Jeffrey Lewis
Welcome everyone, I'm Jeff Lewis.

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

Jeffrey Lewis
And leave us a positive ⁓ review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to the podcast.

Tim Kowal
Okay, Jeff, a week or so ago, you were out of pocket in Boston attending ClioCon. Now, both you and I are Clio users. A lot of our listeners are probably Clio users. I think it's probably the plurality of, at least small law practitioners use Clio. There are a handful of other popular ones, but I think the lion's share goes to Clio. So I didn't go to ClioCon. I wanted you to give us and our listeners a download of what happened because I think they...

It looks like they released a pretty major overhaul. I want that incorporates a lot of AI tools. mean, that's the catch word of the day is we've been talking about that in a lot of recent episodes. hope our listeners aren't getting AI fatigue, but they would do well to stay diligent and stay tuned to that space because I think we are like in the early days. It's kind of like the, like the early or like the late nineties when, when operating systems and all this technology was really starting to

move and metamorphose and to change the shape of how people do business. And I think it really is going to revolutionize our industry in a lot of apps and platforms, including Clio now is getting in on AI certification type of protocols. know Jackie Schaeffer at ClearBrief, another app that you and I both use has started ClearBrief Academy to get their users trained on.

using their AI protocols and doing it in an ethical and sustainable way. And Jackie's teaching a course at Columbia Law School about ⁓ ethics and AI. So I think we really need to stay tuned to what's happening in this space. And Clio is trying to jump, have a jump in this area and get their users coming aboard. So tell us what, happened at Clio Convention? What was the mood and what were the keynotes and the whole energy directed towards?

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah, let me start with ⁓ this is not a commercial for Clio. I happen to find Clio to be a clunky, terrible interface. Their mobile app sucks. I'm not a big fan of Clio. I got to tell you, but I'm a huge fan of Clio Con and my staff likes Clio. And so the staff that spends most of the time inside of Clio, you know, generating bills and all that, you know, happy staff, happy life. ⁓ That's exactly right. I used to enjoy there was a program called Rocket Matter.

Tim Kowal
Well that makes you a big Clio fan then. If your staff is a fan, then you gotta be a fan.

Jeffrey Lewis
that I used to use. I used to love that program. But anyway, I do use Clio. This two day conference last year was in Austin. This year was in Boston. Next year it's gonna be in Boston again. I highly recommend that.

every lawyer attend Clio Con if you have an interest in legal technology, you don't have to be a Clio user to benefit from this conference. They had amazing speakers at this conference that barely reference Clio and they don't pitch and they don't push you to sell their products on you. ⁓ It's it's not a heavy sale. So all that said, yeah.

Tim Kowal
So it's basically a legal

tech conference. It's not necessarily pitching Clio.

Jeffrey Lewis
Correct. mean they do announcements they do rollouts of what the next product is for Clio and then their vendors There's a ton of vendors there who sell their plugins that work with Clio and other practice ⁓ software and So there's a lot of sales going on and showcasing It's really an opportunity to do a hands-on demo of new products and to understand it by using it before you You know pay the bill ⁓

But I mean, to give you an example, the kind of speakers they had, I saw a presentation about KPIs. That was one of the, I've attended a lot of KPI presentations over the years. This was one of the better ones. A presentation about SEO practices, a wellness practice that I found personally very impactful, more than the normal yada yada. And so it's not all Clio presentations, but last year I remember walking away from ClioCon, being shaken by a keynote speaker who was a psychiatrist that talked about

neural data privacy and the coming problems in terms of privacy and gadgets measuring your brain waves and collecting brainwave data and much that the way browser data is captured today and how there's a need to regulate monitor that. this year, they had a keynote speaker named Richard Susskind. I think he's a doctor of something he's from England has a great accent. And my god, I got to tell you his

his speaking topic about AI and how it's gonna impact legal technology. I found it profoundly impactful. And I'll get into that the end of today's podcast and talk about what he said, and how it's gonna impact every lawyer's practice. ⁓ Let me let me

Tim Kowal
Yeah, Richard Susskind is the IT advisor to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah. He's the only speaker who's ever been invited twice to speak to Clio Con. He spoke like once like 11 years ago and he spoke this year. And boy has AI computers changed even in that span.

So let me let me tell you a little bit about what happened on day one on day one. Jack Newton the head of CEO came out and did his pitch. You know Steve Jobs like pitch of what is happening with ClioCon and then or Clio they had some big announcements. They concluded a huge acquisition of this company called VLex which is a competitor of Westlaw in terms of being a primary source of law cases and statutes worldwide. And you know by acquiring VLex Clio kind of declared war on Westlaw and Lexis.

in terms of their exclusive shares of the market in terms of legal research. And I thought to myself, well, that's not a big deal. Who really cares about that? And then he did a demo and he showed how...

AI that is connected to practice management software. So AI that knows your client's name and AI that knows it's a defamation case can move your case forward in ways that Westlaw and Lexis can't. So here's the demo he did. He uploaded like 10 documents. One was like a docketing sheet from a federal judge. One was like a note, a notes from a client. And one was, you know, a document that was like a complaint.

And when you upload it, these three documents to the AI that ClioCon is using now, or Clio is using them, they call it Vincent. That's the name of their product. So instead of Claude, instead of ChatGPT, it's Vincent.

Vincent automatically knows what these documents are. It knows with respect to the docking sheet, hey, here are 10 calendar entries we suggest you enter in your Clio database so you don't make calendaring errors. There's still a human element of a human confirming these dates, but automatically digest that. It looks at the complaint, looks at the timeline, and then it suggests some tasks. Hey, would you like me, Vincent, to...

analyze all the claims and propose some defenses. We just like me to draft a client letter and all pre-populated and having the context of the existing case data that you've already put into Clio. It was, I gotta tell you, it was mind blowing the suggestions it made and the output is far better than anything I've experienced on Westlaw co-counsel. But the most mind blowing thing was the price.

I wanna say they're gonna price this out, Vincent, or this product is called Clio Work, at 300 bucks a month per person per license. And you compare that to a Westlaw or a Lexis product, even just their vanilla non-AI Westlaw, it's a very competitive price. Yeah.

Tim Kowal
Now on top of that, will it do all the other normal legal research tools that Westlaw or Lexis will do? It gives you access to all state and federal cases. Will it do that? Like Westlaw has a co-counsel, legal research memos and Lexis AI will prepare legal research memos. Will it replace those core functionalities of the big legal research tools?

Jeffrey Lewis
Well, yes and no in terms of primary law, case law, regulations, statutes, those kinds of things. It absolutely replaces it. And it doesn't have the red and yellow flags, but it does have something that talks about presidential value in terms of whether or not cases have been criticized, et cetera. How it can't replace it is, you know, as a baby lawyer, I grew up using Westlaw and the keywords and the headnotes and

Tim Kowal
I don't, you know.

Jeffrey Lewis
The Reuters group. Okay. I can't practice practice law without the Reuters group or those key key notes. So I probably will never give up Westlaw but Vincent may soon be my first go to in terms of

Tim Kowal
I'm

Jeffrey Lewis
moving the case forward. the theme, the theme that Jack Newton was trying to portray for this new product is, know, most case management systems just kind of tell you what this they're like a static repository of your case. What you know, what has happened, a record, if you will. This is more dynamic in terms of telling where the case should go. ⁓ It was really it was really an impressive demo.

Tim Kowal
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'll tell you what I hear when you were describing that it's kind of like when, ⁓ when you're, you know, when you're on LinkedIn and, you're po like, I, I post a lot of blog posts on there and I used to post the, ⁓ a short version of my blog post with a link to my website with linked to my blog on there. And then, my SEO guy told me, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. LinkedIn wants you staying in and your readers staying in your ecosystem. And it'll be happy to boost, you know, have your algorithms reward you.

for posting on its site, but it doesn't want you including links that are going to take your readers away from LinkedIn. So the trick is to, you know, don't put any outside links in your, in your post, put it in the comment instead. The algorithms don't notice that I'm thinking that because they want users to stay on the platform. I'm thinking Clio wants its users to stay. It works best when everyone is staying in the platform and you're using Clio for your document management, you're using it for your calendaring, you're using it for your legal research and your AI search.

searches because when you're describing that I was thinking you know what about a year ago I thought I didn't really like the way the Clio is managing my documents so I kind of shifted over the last year to using SharePoint as my main document repository and so it's outside of of Clio and you want to.

Jeffrey Lewis
Well, let me push

back on that for a second, Tim, because we use OneDrive, which I believe is a cousin or similar to SharePoint. Clio works with OneDrive. And so all these AI features that could gobble up your documents and spin them out and do things, it's totally compatible with OneDrive. Just got to set it up the right way. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Kowal
Yeah.

Okay, well maybe I need to tighten up the integration there.

then have my, Clio also has a built-in project manager. can like say for example, we're both appellate attorneys. So you can classify your cases by stage that they're in. So if they're in the trial court or if you're post-judgment or if you're in record preparation on the appeal or if you're in the briefing stage or if you're at the oral argument stage or the post-appeal stage, you can do all that in Clio.

It's not terribly robust. It's not as good as Notion, which you and I both like. I use another related project management tool called Motion, which will help you create action items on your calendar and a task list to-do list. It's similar to, think, Asana or Monday, other project manager tools. But I think that kind of tool is better than what Clio has. Clio can do a lot of things at a C-plus level.

But if you really want to drill down and get a great tool for a particular thing, something that's rated like an A or A plus, you'd have to go outside of Clio. So if you're willing to adopt the functionality at like a C plus level so that you can have all of them together. And now I hear you saying that Clio is going to really reward you because if you have all that in the same ecosystem, your AI searches on it are going to be hyper powered.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah.

And not just fast, but having AI searches run in context in a system that knows what the case is about, you'll get fewer errors and fewer hallucinations because it has more information than a, you know. So by the way, I attended ClioCon with Ernie the attorney, you know, who runs ⁓ that great website and group community about legal tech and.

Tim Kowal
Yeah.

Jeffrey Lewis
he and I walked out of that first day feeling very optimistic about the practice of law and legal technology, which is completely opposite to how we both felt after day two. ⁓ But yeah, and let me tell you.

Tim Kowal 

Yeah, you were kind of

you were Eeyore-ish right after that conference and planning an early retirement because AI is going to eat all our lunches.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah.

Yes. Now, if Jack Newton were on this call, here's what he would say. He had a big graphic up on the screen. He would say, there is $5 billion in untapped legal services market share that could be touched.

with lawyers who are nimble and are using AI to leverage their practice and can represent the unrepresented and help people who can't today afford lawyers. So Jack Newton is more optimistic than I am. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and I don't wanna change, but ⁓ maybe he's got more vision than I do. ⁓ Five billion.

Tim Kowal
Five billion dollars, I'm having trouble imagining. think there's probably like,

yeah, I think there's probably ⁓ maybe that many clients who want you to take your case and don't have money to pay for it and probably don't have any good claims anyway. ⁓ But five billion dollars that are willing to be spent on colorable claims is a surprising number.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah.

Yeah. And by the way, for those doubting what I'm saying in terms of the mind blowing magic of this, Vincent, this Clio work, Clio is offering a 15 day free trial. You can try it out for 15 days and check it out. Highly recommend you check it out. So let's shift gears here and talk about some of the vendors. They have this vendor alley where

I'm going to estimate maybe 40 or 50 different booths of people selling their wares. I remember last year there was some guy who was selling a product that claimed to be able to detect lies during depositions. could analyze a deposition transcript and tell you if the witness is lying. Those kinds of people stuff I would never use. But this year let me say my two favorite vendors. I got to do demos. One is a product called Point One spelled out you know with a P O I N T O N E.

And the other one's called Tempello. T-E-M-P-E-L-L-O. And both of these products, I know you're gonna have concerns about whether or not the future of Clio might moot the need for these products, but both these products use AI to generate time records. It's for time tracking. I've been using PointOne for about a year, and I have seen all the timekeepers at my firm. We have six timekeepers.

I've seen the productivity jump through the roof in terms of finding lost time by tracking, taking a look at your calendar, looking at your received and sent emails and generating draft time entries that you can easily approve or reject. ⁓

Tim Kowal
Well, wait a minute, Jeff, you've been

using ⁓ AI time trackers for longer than a year. WiseTime was one that you were talking about before. Was PointOne the next one or was there another one in between? My question is going to be, it much better than the other AI time tracker like WiseTime that you were using before?

Jeffrey Lewis
Point one is light years ahead of wise time in this sense. Both wise time and point time, point one will do contemporaneous time ⁓ tracking. But here's where point one excels. Imagine working on an appellate brief and you're working on a section on statute of limitations and then a section on waiver. Point one watches what you're doing and the time entry will be review and revise opening brief to address statute of limitations argument.

And you know likewise with the waiver argument and it will retroactively suppose there's a day when you're so busy practicing law that you haven't tracked your time. It will retroactively create draft time entries for you to look at. So that's why point one is much better than wise time. It's more it's a lot more expensive but I believe it pays for itself. So I highly endorse point one.

Tim Kowal
Does it plug

in directly to Clio or your other billing management software?

Jeffrey Lewis
It works with Clio. do believe it requires that you be either on a Google workspace for email or Microsoft Outlook for email. If you don't live in one of those two systems, I think you're out of luck. ⁓

But let me tell you about a new product called Tempello, which I also found super interesting. I demoed, I don't use it, but I've demoed it and I find it fascinating. First of all, it was invented by a lawyer and a lawyer's son based in San Diego. So local folks to solve a problem about time entries, but their model is very different. First of all, there's no monthly fee, there's no contract. It looks at your emails and uses AI to match an email to a matter and creates a time entry. And they bill you per match.

So if you had a hundred matches, you know, you pay based on those hundred matches if there's a couple months where you're on sabbatical or Not sending emails and you're not using it. You don't pay anything But the real power so there's that and the other thing that to pillow does that point one does not

is it migrates and syncs your emails to Clio. You know how in Clio you can view emails associated with matters and do some billing and other things. And as we move forward with AI and Clio, there will be value in having your emails live inside of Clio as opposed to being outside. So that Tempello project, if you're gun shy about...

the monthly fees of either a wise time or a point one. You just want to dip your toes in the water. Highly recommend Tempello.

Tim Kowal
Timpella will do both of those things. It'll do your contemporaneous AI-generated billing and we'll do email management.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah, but here's the problem with Tempello. It does not do retroactive peeking at my calendar and peeking at my emails in the past and reconstructing time entries. That's the magic point one. Tempello, from the present to the future, on an ongoing basis will match your emails to a matter, create a time entry and migrate that email into Clio.

So that's pretty good. And it's good for, it's got good pricing. The other interesting product that Tempello has, I'm not sure if it's a beta or if it's out fully yet. Suppose you do a lot of work for insurance companies or big companies that have billing rules, billing practices. You can't bill for this, but you can bill for that.

It will audit your bills. You upload your bills to this Tempello product and it will apply certain rules that you bake into it and make sure that you're sending compliant bills to the insurance company or whoever, which seemed like a pretty cool product.

Tim Kowal
Yeah, yeah, if there was something that could help me generate insurance compliant bills, that would be well worth the money.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah, highly recommend both of those. So for the Jeff Lewis Law 2025 ⁓ App of the Year, plug-in awards go to Point One and to Tempello. ⁓

Tim Kowal
Yeah, I'm

interested in any kind of functionality that gets my emails out of my inbox and into an actionable area like in Clio or my SharePoint somewhere where my team can take action on those things. And especially if AI can answer questions about, you know, what did the client email me about or what... Because I feel sometimes that looking at my inbox and I'm just sitting at the bottom of a shoot all day long and there's stuff coming down and I'm just moving stuff.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah.

Tim Kowal
from the bottom of the chute off into some other area where it needs to go so my team can take action on it. And that's just, it's a huge friction point. And I gotta believe that there's some AI tool that can help me. Maybe Tempello is it.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah.

Yeah, check it out. ⁓ All right, so let's move on to day two of ClioCon when they had the keynote speaker, this Dr. Richard Susskind. ⁓ He had a few controversial premises. And before I say exactly what he said, let me say this. I did a summary of his topic, of his keynote, and I posted it in two places. I posted it on LinkedIn, and I posted it on Blue Sky.

And I was super surprised by the responses I got. LinkedIn, got generally, yeah, AI's coming and we all got to evolve and be ready. And on Blue Sky, I was widely mocked and made fun of, like, AI's not coming. These are the same people on Blue Sky who I think were laughing at people who...

thinking about putting their documents in the cloud a few years ago that that was so controversial or using fax machines or blackberries that kind of thing. Lots of doubters on blue sky. I was kind of surprised.

Tim Kowal
Doubters of AI or

doubters that AI is going to really change any fundamentals of the legal practice?

Jeffrey Lewis
Both. That AI is so error-prone, hallucinates, and it will never be a replacement for ⁓ a human lawyer. And it won't impact the practice law. Yeah.

Tim Kowal
Oh, I see. It's just kind of an interesting, quirky technology. It'll

be forgotten about come Christmas time.

Jeffrey Lewis
They made me feel like Chicken Little, know, sky is falling. So LinkedIn, which was much more receptive to my pessimism. Sorry, let me tell you what the gist of what he said. He said, AI is evolving quickly, that in the timeframe of 2030 to 2035, there's going to be a huge quantum leap forward in AI. If you look at where AI is today,

Tim Kowal
Yeah.

Jeffrey Lewis
versus where it was when it first came out and the leaps forward is made. It is going to evolve to the point that by 2035, we're going to have AI that can replicate what a human lawyer can do most of the time, 90 % of the time, with fewer errors and top notch work product. And because of that, and because people in general, consumers of legal products,

don't have an attachment to lawyers as human beings. They don't ⁓ enjoy spending time with lawyers. He analogized to tax returns that in the US over half people who do tax returns use TurboTax or a similar kind of software to do their taxes rather than chatting up their CPA. And half the people in the US don't miss their CPA and so too with lawyers when people start moving towards using AI to solve legal problems.

Tim Kowal
What? They love us, Jeff.

Jeffrey Lewis
He also, in the middle of his presentation, he talked about a conversation he had with a group of neurosurgeons a couple of years ago. And these neurosurgeons to a T all said, well, AI might replace lawyers or CPAs, but AIs will never replace neurosurgeons. And what Susskind said to these neurosurgeons is, consider this. Consider this proposition. In 10 years, a group of neurosurgeons are going to say it was barbaric.

to cut into people's brains and do surgery because AI will have by that time not only made surgery less filled with errors and more precise, but AI will develop unthought of preventive measures to prevent a mind or brain problem from happening in the first place. And it's going to profoundly change the way neurosurgeons operate or don't even have to operate because it eliminates the problem. So too with lawyers.

Tim Kowal
Yeah,

Jeffrey Lewis
yeah.

Tim Kowal
yeah, for that matter, the more information, again, the more information you can feed into AI, if your goal is to prevent the need for things like surgery, for example, the more diagnostic information you can feed into AI, maybe you can spot patterns and things that would be imperceptible to the naked eye or to human minds.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And then the final analogy he used was he talked about executives of a power tool company standing around talking about marketing and how they market their tools and asking about what is the product that a power tool company sells. Are they selling hammers. Are they selling drill drills. Are they selling nails or are they selling the completed nice hole that you put in your wall.

the problem that you solve with a drill. And he said when you're marketing for power tool companies, you want to market the solution the whole not the power tools. Anyway, as a result of all this, I got to tell you, Ernie, the attorney and I walked out of this presentation just it was like a gut punch because I always thought that I would retire in 10 years and 2035 2036 and

Tim Kowal
That's right.

Jeffrey Lewis
and AI would never come for my job or come for my livelihood. And now I am of the belief that between 2030 and 2035, I'm gonna have to pivot in terms of hiring and how I practice the law and how I leverage the law and how I structure my fees, because AI is coming for me.

Tim Kowal
I've been wondering the same thing. Yeah, I guess the nature of disruptive technology is that we don't quite know where it's gonna go. what did Ernie, Ernie introduced me to the saying, I think I was late in getting to it about the Wayne Gretzky quote that we don't know where the puck's gonna be, but we gotta try to skate to where we think it's going. I think I read something in the materials you sent over to me that... ⁓

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Kowal
I think there was a mention that 74 % of billable tasks are automatable. I think that relates to your point about if that's true or if it's anywhere near true, then that's a majority or maybe even a vast majority of what we are doing and charging for can be replaced or supplemented or in some way aided by AI. And so we gotta figure out which categories those fit into. What bucket of tasks

or do we need to learn to supplement with AI and improve upon with AI? What do we need to learn to complement with AI? And what do we just need to be prepared to completely lose ⁓ to AI?

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah.

Yeah. And but there's always going to be a role for a human lawyer at some at some stage of the process, whether it's looking at the Clio work suggested tasks.

in terms of strategy and research areas or calendaring. There's always going to be a role for human, but I think we're going to have to really rethink what that role is and where we can add value to clients. I'm not as pessimistic as Susskind in the sense that I think clients do get attached.

to their human lawyers and value those relationships and value that advice and maybe focusing on strengthening those relationships and the emotional and qualitative aspects of that relationship will be very valuable to a lawyer's survival in terms of their practice in the years to come.

Tim Kowal
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, this was something I alluded to in our last conversation. ⁓ When I was asking, ⁓ chat GPT, how can I make sure that, that I can stay relevant in posting about legal, you know, legal articles, legal content, tips for trial attorneys. And then agreed with me that, it's going to be very easy for anyone else to eat your lunch on this. If it's just about, you know, pushing information out there. But, I think that the commodity is, is no longer going to be information. Information is just easy to get.

for anyone who wants it. The problem is now that it's so abundant, it's super abundant, that no one wants the information. They're going to want authenticity. They're going to look for an authentic voice to provide them that information and that advice. And I think that's maybe where we lawyers need to pivot is that we're not just holding the celestial fire and we get to have a monopoly on it and then that we can just dispense truth ⁓ for the right price.

You know, think clients are going to want to hire us for our, for being counselors, for being true, you know, truly, ⁓ true advocates. I think we need to, it's going to be an opportunity for us attorneys to relearn what it is at the heart of our profession that we're doing. And it's helping clients sleep at night. It's not just dispensing information because they can get that now. and in, in five to 10 years, like you're saying, they could probably even represent themselves, in, ⁓ after a fashion.

⁓ But are they going to have counsel? That's going to be a different thing and we're going to need to relearn how to provide that in an age of ⁓ super abundance of legal information.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah, and let me just say this, a more immediate impact for you and me are going to be dealing with ImproPERS armed with ChatGPT or similar products who are more capable than old ImproPERS, who are more able to access information and put on colorable defenses, whereas before an ImproPERS party, you could usually run over.

Tim, next year I want you come to ClioCon with me. I've already bought my tickets. Tickets for ClioCon usually run like $17, $1800 if you try to buy like the day of. But right now I think you can buy them for like $500 or $600. It's a huge discount if you buy early. And you can get a refund all the way up till May. So if come April you decide you don't want to go to Boston and hang out with me, you can get a refund.

Tim Kowal
Well, you'll be happy to hear that I have already purchased my ticket. I was meeting with our mutual friend Ernie last week and he was flogging me for not attending ClioCon. He says, what are you doing? You've got to attend ClioCon, especially if you're a Clio user, but not only, as you explained, it's not only for Clio users. It's an all purpose legal technologies conference. find a lot of like-minded people. It's a great networking opportunity. And again, it's trying to get an idea of where the puck's going so you can get there before it's too late.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah.

Tim Kowal
But there was one last big question I wanted to ask you and it's about this term that I just learned yesterday. It's called getting Sherlocked. I'll share with you the anecdote. Maybe some of our listeners have heard it, but in the late 90s, ⁓ Apple computer shipped its operating system for its Mac computers called Sherlock and it had a file and web searching tool built into it. It was Mac OS 8.5 and it was extendable via plugins.

You know, some indie developer with a bright idea built this add-on tool called Watson a couple years later and it was a $30 companion app and it added lots of channels for like stocks and weathers and translation and shopping that you could plug into the expandable operating system. And it was such a hit, it even won an Apple Design Award. the problem was it was too successful. Apple was even impressed by it and decided

Well, why don't we just incorporate Watson right into our next version of Sherlock? And that's what they did in Sherlock 3 in 2002. And it just ate Watson's lunch. And they were forced to just offer it as a free add-on app after that, because no one was willing to pay 30 bucks for what was basically already included in the operating system that was shipping at that point. So that was the origin of the term getting Sherlock.

is building an add-on app that's so impressive and adds such a great enhancement that the underlying technology developer decides to just incorporate it in their next version. When I learned of that phenomenon, it got me thinking about all the different AI tools that have been coming out. then every time you see OpenAI or Gemini or one of the other underlying AI technology developers come out with their new iteration, it'll...

it'll have these new technologies and expanded capabilities. And I wonder if they're just going to start incorporating the things that maybe Clio Work can do or that OpenAI, for example, you can create project areas where you can load in all your project files. It has a SharePoint ⁓ interface so it can access your SharePoint database. So you are explaining the benefits of having

an AI tool like in Clio work that has access to your case files. Well, you can do that now after a fashion with OpenAI and probably some of the other ones that certainly with Microsoft's co-pilot. That's what it's made to do is live and work where you work and run your AI searches on your actual emails and your SharePoint or OneDrive documents. So that's why I wonder about how much of these new AI tools in some of these AI technologies that you were experiencing at Clio Con are at risk of getting Sherlock.

in coming fiscal quarters or after the new iterations of the next time the big guys offer their upgrades.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah, I don't think it's limited to AI plugins. I think there's a wide variety of plugins that offer additional functionality to Clio that will be mooted in the next few versions of Clio. Like, 0.1, I could see Clio having a built-in feature that listens to you.

you and then generates your your time entries that would be easy for Clio to do so but I think these vendors will still survive because a lot of these vendors have plugins that work for with a variety of different practice software's of practice panther and the rest ⁓ smokeball you know so

Tim Kowal
Yeah.

Well, so what's your overall advice on how do we as attorneys identify what is a what's what's a core structural improvement? Something that we need to adopt now and what's something that well, it's just wait because I think probably chat GPT will just incorporate that in their next version chat GPT six.

Jeffrey Lewis
Ahem.

Well, let me answer that question with a question, Tim. When you get a new appeal to work on and you're fed, you you're handed the record, it's your first move today in 2025 to read that record yourself or to feed it to co-counsel or chat GPT or one of those and have it search for certain keywords or key things happening.

Tim Kowal
Well, I'm doing both. I mean, I want to know what AI thinks about it because it can help give me insights faster than I can just starting at page one and then working all the way to page 1,000. It can help supercharge where I go to, which pin site I should jump to to get a better understanding of the case and where I'm going to find that first entry point to exploring a key, appealable issue.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yeah.

Yeah, so I think the key today, similar to that, is for those who want to put a toe in their water, is to use ChatGPT or Co-Counsel or Vincent to do tasks that we're comfortable with so you can assess. ⁓

whether it's done it right or what it's done it's done it wrong and have AI work alongside with you as a companion and So you can evaluate where its strengths and weaknesses are and but I think over time There's gonna be certain tasks like summarizing the procedural history of a case From other reporters transcript or summarizing the number of exhibits that were admitted I could see a future where you rely more and more on AI for those kinds of tasks and you focus on

Issue selection. What are the top five issues that we should raise in this appeal and in analyzing ⁓ and analogy? distinguishing cases in terms of the law is a lawyer job But in terms of facts and summaries that being more and more of an AI job

Tim Kowal
Okay, well, we'll have to leave it there. think there are no fixed answers in this evolving world of AI, new AI tools, but we'll hope to see many of our listeners at ClioCon 2026. That'll be my first ClioCon. But we'll leave it there and I guess we'll be checking in periodically to see how you like Clio work and Vincent and some of the other tools that are on offer.

Jeffrey Lewis
Yep, yep.

Tim Kowal
Okay, well that'll wrap up this episode. If you have suggestions for future episodes and topics and guests, please email us at info at calpodcast.com. In our upcoming episodes, look for tips on how to lay the groundwork for an appeal when preparing for trial.

Jeffrey Lewis
See you next time.