Best of 2023: On Taking Typing out of Litigation (Automating Legal Drafting with AI) Nathan Walter (CEO Briefpoint)

Despite much ballyhoo and countless articles about them, alternative fee arrangements, or AFAs, have yet to gain widespread traction and the billable hour still reigns supreme for legal billing.

Enter the Leigh brothers, Scott and Digby, and their new legal tech startup, AltFee. The company’s stated goal is encouraging legal professionals to break free of hourly pricing and move to AFAs by using the app to help scope and price legal projects.

The brothers point out that the traditional billable hour pricing model doesn't provide certainty for clients and that AFAs will become more important with increasing use of AI which will likely reduce billable hours. They explain how Altfee offers a solution by providing a foundation for law firms to operate on an alternative fee model. The app helps users scope, price and audit their fees.

Scott and Digby also delve into the concept of 'value billing', explaining that it involves charging fees based on the value of the service provided to the client, rather than strictly on the time spent. They underline the importance of taking both task-based considerations and value-based considerations into account while pricing.

Learn more about Scott and Digby.

Things We Talk About in this Episode

Directory of Law Firms Offering Alternative Fees

Episode Credits

Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock

Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI

This episode is a conversation with Spellbook co-founder Scott Stevenson about intersection of technology and creativity. Spellbook is a AI contract co-pilot for transactional lawyers that plugs into Microsoft Word. Despite founding a legal technology company, Scott is not a lawyer but is computer engineer by training.

As a kid Scott was into video games and in fourth grade he talked his parents into getting him a computer because he wanted to figure out how to create them. By middle school he was building websites and eventually landed an internship at Electronic Arts.

Scott is also interested in electronic music and he launched his first start up, Mune, with a music professor, to create a whole new musical instrument that combined the power of digital music with an acoustic instrument. It was during his time at Mune that Scott started to think about building a legal tech company.

After he got his first legal bill he figured there might be a more efficient and less expensive way to do legal work. So he and lawyer buddy founded Rally, a document automation and templating engine for law firms which later begat Spellbook, but he funny thing about Spellbook, it was originally conceived as a marketing idea to generate leads for Rally.

John Grant talks about how legal teams can adopt Agile and Kanban project management methodologies to optimize workflows, correct bottlenecks and increase client satisfaction. John is a lawyer and the founder of The Agile Attorney consultancy.

As John explains, the traditional project management method is waterfall. A technique often used by technology companies, involving a sequential approach where each stage is dependent on the completion of the previous one.

But John is a proponent of the newer, Agile methodology, which emerged from the software development community. It is a flexible approach where tasks are broken down into small increments with minimal planning, and processes are iterative. Agile is one of John’s favorites because he believes it is well suited for legal work.

John also talks about the value of a Kanban board, a visual tool used to manage work at various stages of a process. It typically includes columns such as “To Do,” “Doing,” and “Done”.

So why is he so into project management methodologies? Because despite coming from a long line of lawyers, before he went to law school, he first worked in tech.

At an early age, Feargus MacDaeid, the founder of legal tech company Definely, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, which is a rare eye disease that breaks down cells in the retina slowly over time causing vision loss.

Until he got to college to study computer science, Feargus’ vision was decent, but at university, it began to deteriorate and eventually went blind. 

After college he landed a couple of tech jobs but ultimately decided to go to law school. 

After law school, Feargus took jobs at two Magic Circle Firms in London, Allen & Overy and Freshfields where he was working on mergers and acquisitions.  Because of his visual impairment, Feargus had to develop hacks in the software he used, like custom keyboard shortcuts, to get his job done.

He met his Definely co-founder, Nnamdi Emelifeonwu, at Freshfields when the two of them were working on the same deal. As Feargus explains it, his soon to be co-founder was the first colleague that actually took an interest in how Feargus accomplished his work and marveled that he was getting it done. 

The two figured there had to be a better way for Feargus to work on contracts, but the duo figured out pretty quickly there really wasn’t and Definely was born.

Definely is a suite of tools that helps lawyers accomplish the tedious tasks relating to the drafting of contracts. As the company describes it, they create legal tech solutions to free lawyers from frustrating, repetitive tasks, so they can get back to the work that matters.

This episode is a conversation with Katherine Porter about her journey from practicing law to founding her own company, Resourceful Lawyer which is a consultancy helping legal teams implement project management techniques into their legal work.

Katherine discusses her unique approach to problem-solving in the legal field, which involves design thinking and project management principles. Katherine explains the importance of lawyers understanding client needs, the process of workflow mapping, and the challenges of implementing new processes in law firms.

Katherine also emphasizes that empathy and understanding the client journey is a must when designing effective legal services. In the end, she also gives some real world tips about where to begin working in project management principles into legal practice.

As we close out 2023, we are replaying some of our most listened to episodes.

Not surprisingly, AI was the hot topic this year and as its acceptance grows, so to tough questions, like whether AI developers need permission to use copyrighted works and other IP before using it to train artificial intelligence?

In a very popular episode, Professor Mark Lemley of Stanford explained whey he does not think so because he believes that copyrighted works used to train AI fall should under the fair use exception to copyright law.

Professor Lemley is the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, an author of seven books and more than 130 articles on intellectual property, antitrust and related areas of the law. He is also a co-founder of Lex Machina and most recently of Counsel to Lex Lumina, a boutique IP law firm.

Professor Lemley argues that AI companies should be permitted to use copyrighted works to train AI models without first getting permission from owners because of the benefits AI will yield and the impossibility of tracking down millions of copyright owners to get permission. He also believes that it is a fair use for AI developers to use works protected by intellectual property laws to train artificial intelligence models because such a use is transformative and the more data available to the AI, the more accurate it will be.

In one of 2023's most listened to episodes, Nathan Walter, founder of Briefpoint, joins Technically Legal to explain how his company is using technology and artificial intelligence to automate routine legal drafting tasks. 

A good portion of lawyers’ time and those helping them is copying or re-using prior work. This is especially true in litigation and especially in discovery. 

Thankfully more and more apps have been developed that help automate the creation of legal documents. Historically, these programs have been form based and users populated documents by selecting choices from a menu.

But with advances in generative AI maybe form based software is unneeded. That’s what Briefpoint is banking on.

Briefpoint uses tech to analyze legal documents, like interrogatories and document requests, and then generates preliminary responses to give legal teams a head start on drafting.

As Nathan explains, if more legal processes are automated and augmented with AI, it will bring legal fees down and free up lawyers to focus on the complicated stuff rather than cutting and pasting prior work product.

In the most listened to episode of 2023, Zach Abramowitz makes a repeat appearance on Technically Legal to talk generative AI (like OpenAI) and its impact on legal technology adoption.

Zach is a keen observer of legal tech and its trends.  If you want to keep tabs on up and coming tech geared for legal, Zach is a good person to follow. 

He started is career at a large New York law firm where he worked on mergers and acquisitions. From there he launched his own tech company called Reply All and his latest venture, Killer Whale Strategies, is a consultancy that works with law firms and legal departments to find and utilize technology to disrupt the way traditional legal work is done.

Zach has always been a strong proponent of using artificial intelligence in the legal industry, but after the release of ChatGPT and the growth of other generative AI platforms, he believes it might be the catalyst that finally expedites legal tech adoption.

Zach explains why he thinks generative AI could make legal services cheaper, less profitable for service providers and on a timeline that is faster than most might think.

In this episode, trial attorney, mediator and Web3 believer Mitch Jackson talks about the future of mediation, dispute resolution and the law in a Web3 world.

Mitch is a long time litigator and a name partner at Orange County, California based Jackson and Wilson. He also maintains a busy mediation practice and is passionate about the positive impact new technologies can have on the practice of law.

Mitch talks about how he uses AI to facilitate mediations and his use of virtual reality to engage with clients in the metaverse. He gives a glimpse of what dispute resolution could look like in the future. He thinks cases might converted into digital files that parties interact with on a blockchain and that AI could be consulted about potential resolutions.

Crypto lawyer Nelson Rosario discuses the legal, regulatory and political landscape of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency.

We also get an update from TurnSignl CEO Jazz Hampton about his company’s progress since he was last on the show.

Nelson started out as an intellectual property lawyer but caught the crypto bug in law school. His boutique law firm Rosario Tech Law, focuses on servicing crypto and emerging technology companies that are working to change in the way we all interact with each other and deal with privacy and power.

Although IP is still a significant part of his practice, Nelson’s firm provides those companies with strategic counseling, general outside services and assistance with privacy issues.

Before he went to law school he was an election official in Florida and worked to streamline voter registration rolls and how his county processed absentee ballots.

Nelson discusses the potential impact blockchain technology may or may not have on elections, the political and regulatory ramifications of the recent U.S. sanctions against crypto “mixer” Tornado Cash and how blockchain technology might change certain areas of the law.