James Pittman: Welcome to Immigration Uncovered, the Dockerby's video podcast, where we dive deep into the dynamic world of immigration law with the latest developments, practice management strategies, and the transformative impact of legal technology. I'm your host, James Pittman. With me today is Thomas Martin. Thomas is CEO of Law Droid. So, Thomas, welcome to the program. Thank you for joining me.

Thomas Martin: Thanks, James. I'm thrilled to be here.

James Pittman: So, Thomas, can you share a little bit? Now, you were a practicing attorney. Let us know, do you still practice? And tell us about your journey into the legal tech space and what inspired you to found law droid?

Thomas Martin: Yeah, happy to do so. So, I am still a practicing lawyer. I have a law firm that does exclusively probate law, and I have a great team that pretty much helps me to manage it without a lot of heavy lifting. So I get to pursue fun and exciting opportunities and challenges with law droid.

James Pittman: So how did it come to be, though? Give us a little bit of the backstory. I mean, what area of practice did you start out in? Were you always into technology, and how did it evolve?

Thomas Martin: I'm really glad you asked that question, because it's kind of an interesting coincidence. I actually started out with immigration when I got out of law school. It was around the lots of investment, and I actually started out with a website that was called ImmigrationFilings.com.

James Pittman: I did not know that.

Thomas Martin: Yeah, it was my first foray into legal tech, really. It was a website where it was very basic. At the time, it was just forms, and the forms captured information that I would need to fill out the different immigration forms, and it allowed for a client to have a web based interactive experience. That was my business that I launched at the time. It lasted a few months. It wasn't a big success. It was way ahead of its time.

James Pittman: What year was this?

Thomas Martin: This was 2000.

James Pittman: Wow. Okay.

Thomas Martin: Yeah. So, way back, I've had experience in a lot of different practice areas. Employment, immigration, class actions, personal injury, toxic tort, personal injury cases, a whole spectrum of different types of law. So it really gave me good experience about what different lawyers experience and what their problem points are, what they would like to streamline if they can. And I've just been into it, into tech my whole career, and trying to use it to leverage it to make doing the job easier.

James Pittman: So load droid is a chat bot. So how did you get the idea for the chat bot?

Thomas Martin: Yeah, so the idea came a little over seven years ago now I think almost eight, where I saw a news story about Joshua Browder, and he was using a chat bot to fight parking tickets in London. At the time, I think he was 17 years old, and that just caught me by surprise. I hadn't heard of that before. And the ability to use chat bots to essentially automate legal information and advice, that was shocking to me. At the time, legal Zoom had already done document automation, but to combine document automation with provision of legal information and advice, that seemed revolutionary to me. And so I immediately jumped into it, created my own experimental chat bot that helped Californians to incorporate in three easy steps, and that just kind of blew the whole opportunity wide open. There was a lot of interest, and since then I've just been working with a lot of different law firms, lawyers, legal aid organizations, and it's been a fantastic ride.

James Pittman: So if you're doing a corporation, so we have 50 states. So did you have to modify the product for every one of the 50 states?

Thomas Martin: No, because at the time it was a raw experiment. It was my first step into chat bots. It was solely focused on California, which interestingly, back then it was still a paper based system. You would think that with Silicon Valley, California would be at the forefront, but yeah, I think it was just a couple of years ago they actually converted over from their paper based applications to online.

James Pittman: Well, let's dig in a little deeper. When you were practicing, what were some of the challenges that you faced that led you to this whole idea of, and see the need really for leveraging technology to automate? Let's go back now to 2000, the late ninety s, and all of that, the Internet revolution is happening. What were you experiencing?

Thomas Martin: Well, what I was experiencing at the time is what I think lawyers throughout the ages have experienced, is that there's too much, there's too much information to get your head around. There's too many documents to draft. And admittedly, a lot of the documents that we draft, and I was drafting then fairly similar. I mean, the workflow, like probably most of the lawyers that you have here, is that you start with a shell, and that shell is something that is a template that has most of the information filled out, and you put in your client information, you just swap it out, and that you also like, there's a unique arguments that you might make that have to do with the specific facts of your client, but basically you're just tweaking that. So the total amount of time that you put into it, it's been less and less over time. We're not in the 19th century where you had to draft this from scratch with a blank page. So making that quicker and quicker was what I was trying to do.

James Pittman: Well, let's dig in a little bit to the actual capability. So as far as law droid and its current incarnation, the state of law droid, can you tell us about it? What capabilities does it possess? How does it help lawyers to automate their practices? And piggybacking on that, in your view, what are the most exciting potentials of legal bots in the industry? What is the state of the art of the capabilities of legal bots, and what do you think are some of the most promising features that are coming out?

Thomas Martin: It's an exciting time, and we're just scratching the surface about what generative AI can do to help lawyers practice, and not just the practice of law, but also the business of law capturing that business. So within a year's time, my answer is going to be vastly different about everything that it could do, as it has been over this past year. So logroid has evolved now into a no code, easy to use, intuitive platform where lawyers can use two products. One product is logroid copilot, and they can use it to do some basic legal research to help them draft letters and emails, to summarize documents, deposition transcripts. It could be analyzing a motion from opposing counsel, extracting arguments, even creating counterarguments. There's a lot that you could do with it, and it's intentionally built as a bit of a Swiss army knife because there's a lot of different things that we do throughout the day. So that's La Droid. Copilot is your AI legal assistant. On the other hand, we have a platform which is called Laudroid Builder, where you can build your own unique custom AI chat bots. And so Copilot is one example of the kind of thing that you could build using our platform.

James Pittman: So it's customizable, so it has some set capabilities, and then you have the option of creating a customizable bot. So you have both pathways. That's great. I mean, does it do intake? I mean, talking about sort of onboarding leads, how about that capability?

Thomas Martin: Yeah, that's the one we started out with. Even pre generative AI, we had natural language processing that we had custom built for it where it interacts with leads on your website, captures their interest, and then gets their contact information, and now you have a new lead that you could follow up with. It's a fantastic alternative to using essentially call centers that would man your chat bot. And essentially they do the same thing. They simply ask, hey, are you interested? What's your name? What's your phone number. And it never made sense to me why you wouldn't automate that, because it's pretty route conversation and saves lawyers a heck of a lot of money. So that's one use case that's very powerful, shows immediate value using the bot to help you capture leads.

James Pittman: And Tom, the law droid copilot and the custom law droid builder. So are they utilizing OpenAI, or where's the engine coming from?

Thomas Martin: Yeah. So keep in mind, law Droid has been around for seven years. We've had this platform for over three years, the no code intuitive platform. And so we still have pre generative AI systems that we have in place that you could still use to make a very custom solution. But yeah, on top of that, obviously from a year ago, we built on to it an additional layer. So we have many different layers of technology, the latest being generative AI. We use OpenAI's models. All of them you could choose from. And just recently we added on llama Two, which is an open source AI model that users can select to use that as well.

James Pittman: And you can train it, can you train it up on your own documents? I mean, let's say you want to create it to create a certain type of motion, and you have a whole set of previous motions of that type that you've done. Are you able to upload those and have it train off of those?

Thomas Martin: Yeah. In fact, you've been able to do that with our system since January. It's very robust now. Like, you can upload one document, you could upload several documents, PDFs, word documents, and you could even just have an open text box that you fill in the information that you want it to know about. We call them knowledge bases. And so you could create knowledge bases within our system. If you have many different documents, you could create a knowledge group, which is just a logical collection of knowledge bases, and you could ask questions that are drawn where the answers are drawn from that knowledge base. But you could also use it, like you said, as training. Examples of, like these are past motions that I've written. I like to write one in the style of that.

James Pittman: What are you most excited about going into 2024? I mean, we're at the end of the year, and the field is just changing so quickly. I mean, if you had a look over the next year, both at bots and Generative AI, what are the most exciting things to you?

Thomas Martin: I think the most exciting thing to me is that I believe that by 2025, we're going to have AGI, which is artificial general intelligence. So that's the human level type intelligence that people have been talking about, which is not really. That's not the end goal. We're going to go far past that, and there's going to be unimaginable things that we'll be able to achieve with this technology, including helping to fight cancer, helping people to stay healthy, lots of great positive things. So that's the most exciting to me. But dialing that back to the reality of working as a lawyer is that I think that a lot of what we do will be able to get help with. People still want to hire people. They want to have a lawyer that they can meet with and ask questions of and feel comforted by. That's not going to change. When I deal with clients, even now, it is such an ingrained thing that they want to have a local lawyer, someone who's nearby that they can see go to the office. That's a very important thing still, and it probably will be for the remaining generation until we make a full transition over to more of an online experience. There is online convenience, and people really appreciate that, but at bottom, they still want to have the peace of mind that a person inspires.

James Pittman: What do you think about using AI for adjudications? I asked this to all of my guests who are into tech. To me, in some sense, it's really like everything else. It's a mixed bag. I mean, on the one hand, I can see where it can eliminate. I mean, of course, depends on how you train it, but I think it can eliminate certain types of biases. I mean, if you have a technological system using evidence only and comparing it to precedents, I think you can eliminate subjectivity. Again, it's all on how it's trained. On the other hand, it's a mixed bag. What are your thoughts on adjudications? I understand that it's being employed already to a certain degree. In some European countries. They mentioned, for example, for initial asylum screenings, people are coming in with certain types of claims, and if they do not fit, like one of the recognized patterns, it's giving a recommendation to reject the initial claim, something like that.

Thomas Martin: It's a great question. It's one that I haven't had asked before. But I think the advantage to using AI for adjudication, if you're going to use it for that, at least as an initial screener, is that I think you still have subjectivity because you still have training data that is coming from people, and the people inherently have their own biases, different biases, by the way. But I think what's the advantage to using an AI system is that it externalizes that. Right. And then once it's externalized, as you said, you could dial it back, you could essentially retrain the weights, right? The weights of why it's deciding one way versus another. And once you have control of that, you can have a system that is more fair. I think, though, at the same time, what I just talked about is an immense amount of power, like the fact that somebody can retrain the weights to make it less biased, but create a type of system that reflects that person's values and what they want. It's just a lot of power that is probably going to be exercised by someone or some people that aren't elected and haven't been, don't necessarily reflect the political will of the people. So there's like this interesting interplay between democracy and technology and fairness and equality that goes on there that I haven't quite completely wrapped my head around.

James Pittman: We're going to get into the topic of access to justice. One of the exciting things about legal technology in general is that by reducing the amount of actual lawyer labor involved in handling certain tasks, it does have tremendous potential for access to justice, for enabling work to get done for people who don't have the means to hire an attorney to do all of the work individually in the traditional way. But we're going to get to access to justice because I know that you are involved as an access to Justice Tech fellow, so let's just hold that for a minute. But before we get to that, a lot of practitioners are nervous and people in society in general are nervous about the developments in AI. It's changing so quick, and everyone has some apprehension about the power of this technology and the ways in which it's going to change how we work and how we live. What are some of the misconceptions or sources of hesitation or even stumbling blocks in implementation that you've seen lawyers face when trying to incorporate AI into their practices up till now?

Thomas Martin: I think one major misconception with generative AI, which is what we've all been experiencing over the last year, is that it's an oracle, a fact expert, that you could rely upon it for fact based inquiries, and it's not what it's built for. It could definitely be corrected to include further information to make it better at that. But this has been oversaid. But it's a large language model that's been trained against the entire Internet to understand language better. So it does get some facts right. A lot of times, but it shouldn't be relied upon for that. And of course, that misunderstanding has been at the root of the Schwartz case, which had the hallucinations with citations get being ill founded. If I could drive home one thing that is a misconception that I want all the lawyers listening to this to get out of their head is to be able to understand the difference between chat, GPT, which is the consumer facing AI, on the one hand, that we've all experienced, hopefully, and if not, try it out, and on the other hand, apps that are built on top of that technology, like law droid, like case text, like Spellbook, like a whole bunch, a whole list of others. When you build on top of that technology, you could build in safeguards, you could build in additional layers that make it more useful, make it more accurate, make it more reliable.

James Pittman: Understood.

James Pittman: How about in implementation, practically speaking, what do you hear, for example, from Lloydroid customers about? Well, I tried it, but I'm having problems getting the most out of it when it comes to implementation. What do you say?

Thomas Martin: Yeah, that is a recurring issue that I'm working through. I think the most important thing there for me is being open to the feedback and trying to work through it to make it a better product. But yeah, there's definitely right now, especially with my product, the back and forth, listening about how to make it more useful and better in terms of being able to sit down during your workday and use it and make it part of your workflow, that is a challenge that really depends on the specific lawyer's use case. And all I could say about that is that I'm very open to the feedback from my customers to make law droid.

James Pittman: So do you see it? Do your customers really come from all practice areas now? Are they concentrated in a few? Give us a sense of the universe of use cases here that you've seen and things that might surprise us that people are using it for, if you.

Thomas Martin: Can think of that. We've worked with many different types of lawyers, law firms. We have a legal insurance company that is an enterprise client of law droids, and we help them to manage their relationship with their network of attorneys. They have 15,000 attorneys that are part of their network, and we help them to manage that relationship and answering frequently asked questions and then a bunch of other things that I can't go into a lot of detail about. But working with a legal insurance company is probably something that you never thought law droid was doing. Also, we worked with over a dozen, maybe 20 at this point, legal aid organizations where we help them to scale up their services to the people that qualify for legal aid. So, like, one example of that is if you're applying for workers compensation in Tennessee, you could use our system to interview you and complete the claim form that you need to file with the state of Tennessee. It also speaks to you if that helps people in terms of accessibility to use that system. And then, of course, there's the lawyers and law firms that we work with. We've also worked with a lot of law schools over the past year because we have this briefing function built into it where it could grab a case, brief it, the issue, the holding, the reasoning, and put all of that together for law student. So they're very excited about that. There's a lot of different, as you see, a lot of different stakeholders that have different use cases and interests. And it's really helped us to build a more robust product, and it's one that I'm really proud of, but I know that there's still a lot of work to make it a lot better.

James Pittman: Well, and Thomas, you co founded the organization American Legal Technology and its awards program, and you're frequently promoting the ALT awards. So tell us about ALT. How did that come to be? What are the goals of the organization? What motivated you to get involved in this initiative and what impact you hope it will have on the legal tech community? And was it the first award show that you had recently? And if so, how did it go?

Thomas Martin: Yeah, when I hear questions like that, it reminds me like, I've been juggling a lot. I've been doing a lot of things. So the American Legal Technology Awards, it started four years ago. I have two co founders. Patrick palace, he's a lawyer that does workers comp in Tacoma. And Kat Moon, who's a professor at Vanderbilt Law School. Sometimes people don't believe me, but it really started out as just an excuse to have a party where people can have a good time and dress up, have fun, and honor the innovation that people are up to. That's really how it started. And then COVID happened. So we had to do the first two years just online, and then the last two years have been in person. Just this past year, in October, we had it in Nashville, Tennessee, and it was just sold out, 150 people. It was fantastic. It was really wonderful. And we got to honor some people that have been working very hard to make everybody's lives better. Our lifetime Achievement Award went to Carolyn Elephant, who is just an amazing person, and she's also been working for the past 30 years. To help other lawyers start their own law firms. So it's things like that that make it really worthwhile.

James Pittman: Yeah. I interviewed Carolyn and she is really an inspiring pErson. She's just been at this business of trying to, I mean, she's really one of the people who's been at this the longest in terms of helping lawyers to optimize their practices. We were talking about decades ago when one of the only resources out there was Jay Flunberg's book. She had her blog and her. So, and you were named as an American Bar association journal. Legal rebel. Legal rebel. It's interesting designation. So that's a significant recognition.

James Pittman: And what does it mean to you to be a legal rebel and do you consider yourself a legal rebel?

Thomas Martin: I do, because I think I've felt and been a bit of an outsider when it comes to the legal establishment of doing it a certain way where you go extremely deep in one practice area and you just become a total expert and that you work at one firm for a very long time. Like I mentioned, I've moved around quite a bit. I found that experience enriching. But I understand at the same time that it's not the typical or expected traditional experience that lawyers have. So in that sense, I guess I'm a bit of a rebel. But no, to me, what that has really meant is that people are that I feel seen that the work that I've done has been recognized and that it feels like it's been appreciated and.

James Pittman: You'Re shaking things up for the better.

James Pittman: I asked a lot of people this question as well. Don't you get the sense that the field as a whole, legal industry as a whole, is becoming a lot more flexible than it used to be and in part because of technology, people working remotely. COVID I mean, it used to be the case that the goal was you go into a firm and you're going to stay there and it's like it was a very sort of lockstep way of going through a career. I mean, people sometimes left and then went to a corporation and worked in house and that kind of thing, but there wasn't a ton of flexibility. But I really do feel like the field as a whole is becoming a lot more flexible. Do you feel that way as well?

Thomas Martin: Oh, definitely. There's so many more choices over the past seven, eight years than there were previously. It totally was that system you described, this lockstep system. But now, you know, a friend of mine, Joshua Lennon, who's the attorney in residence at Remember, you know, seven years ago when we were doing legal hackers together, that he spoke at University of British Columbia Law School, and he was talking to them about what he was doing and how it was like an legal alternative career path. And that was kind of, Whoa, what is this? This is real different. But there's so much of that now. It's great that lawyers have many more opportunities that can enrich them, because lawyers aren't all the same. Some of us are very creative, and when we don't have that creative outlet, it's not as fulfilling. So the fact that attorneys like Alex Su can be out there and making us laugh and doing TikToks and great commentary and criticism of the industry at the same time, that's in a positive way. I think that's all for the know.

James Pittman: The Fifth Circuit, as AI becomes more utilized in legal practice, some of the authorities, whether they're the courts or the bar authorities and so forth, are thinking about ethical guidelines and things like that. I know that the Fifth Circuit has a proposed regulation that they're seeking comment on, where they would require lawyers to certify every document that they're filing as to whether it had been prepared with the use of AI and whether it had been reviewed for precision and that sort of thing. What is your opinion on that type of regulation? To me, frankly, seems kind of heavy handed, not really the direction we should be going in. I'm interested in what you think about it. The technology is changing. It's going to keep changing so quickly. I mean, to an approach like that where you're forcing people to sign off on every document that way, it just doesn't seem, first of all, isn't what they're really asking you to attest to, isn't that really already covered by existing rules, at least if they're read broadly enough? And do we really need that, and what do we have a rule like that every single time a technological advance comes out? I mean, what do you think about that?

Thomas Martin: I think in federal court, rule eleven is sufficient. We don't need these additional add on AI affirmations. I understand it, though. It makes sense to me that as a bit of a correction against what's happened, know, the Avianca case and another one, that people would want to do this, the judges would want to do this, because if they don't do this, then there's a concern that they're not watching closely enough. So I get the motivation for it, but I think in the long run, all of those will fall away and it'll just be what it has always been rule eleven, where you just stand behind your work product and you're responsible for it.

James Pittman: Yeah, I agree with you. It seems like a reactive measure, one which doesn't is not one that in the long run is going to be the best way to approach the pace of technological innovation that we're saying. Right. I mean, we need some broad guidelines and flexibility to operate within those broad guidelines rather than these very narrow certifications.

James Pittman: Let's talk about your role as a mentor at the Yale Sci center for Innovative Thinking. What's the center about? It's the first I've heard of it. Sounds fascinating. And you also have a role at the Access to Justice Tech Fellows, which I understand. Is that out of University of Pennsylvania?

Thomas Martin: Yes.

James Pittman: So tell us about your activities at these two engagements.

Thomas Martin: Well, both of them have essentially been mentor type positions where I get to work with usually younger law students on the side of the A to J Tech fellows and with the PSi center for Excellence. That's been a lot of college students that are entrepreneurial. And to me it's always been important because I had the benefit of people helping me when I was younger and them paying it forward to me that I in turn do that. And it's not in the sense of an obligation. It's more in the sense of it's really enriching that when you get to talk to people that are encountering these life situations and professional situations that you encountered when you were younger and helping them through it, hopefully they get to avoid some of the pitfalls that we experienced when we were going through it the first time as a result of the advice that they're given. And if not, we're only human, but to have somebody who could listen to that and to be helpful and if anything, supportive.

James Pittman: So the Yale center is sort of broadly for entrepreneurs and innovators at the university. The Access to Justice Tech Fellows, is that in association with Penns Law School?

Thomas Martin: Yeah, Miguel Willis is the leader of that program. He sometimes has classes where, let's say, he'll focus on legal technology and AI in particular, and I'll have a session where I get to speak to the whole group of fellows about that and what it means and how to take advantage of that opportunity, but also to be able to speak occasionally to fellows one on one, where they have questions about something and I can give them some advice about how to deal with it. So, yeah, they both have essentially been mentor mentee opportunities, and, yeah, they've been very fulfilling.

James Pittman: What would be some of your key advice that you find yourself giving over and over to aspiring legal tech entrepreneurs these days.

Thomas Martin: Stick to it. Don't get down from the ups and downs that you'll experience, which we all do. It's not a rocket ship. It's not what you hear about in the movies or in the news all the time, where it's just up into the left kind of chart that is just rocket growth. If you get that, fantastic, good for you. But a lot of us struggle through the month to month and keeping customers happy, learning from the feedback that they give you, which can be challenging at times, because you think, man, I'm not doing this right and using it as an opportunity to improve things. I think the number one thing is just having that mental strength, the fortitude to just keep going and get through it.

James Pittman: And with the access to Justice Tech Fellows, what really, in practical terms, are they trying to do? Can you drill down a little bit on the details?

Thomas Martin: Well, I think all of those law students have a genuine interest in helping people, and the HJ tech Fellows helps. It allows them to explore that in a way that combines their passion for helping people with technology, seeing how they can marry those two together, their legal background with technology, in an effort to expand people's access to legal services and justice.

James Pittman: And Thomas, you speak at a lot of conferences. Which speaking engagements left the most lasting impact on you and why?

Thomas Martin: The first one was in 2016, I think it was, got invited by Cleo to speak at the Cleo Cloud conference. And I was talking about chat bots, how to make them all things chat bots, because it was just really popping at the time, and there were such gracious hosts and getting to speak in front of so many people, it was a lot of fun. The second one I remember is when I think it was 2017 with the British Legal Technology Awards. Law Droid was nominated for an award, and I got to speak on a panel, and the moderator was Richard Suskant. And that was an amazing experience. They were also very gracious hosts. And getting to see London and then the legal tech community that I love meeting Professor Susskin, it was a fantastic, memorable time.

James Pittman: Let's talk a little bit more about the key challenges that legal tech entrepreneurs face. So in your view, what are they and how can they overcome these key challenges?

Thomas Martin: Sure. I think a key challenge for any legal tech entrepreneur is money, because they're going out on this venture. It's new, it's different, but they also need support financially to be able to pursue this thing. And if they're not independently wealthy, they probably need to ask for some money. I think, though, that what's interesting right now, at this moment in time, is that if they're incorporating AI in any way into what their solution is, that things are tilting towards bootstrapping. It's traditionally been you have this idea or you have some initial traction, you go out to VC and you raise X million dollars to pursue it, and either you can get the money or you don't, and if you don't, then you don't pursue it. But I think the economics of everything, especially with AI being so affordable, easy to implement with the right developers, that you could get your company off the ground and make it profitable by just bootstrapping it with not a ton of money. So I think those economics have changed, and it is a big sea change for legal tech in general, and one that I think bodes well for entrepreneurs.

James Pittman: Thomas, you also run a podcast which is law Droid manifesto. What sorts of topics do you cover on your podcast, and what are you trying to provide your audience in terms of value with the content?

Thomas Martin: Yeah, and I have to confess that I wish I was more regular in terms of my publications to Laudroyd Manifesto, both in terms of the articles and the podcast. But I do it when it inspires me. And my take on things is at a much more general level. I know there's been so much going on, and I really didn't want to do the day by day, like, this is what's happening today, this is the new specific thing. And take more of a philosophical viewpoint. Because my undergrad degree is in philosophy, I like to look at things like that about the movements and generalizations of what's going on. And I think people find that valuable too, especially when they're being hit with a lot of the day to day developments.

James Pittman: And you're also co founder of Vancouver Legal Hackers. Are you still involved in it? And how important has that collaboration been, and how important do you think community building is in the legal tech sector?

Thomas Martin: Community building is where it's, um, just in general, just in, like, we call it community building. But it's getting to know people, getting to understand how we all link together and what other people need and how you can connect them with people that can help them. Even if it's not a direct thing, life isn't and shouldn't be transactional. It should be more about how we can all enrich our lives from knowing each other. And to get back to specific, see, I'm getting philosophical here to get back to what you were asking me about, of Vancouver legal hackers. I'm still involved in that. I'm in the moment right now of transitioning that to some new leadership because I'm pursuing American Legal Technology awards. Laudroyd's own first conference coming up. I've got a lot going on, so it's been fantastic. When I first moved to Vancouver, I established that with some other co founders and it was a fantastic way to get to know people in a new city. And we all shared the same common interests of being in love with the law and technology. So I would highly recommend meetups and organizations like that for people to get to know each other.

James Pittman: And you were a fast case 50 honoree, which is quite an honor. So how do you see recognition impacting the work you do and the causes you champion?

Thomas Martin: For anyone who's working hard, you always wonder, do people notice? Do people see how hard you're working and that you're really giving it out to the universe and hoping that things come back? And those recognitions are fantastic because you do feel seen, you do feel valued. And the fast case 50, that was one that came early and I was just so excited by it and it really helped to open some doors to in people that I could talk to about what I was working on because it's one thing to do the work and have your own accomplishments and the things that you've created with your own hands, but to be recognized for it, you get to talk to people and be taken more seriously, for better or for worse. And yeah, it's been a great honor to be honored by Fast Case 50, the ABA Legal Rebels and the British Legal Technology Awards, amongst some others. I'm always very thankful for their acknowledgment.

James Pittman: With all of the technology and automation that firms today can leverage.

James Pittman: What do you think are the most crucial skills that legal professionals, especially people just coming into the field, or even those who feel like they are still catching up? What do you think are some of the skills that people should strive to acquire so that they can future proof their legal practice and really thrive in a tech driven legal landscape?

Thomas Martin: What I think is the number one skill is probably not what anyone is expecting me to say. I think it's curiosity. I think it's having an open mind. I think that's the key, especially right now, especially with things this crazy rocket ship that we're on right now, where we're not quite sure where it's going. I think having an open mind and being curious about these new things is the way that we stay relevant. I think that if you just focus on what you're doing, your niche practice, and just do that, you're going to miss the forest. And before you know it, you might be left behind. So you don't want to do that. You want to keep on top of what's going on. I know there's so much to keep up with. You don't have to keep track of everything, but to explore, play around with chat, GBT, other software. You don't have to pay tons of money. A lot of the stuff you can try for free and just keep on top of things.

James Pittman: And how do you balance being a founder of law droid and continuing to run and develop the company with all of these other projects that you're involved in? What's your personal philosophy? Get back to the philosophy. What's your personal philosophy of balance in all of your different projects?

Thomas Martin: I guess maybe a lawyerly move is to take issue with the assumptions underlying the question that there is a balance. I mean, the thing is that it is a reflection of who we are. I love my family. I spend time with my family. I love technology. I've created a legal tech company, law Droid, to pursue that. I love the profession that we're all a part of. And combining them all and racing to keep up with all of these different, interesting projects is just something that makes life fulfilling and worthwhile. So how do I do it? I have no idea. It is a bit crazy at times, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I think if I was just doing one thing over and over and over again, that would not be a good fit for me. And I'm not suggesting that everyone do this. It's quite a lot of juggling that I do, but it keeps life interesting for me.

James Pittman: And you're currently based in Vancouver?

Thomas Martin: Yeah, I'm originally from Los Angeles, California, but I live in Vancouver there for ten years.

James Pittman: What's next for Law Droid and what's next for Thomas Martin in terms of projects or initiatives you're most excited about in the coming months and the New year?

Thomas Martin: Well, James, I think what's next for me is to continue to fight the good fight of building this product, as I know you're familiar with yours, and to continue to try to do my best to please customers and build that user base, which over time is just an amazing asset, both in terms of getting to work with a lot of great people, but also the financial independence that comes from that to further grow. That is what's next in terms of the technology and how that's going to play out within laudroid. I can't really predict based on what we've seen where that's going to go, but I can say that what my plan is is to just make Laudroid a trusty assistant that can help lawyers with the work that they do, but also to help people and do social good. So that's really what I have in mind. And the more that we get to get together with the awards, with the conferences that I'm organizing, the more we get to see each other and feel good about that, exchange ideas and grow together.

James Pittman: I agree with you. The community building, the sharing, the exchange of ideas, it's so incredibly important both for us to experience the richness of life and of being in this field and also to keep driving forward the innovation. So, Thomas, I'm right there with you on that. And congratulations on, from what I understand is a fantastic job with the legal was I couldn't get to Nashville for it, but definitely do want to make the next one.

James Pittman: But, Thomas, we're getting up to the end of the hour, and I want to thank you again for appearing on the podcast because it's been fascinating, very, very impressive, the sTory. Thomas G. Martin, founder of Lawjoyd, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thomas Martin: Thank you so much, James. I truly appreciate it, getting the time to speak with you and with your audience. Thank you.

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