thomson Reuters, a revolutionary AI-driven legal service.  Pablo, one of my closest friends from Stanford Law School, is a legal tech entrepreneur with an incredible track record of success.  He’s been at the forefront of the industry for fifteen years, co-founded Casetext in 2013, which sold to Thompson Reuters earlier this year, and has played a huge role in the development of AI tools for the legal world.       

Ready to dive in? Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform.

I wanted to have Pablo on the show to explore just how powerful these new AI technologies are, see where the legal industry is headed, and examine their potential impacts on our economy, society, and culture.  As you’ll see in the episode, Pablo is a very dynamic and deep thinker and a key thought leader in the burgeoning AI legal tech world.

Tune in to this fascinating episode to learn:

  • What Co-Counsel’s Legal AI can do and why we should all be so excited by it

  • Why AI should improve issues of access and affordability in legal services and potentially address other systemic issues plaguing the industry / justice system

  • Why AI technology is fundamentally deflationary but not necessarily destructive when it comes to jobs

  • What “slop” is and why we should care about it

    &

  • Much, much more 

Stay tuned to the end to hear some highlights from Pablo’s entrepreneurial journey and learn why he thinks that people losing the ability to write could be one of the biggest downsides of the rise of AI.

As always, I hope you all enjoy this episode.  Thanks for tuning in!     

Love this episode? Please rate, subscribe, and review on your favorite podcast platform to help more users find our show. 🙏 Thank you

Summary
Pablo Arredondo, VP of Co-Counsel at Thomson Reuters, discusses the impact of AI in the legal industry. He explains how language models like BERT and GPT-3 have revolutionized legal research and analysis. Co-Counsel, a company acquired by Thomson Reuters, focuses on building AI-powered tools for various legal tasks such as case law research, deposition preparation, legal drafting, and e-discovery. Arredondo believes that AI will make legal services more affordable and accessible, leading to a drop in prices. He also highlights the potential of AI in compliance monitoring and improving access to justice. However, he expresses concerns about the loss of writing skills and the unequal access to AI technology. The conversation explores the potential role of AI in the legal industry and the need for resources and oversight in the criminal justice system. It discusses the use of AI in e-discovery projects and the ability to uncover bribery and other illegal activities. The conversation also highlights the importance of AI in addressing backlogs of applications, such as those in the Innocence Project. However, there are concerns about the potential for AI-generated content to be inaccurate or misleading, leading to the need for human oversight. The conversation touches on the impact of AI on writing and the potential for information pollution. The conversation concludes with a discussion on AI safety and the potential socioeconomic impacts of AI.

Keywords
AI, legal industry, language models, BERT, GPT-3, legal research, Co-Counsel, Thomson Reuters, affordable legal services, compliance monitoring, access to justice, AI, legal industry, criminal justice system, e-discovery, bribery, oversight, backlogs, Innocence Project, human oversight, AI-generated content, writing, information pollution, global cooperation, AI governance, AI safety, socioeconomic impacts

Takeaways

  • Language models like BERT and GPT-3 have had a profound impact on the legal industry, revolutionizing legal research and analysis.

  • Co-Counsel, a company acquired by Thomson Reuters, focuses on building AI-powered tools for various legal tasks.

  • AI has the potential to make legal services more affordable and accessible, leading to a drop in prices.

  • AI can be used for compliance monitoring and improving access to justice.

  • There are concerns about the loss of writing skills and the unequal access to AI technology in the legal industry. AI can play a role in e-discovery projects and uncovering illegal activities in the legal industry.

  • AI can help address backlogs of applications, such as those in the Innocence Project, but human oversight is crucial.

  • There are concerns about the accuracy and potential misinformation of AI-generated content, highlighting the need for human oversight.

  • The future of AI holds the potential for long-horizon tasks, reasoning, and multi-step capabilities.

  • Global cooperation is important in AI governance, and collaboration can lead to better AI models and applications.

  • The socioeconomic impacts of AI, including job disruption, need to be considered and addressed.

  • AI safety is a topic of debate, with concerns about the potential for AI to surpass human capabilities and the need for regulation and oversight.


Sound Bites

  • "Language models have revolutionized legal research."

  • "AI has the potential to make legal services more affordable."

  • "AI can assist in cleaning up messy document management systems."

  • "We've been doing e-discovery projects, you go find bribery or go find this or that, right?"

  • "There are these huge backlogs of applications that haven't even been looked at."

  • "The most important oversight is a human."


Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
03:11 Revolutionizing Legal Research with Language Models
08:01 Building AI-Powered Tools for Legal Tasks
13:04 Improving Document Management Systems with AI
19:30 The Future of AI in the Legal Industry
22:20 AI for Compliance Monitoring and Access to Justice
26:06 Concerns about the Impact of AI
28:07 The Role of AI in the Legal Industry
30:30 The Importance of Human Oversight in AI-generated Content
34:40 Global Cooperation in AI Governance
37:37 Considering the Socioeconomic Impacts of AI
39:58 Debating AI Safety and the Need for Regulation

 

Nick Halaris

I’ve been fascinated by investing for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I would read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Barron’s, pouring over the data tables, stories and interviews with a passion and an insatiable kind of curiosity. As I grew into adulthood, I struggled to find the right outlet and channel for this passion and spent much of my twenties wandering and trying out different things. I had a very brief career as an attorney, spent some time as a strategy and leadership consultant for big multinational companies, failed in an attempt to start a hedge fund, and even ended up helping run a scrap metal recycling operation for a while.

At the age of 30 though, I took my stand. I made up my mind that no matter what I was going to be an entrepreneurial investor. As crazy as it sounds, I owe everything in my life to this one foundational decision—even my amazing wife and my beautiful kids. I don’t think I would ever have met Alicia had I not made this one choice. At that moment in time, the financial world had just been devastated by the crash in the housing market and the near systemic failure of the global banking system that followed. I’ve always had a contrarian bent to my investment thinking; so, to me the carnage in real estate looked like an opportunity.

It all started with one house in Compton California. The business plan was simple: buy a distressed foreclosed home from a bank, bring it back to life with a big renovation and sell it to a first-time homebuyer. Things progressed slowly as they tend to do with real estate. In the first years of this, I think I did 6-7 homes. But then after plugging away day-by-day, suddenly it seemed, things just came together. I found the right investors and the right loans and the right deals and in just a few short years I ended up investing in over 100 such transactions, building a portfolio of almost 2,500 multifamily units and creating a fully vertically integrated real estate company with almost 100 employees.

Fast forward to today and I’m running the second evolution of my entrepreneurial investing career and having so much fun that I have to stop and remind myself that this is all real.

http://www.nickhalaris.com
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