Announcer  0:00  
Jeff, welcome to the California appellate podcast, a discussion of timely trial tips and the latest cases and news coming from the California Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court. And now your hosts, Tim Kowal and Jeff Lewis, welcome everyone.

Jeff Lewis  0:18 
I am Jeff Lewis

Tim Kowal  0:19 
and I'm Tim Kowal. Both Jeff and I are certified appellate specialists, and as uncertified podcast co hosts, we try to bring our audience of trial and appellate attorneys some news and insights they can use in their practice. As always. If you find this podcast helpful, please recommend it to a colleague.

Jeff Lewis  0:32 
Yeah, if it's not unhelpful, go ahead and send it to your opposing counsel. All right,

Tim Kowal  0:37 
Jeff, one of the products we talk about legal tech a lot, one of the products that I've mentioned several times is type law, and so today, we're very pleased to welcome the co founder and CEO of type law to the show. Chris drawla. Chris has spent his entire life at the intersection of technology and law. He grew up in Silicon Valley during the computer boom and graduated from USC and then earned a JD from UC law San Francisco, formerly UC Hastings today, type laws helped more than 1000 attorneys prepare 10,000 plus appellate and trial briefs for all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of the United States. And recognition of type laws, innovation and contribution to the legal community drama, was selected as a 2023 fast case 50 honoree, excited to talk about what type law is, because a lot of attorneys have never used it, and it can magically transform their practice. But thank you for joining us on the podcast today. Chris,

Chris Dralla  1:30 
yeah. Tim, Jeff, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here, and really appreciative for you letting me tell my story a little bit. Yeah, and

Tim Kowal  1:37  
let's, let's get right into that. Here's a little bit of the type law origin story that I found online. So I'll tell our audience, and then I'll ask you to expand and explain a little bit. In 2010 you opened your own practice, and you found yourself increasingly frustrated by the monotony of brief formatting and table building, acutely aware of how time spent on technical details could be better spent refining the arguments. I don't know. Jeff, I can't relate to that at all. And then Chris, you found ways to automate this pro process. And in 2014 you got together with the technologist, Andrew Baker, to create type law to empower other legal professionals to do the same thing that you would discover to do in automating this this workflow, but done at scale. So Chris, with that in mind, what is type law?

Chris Dralla  2:26  
Yeah, well, type law is a service for lawyers who are writing briefs to court. And those lawyers, as you mentioned, they need to assemble evidence and index it properly. They need to make sure their citations are properly formatted. And they need to do, they need to do a lot of busy work, table building, document formatting, compliance, automation. And as a lawyer myself, I think I noted I was doing about 25% of my time was doing work that wasn't legal research. Wasn't refining an argument, but it was making sure the argument fit for whatever standard I needed it to be. And as you mentioned, I grew up in Silicon Valley. My mom was a trial lawyer. My dad was in the technology universe, and I think in about second or third grade, my mom got her first computer. So I got into the business, sort of, so to speak, of helping people and lawyers prepare motions and briefs, you know, a long time ago, and I started understanding that lawyers needed to be lawyers and technology needed to be technology. But the two worlds did not interact with each other nicely, and so I went to law school. I came out in 2010 in the height of the recession, I was at a firm for two summers that was not a firm in 2010 and I found myself on my own, and I was working with a lot of San Francisco lawyers doing contract work, and so I was filing a lot of motions. I was doing a lot of appeals msjs, and along the way, I just started to have to do this stuff myself. And so having the background of software, and having the understanding of the business community here in Silicon Valley, and understanding the real problem which I wanted to solve, which is, I didn't want to do this. It should have been automated from the start. And why was I spending my time doing it?

Tim Kowal  4:07 
Yeah, I hear, I hear a little bit what you're saying. There is for big firm attorneys who can just farm all this out to their legal secretaries and paralegals. This problem might be invisible to them, but when you are doing contract work, or you're a solo attorney, and suddenly you're having to format a table of contents or a table of authorities. And you think, where did I? Did I miss something in law school? Why am I battling Microsoft Word instead of fighting my opposing counsel?

Chris Dralla  4:31  
So, yeah, so the math came out like this. I think it was like billing at around $300 an hour. And I, if I did it myself, was about 40 hours of non billable work, so I was taking about $10,000 off my bottom line. So I would hire someone to do it. Now, the cost to hire someone was 25 to 50 bucks an hour, and they were still also spending the 40 to 50 hours doing it, because there's just no one, no way around that. So it was two, 3000 4000 bucks per brief, per motion, per whatever on these bigger ones. Yes, average brief that we do is about 7000 words, you know, sites, about 30 different authorities, etc, etc. So if you're doing all the detail work that I wanted to do, because at the bottom line, my mom taught me, Your credibility is on the line here. When you sign your name to a document, you're representing a client, you're in front of a judge, you're going to be before. You're going to be in front of an opposing counsel that you're going to be before. Again, it's not just about this case. So the work you put in now when you sign that document has to be perfect. At Hastings or UC law stuff, they have a 10 error rule in their legal writing classes that if you have more than 10 technical errors, they fail you because they know if you fail, if you you know, miss your comma, miss your period, it matters. And so that sort of was ingrained into me from the beginning, and I was just that's the kind of quality of work that we wanted to allow our customers or I wanted to produce. And so it was either do it myself, send it out. And I think there's a couple other companies that sort of do this on an outsource basis, but again, you're paying two to five to $10,000 per case to get this stuff done. And I figured there was a better way to do it, and so I added software background. I understood that how kind of this could be organized in a very structured way. And I just started with the citations. I wanted to make sure they updated in real time. Moved over to the table of contents. I knew that could be dynamic and that could just be instantly created, because it's technology. Table of Contents should update and automate with the flow, and all this could be assembled. The last bit that I loved that when I was working at a firm was if I wanted to create a motion, I could just call up a secretary, and the shell was created for me. Now with my product, I just put a case name, and it goes to the court, pulls all the date, the details, if it knows it's a motion for summary judgment, it creates the declaration, it creates the notice of motion, creates all the shell paperwork in the appellate world. If you want to create our an appendix, it'll create that. If you need your table of your certificate of interest, parties, or you need cover page inserts, all this stuff is process driven and in our software. And I wanted it to just live and repeat. And once I did it, I wanted to scale it to everybody else. And so now it's sort of the genesis of the product. It exists for everyone.

Tim Kowal  7:03  
Okay, well, you're selling me now on another aspect of your product that I've told our audience, that that I have I started using a year or two ago, and now I'll never go back the type law product that generates the appellant's appendix, because any appellate attorney or trial attorney who has done a couple of appeals knows you have to put together the appendix. And you think that you're done with the brief when you finish the brief then and then you forget, oh god, I gotta assemble that, that terrible monstrosity, the appellant's appendix, with all of its indexes and continuous pagination that has to go through the proofs of service and take, take into account the caption pages and the index pages, and I'll have to have to be the right number of pages or the right number of megabytes per volume. And then if I decide, at the end of the brief writing process, oh my god, there's one more document I need to add. You have to start from scratch if you're doing it manually, and type law waves the magic wand and and takes all of that away. You upload it, and the indexes are created automatically. The pagination is done automatically. And if you decide you found that document that, oh yeah, I forgot to include that the beginning, you just upload it and type law on the fly. Instantaneously reshuffles everything. It's no must, no fuss. You no longer have to worry about doing all that at the beginning. So was that was the appellant's appendix creation process part of the original product, or is that added on later? Because that has just been the game changer for me. Well,

Chris Dralla  8:25 
first, that's great to hear. Yeah, I've looked it up. You came to we, you became a customer about a year ago. You have used us for that appellate dependence. You've done, you know, quite a few of them. And I can't, I'm hoping we've saved you hundreds of hours at this point, you know, if you easily, yeah, and all the points you've made about just you never know when it's over, so you want to be able to just re index and update, and have the ability to control it on the fly. And that's, that's sort of the lawyer in me is, like, I wanted that control and never had it. So that that's sort of, you know, the product we love that you use it and we love that you love using it. So that's great. It was the second product. The first product the first product was briefing. So I in law school now to, you know, I was writing the briefs. And so that's sort of where, you know, I wanted that quick assembly. The first thing that we, you know, every business is faced with, well, where do you go from here? And the thing that the number one request that our customers were saying, How can you do this with the appendix? We, you know, we know that we need to assemble these documents. And so it took us about, I don't know, three or four months. We worked with a couple of our core users who were kind of like yourself, just regularly filing in this. And you know, through that, we realized, okay, we can easily index this, that the other alphabetical, chronological pagination, it's so annoying how they how the court requires it. I wish we could do better with that. I think from the judicial level, we should have more technology adoption and make things a little more easy, easy, especially if we're going to have all these technical rules. But because they exist, we exist, and in that sense, yeah. So the first thing is briefing. The second thing was appendix. And now the third kind of generation, the thing that's going to exist next year, is the merging of the two. And so the idea is that you're filing an MSJ, and. You can either start it from the brief, you know, the outline process, you can start it, or you can start from the evidence collection process. And I think we're going to create a product and a process that allows you to just focus kind of, again, it's focusing you on what matters and taking away what doesn't. And so if you stick to a process, whether you start with your evidence, build your brief, build your declarations, or vice versa. It's up to you, and in between that we have the connected dots that we can set up for your practice. And so we, we sort of come in and we sort of look at what you're doing, and we can either do it on a customizable basis or on an ad hoc you just send it to us and follow our steps, and we get it done really quickly.

Tim Kowal  10:36  
And that's I'm I'm excited about the MSJ product that's going to be rolled out, I think, I think you said next year, but I wanted to just go back and understand a little bit better about the your first product, the brief process, or the brief product, is that, like the does that work on the web, or is that a standalone application? How does tell us a little bit about the mechanics of what does it look like for the users of type law when they decide, you know, I'm going to use type law to draft my brief so I don't have to fuss with all the citations and formatting and everything else. Yeah, so

Chris Dralla  11:07  
here, here's the pitch that we we tell, you know, lawyer, or lawyers, for the first time, is it's going to be a different process, but to save the most time, don't worry about formatting. Don't worry about updating your citations, and don't worry about building a cover page, a table of contents, table of authorities, proof of service, any of that, all of that stuff we take care of automatically and instantly. So if you want to save yourself the most, most amount of time and most amount of hassle, just don't do it. Send us a draft. You mean,

Tim Kowal  11:35 
you mean, all you have to do is just start writing your legal argument. Start drafting from

Chris Dralla  11:39 
introduction and stop drafting a conclusion and don't even do any formatting. Our software constructs your headings for you. We can, you know, itemize and nest your headings. We have a system that allows you to basically short sight. So if you know Brown versus Board of Education, you said, you know Brown v Board at symbol 25 it'll know, it'll pick it up and give it to blue book or Cal style, depending on whatever format or jurisdiction you're working on. Don't do any we do it for you. And so it's really just send us the draft of your document, Intro to conclusion, and we'll process it in our engine. It'll pick up the tables, it'll pick up the citations. It'll know the formatting, because we those are all guidelines that we we have. It knows the components, the cover page, what to look for, and it sends it back to you in a PDF form, ready to file, cover page, certificates, everything. But we're assuming you want to edit it. We assume you want it up until the last minute. You want your last word on the document, which is what I wanted, and so that's as a lawyer, the key feature of our product is you're going to get the PDF and then you edit it. You can click to edit, you'll go to our website and there's a text editor that is built just for legal writing. It's not word, it's not a standalone application. It's on the web. It's sort of like Google Docs. It's not unfamiliar to you. It's just but it's really just citations, headings and the argument, and then if you want to include evidence, it sort of naturally flows from there. So you can insert your documents with that brief, cite to those documents, and so you can also have a hyperlinked brief, and that's the last bit. Is, once we've formatted it to detail, we can add hyperlinks to the citations. And if you've done the appendix that the way you've done it, you can now cross reference your appendix and cite to specific evidence pages and bring the judge right to that page, because we'll host the document for you. So every file, every time you file it, you've got a brief that's digital, and the judge will be reading it on their iPad, and they'll be able to click to Exhibit C or appendix, appellants, index 216, and we'll get them right to where you want them.

Jeff Lewis  13:38  
Have you encountered any resistance from clerks or judges who wanted to click on a link, worried about malware or anything like

Chris Dralla  13:48  
that. With that, obviously, that's a concern of the court, and that's a concern of ours. And we make sure that you know we, our word is that you're not going to have malware. We make sure that we've worked with the courts. The courts know us. We I think we filed two or 3% of the briefs in California at this point, and they like what we do because we give it to them in a structured way. We give them how do they

Jeff Lewis  14:11  
know when they're getting a brief from you? It's a WordPress brief, as opposed to Jeff's, you know, home workshop in the

Chris Dralla  14:18  
basement. Yes, we can. We can put a word mark on it so they'll know. But it functionally by submitting it, by filing it, there's a lot of certifications you're making to the court, and one of them is that it's free of these five that you've prepared it. And so one of the values that we have to provide our customers is that we stand in your shoes with respect to that sort of thing. So every one of our customers gets a very, very specific level of support because we stand for you in your you know, we don't file it for you, but we know that our work is your credibility and we, you know, I'll put it this way, the courts love our product because they know that a type law brief has, Pro has, has no citation is going to be wrong. Citations are going to be hyperlinked to the source, to the pin page and where evidence is applied, it is going to cite to the pin page of the record. So the judge is just not going to be wasting time. So if you tell them,

Jeff Lewis  15:12 
yeah, and for the pinpoint site to the case, do you guys play nicely with either Westlaw or Lexus, or what kind of case comes up?

Chris Dralla  15:18 
We're using case text right now. We can play with any of okay, it's really up. We prefer, and the courts have preferred that anything that's outside of a paywall is better. So anything that because they're going to ultimately have to pull the case themselves and reference it in actual form, but to get them from here's here's the process, right? You file a brief, the clerks or the assistants are going to pull the tables. They're going to pull the table of authorities and get all the cases that they need to and then they're going to take the table of contents and they're going to read it and create their summaries off of it. And that sort of gets ripped off pro forma. And then all of a sudden they go in and they read your brief. And so the first pass, if you can get them to your point, and your point is credible, and they know you to be a credible attorney, and you're doing what you say you're doing, which is not nefarious, and you're actually helping the judge out here. You're actually helping the clerk out by getting them matching the case to your point, and specifically saving them time. They will appreciate it. They will find it that Oh, you are you mean business. You're not trying to dance around the issue here, and you've saved me time. We've talked to judges at lunches, we've talked to customers who talk about this, and it is a, you know, we can't make any promises here. We can't say anything, you know, that we can't deliver. But this is one of the key things that I think it goes overlooked by our customers and lawyers in general. Was making it easy for the judge and letting them know that you're credible is half of the half of the game here.

Tim Kowal  16:42  
So both Jeff and I are clear brief users, and so when you talk about type laws, ability to include hyperlink citations in the brief, that hyperlink directly to the fact record, you're talking about something that clear brief does as well, and that's something that Jeff and I are familiar with, but it sounds like type law does it does it in a little bit different way. Can you, can you speak to some of the, you know, the Compare and contrast between that somewhat competing product? I mean, there it's a different product, but it

Chris Dralla  17:10 
has, yeah, there it's, it's, I mean, certainly, I think the entrance to the game, we're similar products and competitive spaces, but we have different core user value propositions. And I think our user bases and customer base is probably be slightly different. We're sort of more of a hands on service. So if you need something done quickly, you know, we can get this. We can do the 40 hours of work in about under an hour. So if it's four o'clock and your deadline is five o'clock and you need to get the appendix assembled and put together, you kind of come to us with respect to, I have not used clear briefs product, so I don't know specifically. I mean, I assume table contents, table authorities, all this is done inside of Word. We are specifically outside of it. We want to give you a platform that you can use. You don't have to, you don't have to worry about how Word works, which is a frustration that I had. And so I wanted to strip all of word out and allow you to just be this is a process that is text editing, and that's what our why we keep it outside of word and in in the web. It's something that you can you don't have to install software for you, don't need updates for you, just come to us, and your workflow is kind of inside of the application that way.

Tim Kowal  18:16 
And on the other side of things, I think another, another competitor, more traditional competitor would be like, Council press, yeah, that you would go to and they, they will assemble your, your brief. And I don't, I don't know that they do the, I don't think they assemble the, the appendix from scratch, like, like type law will. But can you speak a little bit to the Compare and contrast between Council press? Yeah, yeah,

Chris Dralla  18:37 
Council press will be sort of the great. It's the analog, real world version of type. Let's we're a digital company and they're an analog company. And so I'm assuming that a lot of our customer overlap comes from like, if you wanted to outsource this work, you would, you'd probably traditionally have thought of Council press, and then now you're sort of starting to see that we are a company that can come in there, do it better, a little better, a little faster and a little cheaper, better in the sense that we we can do technologically different things we employ AI. We have that editing and turnaround feature that Council press, I don't think, has, that are still kind of a human element to what they do faster, our turnaround is under an hour and cheaper. We were generally under $2,000 for the complete brief in appendix, and I know that their product does not offer a No,

Jeff Lewis  19:30  
not for many years. Hey, if you're at the high end of the courts and you're filing a paper product with the US Supreme Court, some sort of amicus brief or petition, is there any step in the process where it makes sense to go with your you folks,

Chris Dralla  19:44  
absolutely so that we've, we've done a number of briefs. We've done a number of positions for cert. Absolutely it's so our process again, to get to the Supreme Court. That's one of the most technically detailed briefs you're going to file in your life. It's going to be the most important brief you're going to file in your life. There's no room for error there. I don't know if you want to spend the 15 to 100 hours it's going to take for you to understand the rules of formatting and procedure at the Supreme Court level. So starting from there, the beginning click to you can at with type law click new Supreme court brief. Your shells come out clean day one, so you can start writing your brief, have it formatted and rendered to whatever the SCOTUS format is the you know, it's, it's a printed that what? It's a very specific format that not a lot of people are out of output. We can do like you literally can get that done in 15 minutes or less. Send us the intro to conclusion, we'll format it to whatever court rules it is. So for SCOTUS, for ninth circuit, for the big, important ones where that detailing and formatting is so important, done in an instant. No work, yeah.

Jeff Lewis  20:51 
And then at the end of the process, do you hand me back the brief? Or do you work with vendors who can print it out and do the rest of the work? In terms of getting

Chris Dralla  20:58  
we send it right back. You send it right back to you. Okay, we assume go through true filing. We are talking about partnering with Clio in that sense, they have their start there. They have a filing component for some of our customers. That's something customer that's the second most asked for. Feature of our product is, hey, you've done it perfectly. I don't have to make a change. Send it to them like we're that's part of your you know, notice your service requirements. We can get you all the way from right to that point, but we don't do the filing and service yet. Now, is that Clio Con this year? Were you there? We have not gone. We are a not stealth, but we are very tight. We work closely with our customers and try to keep it very low key and work off referrals that way Boston next year? Cleo, yeah, I think next year we're going to start emerging. We'll be there. Yeah. And we'd love to kind of meet our customers and anybody who goes out there. We'd love to know more. We're starting to emerge more from our California and federal markets and into the different states and pretty much across the country.

Tim Kowal  21:56  
Our lawyers. Do you find that lawyers embrace what type law can do for them, or do you find that you have a better time talking with their legal assistants and paralegals, who often bear the brunt of having to prepare these documents? Yeah,

Chris Dralla  22:09  
so we we are aware of the various different different dynamics that that exist in the different types of firms we we love working with lawyers. It's been really cool to see type law be a lawyer product and deliver technology to the lawyer. I grew up in a as I mentioned, my mom was a trial lawyer for 40 years, until in Santa Clara, there was a lot of work that was manual that she had to shelve off to other people that just took time. And so the efficiency of the business never made sense to me when I went into practice myself. I didn't want to send that work away. I know that there are some lawyers that that really like, you know, being able to delegate all that stuff, but I wanted to live quickly within the document, so I built it, thinking, lawyers want this. It's just the technology doesn't work for them. And lo and behold, I'd say 80% of our use case is the lawyer themselves, and, you know, mostly a partner, 40, 5060, maybe not technologically advanced, but we've made it a really easy, compelling product that they can use themselves. And they say to me, I know I don't want to have I don't have to send this up anymore. I this would be a week for me to get this back before I could edit this, or overnight. Or, you know, I don't trust the work that this person does. I get to do it instantly with your product right then and there, and I just move on to the next thing. And that's important for

Jeff Lewis  23:32 
lawyering. Did I hear you say that you folks charge a per brief? Or is it a flat fee for a month? Or what? How do you Yeah, our

Chris Dralla  23:38  
typical, our typical is a per order per fee basis. I think it's 895, at the appellate level, either for a brief or an appendix. And that's the flat fee. So everything included, we it's a little more if you rush it, if you need it like that minute that day, our standard delivery time is next business day. But if you need it today, it's a little more, and then it's a little more if we do the hyperlinking and the evidence prep for you. So I think all in usually it's about 120 200 we'll build the appendix. We'll hyperlink your authorities, we'll build your table of contents, do all the formatting. We'll build, you know, cover page, proof of service, assemble all the inputs for you and get it back to you ready to file state. Another an hour, and then if you want it next business day, but you don't need all that stuff, I think it's about 895, and that five, and that's our standard order. If you file this a lot, and you have a practice that wants to incorporate your own process with us, we do ad hoc stuff where, you know, we do retainer stripe type work. We do custom workflows. So it's just a function of kind of what your firm's needs are. But for most people that are just jumping into a particular court, they don't file there too much, and they just want a little bit of assistance. Come to us one off, if you're filing in a court a bunch, and you know what you want, but you want a little bit more automation and customization. That's a different product and a different service. So we have a number of different ways to get you based on how, what, how, how much work you're doing in a given year.

Tim Kowal  24:58  
Now, when you started type. In 2014 that's about 10 years ago. That was before the AI phrase, you know, AI and chat GPT was on everyone, everyone's lips, not until, you know, several years later, is type law, you know, is type law AI powered in a way? Or is it part of, you know? Is it something different?

Chris Dralla  25:18 
Yeah, no, we are definitely AI. We are not using generative AI, which is kind of the chatgpt technology of the moment. So to speak, we use natural language processing to solve the kind of discrete skills that editing a legal brief would need. So you know, we're thinking about, is this a citation? Is it not a citation? Where does the sentence start, what citation is this? What form should it be? These are all things that are good for machine learning, good for natural language processing, but we're not asking it to do research for you. We're not asking we expect you to do the research. I we want the technology to do the rote work that we know it can do, like if we know there's really no optionality here, you shouldn't have to do it. If there is optionality here, we think that's the core function of your job, and we want to support you to do it, but we don't want to compete with that.

Tim Kowal  26:08  
Yeah, this is the kind of I want to say it's not bleeding edge in terms of, you know, gender, AI, is like bleeding edge. This seems like a tool that should have been out a long, long time ago, frankly, but I'm glad you, I'm glad you did it, because it was something that, as someone with with a with somewhat of a tech background, I remember when I started my practice in 2007 and for years, you know, laboring in the trenches format Word documents, I thought, we've not figured out a way around this yet. And it took many, many years for type law to get around to it. And now we have all these other tools that are starting to make attorneys realize where their talent lay, and it's not in wrestling with Microsoft Word documents,

Chris Dralla  26:51 
yeah, and when we started, I think in the first two or three years, 40% of our customers documents were in Word Perfect format, and we got it because those we when we talked to and those customers were like, listen, it gets the job done. Like, and that's when we started understanding we're in the business of selling assurance. You know, our customers come to type law because they know they can get the job done. And I was like, oh, that's what I was asking for as a lawyer all along, because I know, again, I'm signing the document. I'm filing it to court. My reputation is on the line. So all that stress and anxiety of over why? You gotta abbreviate Association and, you know, italicize this it matters. And you know that stress is important, and it's there for a reason, and we're sort of trying to eliminate it as best we can. Let

Tim Kowal  27:46  
me ask you one, one nit picky question about you. Mentioned that lawyers like to have control over their briefs until the minute they file it. You know, they're changing little things here and there. One of the things that I always find when I'm doing my last review, you know, I have my paralegal, okay, turn into a PDF and then give it to me for one more spot check, because you always find more issues after it's PDF. And then you find more issues after it's filed, of course, but one of the issues I find once it's PDF is that there are headings that will break across two different pages since I say, send it back. Okay, you know, enable

Chris Dralla  28:18  
the key together orphan and window control is a pain. One of the details right, every time in, type law automatically resolved. You'll never have to think of it again.

Tim Kowal  28:29  
Yeah, done good. Okay. And then, and then lastly, I wanted to circle back around to this new product that type law is going to roll out next year, about preparing msjs, and you know this, preparing trial, any trial documents, just simple motion with a declaration with a couple of supporting exhibits, can be a pain, because you might decide, oh, you know, I need to add another exhibit and it chronologically. It needs to go before the second exhibit. So therefore all my exhibit numbering needs to be changed throughout the brief, and that can be a headache, and it gets exponentially more so the more evidence that you're adding. And so if you can have one integrated document and not have to worry about all of the authenticating the exhibits and numbering the exhibits and having it all work together, right with your citations, and then that process becomes exponentially more difficult when you have an MSJ with the separate statement, and all the evidence has to be in the separate statement, and then you refer in the brief to the separate statement and not to the individual exhibits. And then when you change any one thing there, it just becomes a nightmare. And so I think the attorney who writes the brief, if you're trying to also manage all of that, you can't put your you just go on tilt. It's just too much to manage. So talk about how you're going to take all that headache away. Yeah, I

Chris Dralla  29:47  
mean, that's you define the use case. We go. I talked to my engineer specifically about that's it like we have a bunch of evidence. So we built it originally at the motion scale. So if you have a motion and you want to create it. Declaration you want to create your evidence exhibit says you've been through a product with the evidence side of things, and you want to create the brief and reference it all and have it update. We can do that. No problem right now. The product that we're building is specifically for the MSJ that sits on top of that, because you do have that separate statement, and you do have that, well, you it's a collection of evidence. And so our product's going to start with the assembly of evidence and getting your documents there. Once you have that, it bleeds into a process of creating a separate statement. Now

Tim Kowal  30:31  
are you uploading your exhibits to type law? You

Chris Dralla  30:35 
drop as you kind of as you would create an appendix. You just give it think about your individual files, you have to assemble the record the documents that you're going to be preparing yourself. So that's the kind of work that we need from you, is give us the documents. Just drop into the type law, organize it into your evidence listings. You can drag and drop, reassemble it'll update whenever. But we're creating objects in our workspace now that are tied to those documents. So when you move them, they move with it. So now the next step is you're creating your separate statement. Separate statement, and in Word, you've got to deal with all those text box and the tabbing and all that nonsense. Just write out your doc, your separate statements, and reference that the evidence. And if you need to add more evidence, easy process to upload a document and tie it referentially in there. Next

Tim Kowal  31:17 
are you doing when you're when the attorney is drafting this? Are you? Are you drafting it all? Just, just kind of ad hoc, okay, Jones, declaration, the the bylaws exhibit. And can you do it that, and it'll get you together. Yeah, you

Chris Dralla  31:32  
can do that right now. You can do that. So we have a declaration tool, right? So if I was filing just a regular motion, I wanted to start with the declaration, just to in terms of organizing the evidence, create notice of, you know, create the document series of motion, draw a motion for summary judgment, go and then it knows that we've got to create a notice. We've got to create a memorandum in support, and, at a minimum, a declaration in support of, etc. And so those shells come out. And in the declaration shell. It's meant to be a declaration, so it's just a list of statements that you do. And as a declaration, you add evidence to it, and it stores it within that project setting. So it's a project based automation. And then once you've got your so in the in the motion for separate judgment phase, we've collected your evidence, you've prepared your separate statement, you go into writing the brief. Your statement of facts is already written. It's already citing the document. The evidence for you can go in and retool and edit it and edit it there, but we've gotten you launched to the point that you need to be and then from there, it's just filling out the details, really putting into your fine touches, and hitting Publish. And then you've got it'll download. You've got a notice of motion in a PDF form. You've got your declaration, you've got the evidence all chronologically and alphabetically, indexed up. You've got your declarations, one or, you know, however many you need. And then the meat of what we do is in that brief and that memorandum, which is a editing process. And then with all that, it's just tied together.

Tim Kowal  32:58  
Let me give you a for instance, what if? What if you decide when you're, you know, when you're 75% done drafting that that okay, you know, I need to cite to the bylaws. And I said that Jones was going to authenticate that. But it turns out Jones can't lay the foundation for that. Smith has to lay the foundation for that. Now, do I have to, you know, you change all the references from Jones to Smith?

Chris Dralla  33:18  
No, you get a new declaration. And then what I'm assuming you're creating a new declaration for Smith or Smith, Smith or Jones. I forget at this point, but the new declaration you that's part of your series of documents that you're ultimately going to file. That's so I think of it for not creating

Tim Kowal  33:33 
my will type law. Know that the that the bylaw is associated with the Smith declaration you

Chris Dralla  33:39 
would, you would have to move it in. Because, let's assume you've created your first declaration. You've tied that first declaration with the piece of evidence to that declaration, and you want to move it, you would just drag and drop it into the new declaration.

Tim Kowal  33:50 
Oh, I see they're like object relations within the type law interface. And then type law will use that, you know, that information, to make the associations in your document exactly.

Chris Dralla  34:00 
So now you've now, when you're typing and you're like, all right, you're referencing in the analysis, the jump, you know, whatever it No, it's going to auto pop. It knows the four or five decks that you're you're citing from. So you don't have to really, it's there for you. It's sort of, I don't know if you can, I can analogize it to like Facebook, when you're at mentioning your friend, you know what? You're trying to tag a friend. So you're trying to tag a deck, and we made that process easy.

Tim Kowal  34:23  
Yeah, yeah. The process that I tried to use within Word to do a MSJ and separate statement with using bookmarks and cross references, and it takes a lot of brain power to get that juggle juggling act going,

Chris Dralla  34:39  
yes, and that employs big departments at big law firms, and it frustrates solos and small firms and creates counter productivity at the legal market all across the board. And I assume within 10 years that that stuff will be bygone. It'll be lawyers doing lawyer stuff. And so we're going to hopefully start with that MSJ thing again. I I just remember doing it for it would. Be like 40 hours, like, I remember just thinking, that's 40 hours. That's a week of my time. And there it was, and I'd sit at a table I have, you know, I've got the lawyer table at my home now, which I stack, you know, in series all like, linearly stack, you know, my notice, then I have my declarations, and it's a series of stacks. That's all we did. Is we created a digital series of stacks, and then, you know, with the interfacing and creating a good product that's intuitive and all that stuff that's fun, but that's it. It's a series. It's, it's digitizing the world that we live in as lawyers and making it convenient for you. Yeah,

Tim Kowal  35:38  
well, and we lawyers don't get to charge our big lawyer rates to do that kind of of work and doing all this assembly work. We're, we're we're paid the big bucks to to be able to to have the trigger go off that something's wrong here. There's got to be a simpler, more efficient way to do this. Yeah,

Chris Dralla  35:56  
absolutely. And I think that's the that's the key is that this is non billable time. So you have an option as a lawyer to non billable and you're going to eat at your bottom line, because you won't be, you'll you'll tire yourself out doing stuff that doesn't produce revenue, not a great look. You can delegate it, but there's cost and time turn around for the delegation. Or you can invest in technology. And we're starting to be, I think we're, we're one of the first couple companies that kind of came out in this space and do it and did it. I think there's going to be hundreds of of AI companies that will be small scale, fixing niche, niche problems all across all professional industries, law totally included over the next 10 years. I don't know how it's going to change or what's going to change, but things will get better for lawyers. Our jobs will become easier. It'll be more lawyering, less administrative stuff. That's the first stuff to go is the admin stuff, whether they can be robot lawyers or not in the future, I don't know. I'm not making I don't I doubt that's going to actually happen. But the admin stuff, the stuff that makes it hard for us to get to court, that's the stuff that's going to go away and hopefully, hopefully, that's the stuff that makes lawyering, not fun, stressful, creates a lot of depression, anxiety, frustration, but real serious stuff. That's what I think AI can do, and that's good for our profession.

Tim Kowal  37:13 
Yeah, I'll repeat the line that I heard somewhere that I really like that AI will not replace lawyers, but, but the lawyers that use AI and legal tech effectively are going to replace the ones that don't. Oh, absolutely,

Chris Dralla  37:26  
yeah, you, there's a, there's right now you, if you have a, I probably a 10 year transition period, if you are on the cusp of this and you can leverage it, you will take, you will have opportunities as a lawyer to do things that you didn't think where possible, in terms of spending time with your family, making more profitable revenue, enjoying your practice, if you can leverage this stuff right now, if you don't leverage it, I'm not going to sit here and say you're over, but you're going to that's that's the opportunity that you're going to miss, to redefine how you want to practice, and The ability to practice and using those tools, the lawyers that do this in the next 10 years emerge as the leaders, and there's a real opportunity, and it's just really interesting to see. Well,

Tim Kowal  38:10  
thanks very much. Chris was great hearing from you and hearing more about the type law product. As I said, I've been using using it for for one of its tools, but now I'm very intrigued to use it for the for the brief writing tool. But certainly any listeners who haven't, who are still wrestling with doing the appendixes by themselves manually, you owe it to yourself to take take a look at type law and what it can do for you, because it really it takes one business day to turn it around, and then it's right back in your hands, and you can start citing to, you know, citing to the appendix. That was a week long process, even for just a modest appeal. So you owe it to yourself to take take a look at that. All right, Jeff, that's going to wrap us up. Yeah. You have suggestions

Jeff Lewis  38:53 
for future episodes. Please email us at info, at Cal podcast.com, and in our upcoming episodes, look for tips on how to lay the groundwork for an appeal when preparing for trial. See you next time

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