James Pittman: Welcome to Immigration Uncovered, the video podcast produced by Docketwise, where we dive deep into the dynamic world of immigration law, shedding light on the latest developments, cutting edge practice management strategies, and the transformative impact of legal technology. I'm thrilled to be your host on this exciting journey as we empower immigration practitioners with invaluable insights and explore the intricate intersection of law and society. Welcome. Today I have as my special guest Nikki Black, who is an attorney, author, and speaker. She also works here at Finope, the parent company of Docketwise.

James Pittman: So I'd like to introduce Nikki. And Nikki, please. Thanks so much for joining us. Tell us about your background.

Niki Black: Sure thing. Really happy to be here and looking forward to talking to you today. I started my career off in a fairly traditional way. I was a public defender for almost four years. I started off in appeals and then spent the next three years after that in court representing clients. And then I moved on to a litigation firm where I handled lots of civil litigation, plaintiffs and defense matters, personal injury, employment discrimination, some commercial litigation. And I also continued to handle criminal defense matters as well. And then I took a couple of years off after I had my second child and then sort of segued back into legal after about two and a half years. And I hung a shingle doing contract work for other attorneys initially, and then at that point started writing. I started my blog, Suey Generous, which is still continuing, and that was in 2005, and that was my legal blog. And shortly thereafter became of counsel to a DWI defense firm here in Rochester, New York, and continued to write about the intersection of law and technology. At the time, it was blogging how lawyers can use social media. And then eventually in 2012, I was hired by my case, which was later acquired by Finnipay. And before that, we acquired Docketwise, our parent company did.

James Pittman: We're all part of the same family now, and it's great for our Docketwise users to see the incredible depth of talent that we have here in the larger company.

James Pittman: And, I mean, Nikki, you're an author, a speaker, a blogger, you've written treatises. You're a technology evangelist and advocate, a kind of guru, if you will. It's really an incredible story you've written. I see at least three books. I have cloud computing for lawyers, social media for lawyers, and a treatise on criminal law in New York. Out of these, which was the most fun to write?

Niki Black: Well, the tech ones were the ones I enjoyed the most. And The Social Media for Lawyers and the Cloud Computing were both published by the Aba in 2010 and in 2012. And those two books were very different because The Social Media for Lawyers I co authored with Carolyn Alafont, and she was already under contract with the Aba, and she reached out to me to help her with that and we both had already written. We were able to take a lot of the stuff we'd already written in terms of articles and blog posts and kind of repurpose that to create that book. So it was a different sort of collaborative experience. We also created some new content, obviously, as well. But the Cloud Computing for Lawyers book I think probably was my favorite, mainly because it was one that I pitched to my editor at Daba while we were finishing up the social media book. And I wrote that one myself, and it took a lot longer and it was peer reviewed multiple times because in 2012, cloud computing was a nation technology and not particularly accepted. And so a lot of the lawyers that were members of the Aba, they reviewed them multiple times just to ensure accuracy and to make sure we covered all our bases before publishing something that was somewhat scandalous at the time in some ways that a lot of people still opposed. But I really enjoyed that one because it was definitely cutting edge and I think I was the first one to write about it and it really helped sort of lead the way to what our companies do today.

James Pittman: Cloud based products are now the standard. I mean, if you had to revisit the subject matter, do you think there's value in some of the concepts that you brought out or has sort of the passage of time and the adoption of the cloud platforms just sort of obviated the things that you were talking about? Are there any things, looking back when you wrote the book, that are still issues?

Niki Black: Oh, for sure. A third of the book covered the security and ethical issues, in part because of all the caution at the time, but also because lawyers, regardless of when they're using it then or now, need to address all those issues. The very first part also was relevant, which was an overview of what is the cloud, how does it fit into things, how is it different from premises based computing? It was just a middle part where I talked about even then, the different categories still exist, although they've expanded. But the products have all changed significantly since 2012. Lots of acquisitions, tons of new products have come on the market since then. But two thirds of the book really is still fairly current and up to date, I would say, and relevant.

James Pittman: Nowadays, the hottest buzzword is the artificial intelligence. I mean, I'm asking this to all of my guests practically, but how do you see artificial intelligence impacting the future of law firms and the legal profession as a whole?

Niki Black: Well, it's something I've been incredibly excited about. I've written a ton about it at the Aba Journal, above the Law, my column at the Daily Record, and I already have two different talks about Chat GPT and then artificial intelligence that I've been giving. I agree with what Bill Gates said, which is that there was PCs, there was the Internet, and now there's AI. All these other things in between that I wrote about, that I covered, that I helped lawyers understand blogging, social media, the cloud, mobile computing, those are all huge things. But this is on a different scale. This has the potential to change the practice of law and also, quite frankly, our society and even the world in unexpected and in some ways unpredictable ways that are very dystopian and predictable, quite potentially so. The generative AI is something new and something different. Its potential is incredible and the ability to help lawyers streamline their practices, get things done much more quickly. Brainstorm like almost have like an assistant right next to you. There are so many potential use cases, but then there's so many issues right now that I think are going to be solved pretty quickly, especially now that you have so many legal tech companies rolling out variations of this too and putting guardrails on it.

James Pittman: What would be some of those issues?

Niki Black: Hallucination one of the biggest ones, which is that it just makes things up. Certainly it's not useful right now for legal research. Even I would almost caution against it. Even when you're using it within the confines of a legal research tool, they still are trying to iron out some of those hallucination issues. But then the other one is confidentiality, especially when you're using chat GPT versus a product put out by a legal tech company because depending on your settings, they may be using the input to train the system. And so you may be providing with either confidential or proprietary information that you don't want to be providing to it or else that you shouldn't be providing to it due to your ethical obligations. So those are some of the main ones right now as legal tech companies. Lexis has released Lexus AI, plus Thompson. Reuters has acquired Case Texts and their co counsel product. As these larger companies that own a lot of the data that's legal specific data, acquire and build out their AI product, you're definitely going to find more value and more Guardrail capabilities. So that it's only pulling on legal data which reduces the hallucinations in addition to other programming on the back end that they put in place to try to reduce that. So that's super exciting. I mean, that's an entire talk, but I've definitely written some articles on it that you can look up if you're particularly interested in reading the specifics and plenty of other people have as well, not just me.

James Pittman: How do you think the rise of AI would impact the job market for lawyers?

Niki Black: I mean, that's a really interesting question, right. It's hard to tell right now because with those hallucinations and some of the confidentiality issues, it cannot replace lawyers at this point, right? Or even legal assistance because you can't rely on the output. But once we get to the point and we will where you can rely on the output. We're going to get there quickly. In my talk, I talk about Moore's Law and how we're in the middle of this tech adoption. It was always pretty tech rollout and improvement was pretty consistent for a long time. For 80 years, the capabilities doubled. Now as we talk about processing power, but they doubled every 18 months. But now we're at this point we're just off the charts and Moore's Law doesn't even apply. And with AI applying AI training its own AI in some ways or else improving it, we're off the charts. And so we're going to get to a place very quickly where a lot of these issues have been solved. And at that point, once you can rely on the content and we really reduce some of the confidentiality issues that you encounter, it has the potential to at the very least, replace a lot of legal functions, not necessarily lawyers, although there's also going to be new jobs created within firms too, right? And new jobs for lawyers to do. But I think what's really interesting is a lot of the studies that have been put out where they've asked lawyers and legal professionals about who they think it's going to replace, everyone at the top of the firm always thinks it's going to replace everyone below them, but they never think it's going to replace them. But all the studies about the AI in general across all different industries, legal is one of the top ones that's predicted to be significantly impacted by it. But it's going to be time will tell what that really looks like. I think it's hard to predict.

James Pittman: Do you see the various state bars grappling with it in a systematic way or are they sort of being reactive? We've seen cases come up already where people were sanctioned for just relying on Chat GPT without checking the work or checking the product. Do you know if they're going about it in a systematic proactive way?

Niki Black: I do know that California is their bar is in the process of coming out with an ethics opinion that addresses some of those issues. I'm not aware of any other bars that have announced that they're doing that. I can almost guarantee that at this point. Either somebody has submitted that question to multiple bars across the country, or bar associations, as the case may be, or else they've already encountered a violation like the ones that we've seen in New York, for example, where they use Chat GPT and it created false case citations. And then when the attorney probed further after the court saying we can't locate these cases, can you provide them? The Chat GPT provided fake cases and the guy submitted them to the court, which obviously doesn't make he should have gone about that in a very different way across the board. But I think what you're seeing now, and I just wrote about this for my daily Record. Colin right now you're just seeing a knee jerk response, just like you have with every other kind, where initially they forbid lawyers. Like courts are doing this. Some law school applications are saying they won't allow it. In their applications process, you have to certify you didn't use it. This has happened, like with email, it's happened with social media, with cloud computing. They initially forbid it or they require client consent, and eventually it's just this tidal wave and they have to allow people to use it. Right. And that's going to happen much more quickly this time around, I think, where it's just going to be like, we give up. You can use it, and it's just a free for all, and we'll see how the chips fall. We'll see what happens, though.

Niki Black: Well, I want to get a little.

James Pittman: Bit more about you. You started off as a practicing attorney. What inspired you to start the journey as a writer and a speaker? Was there a pivotal moment?

Niki Black: Well, I would say that it was starting that legal blog, Suey Generous, that I mentioned. I had two small kids, I'd taken about two and a half years off, and I hung that virtual shingle to do contract work for other lawyers. And I met with my cousin, who's always been my mentor, and he's a lawyer here in Rochester, and told him what I was doing. And as I walked away from lunch with him, he yelled over his shoulder, by the way, I heard about this thing called blogging on NPR today. You might want to look into it. I was like, blogging. What is that? And so I started my blog, Suey Generous, and that really connected me with a very small legal blogging community that existed in 2005. There were quite a few people that preceded me, but not that many in terms of now there's thousands, I would argue hundreds of thousands of lawyers and law firms online. But it didn't used to be that way. And so I made a lot of connections very early on with a lot of people that were already involved in legal tech before me, for sure, and had long been involved in it. And so from there I would go to conferences. Initially, I went to one or two. I just paid my way. Then I started getting treated as press so I didn't have to pay for the ticket. And then I started getting asked to speak, and so they would pay my expenses. And I got to the point where I was getting speakers fees, I was getting paid to write. And initially I started talking about blogging, like, here's why lawyers should blog, starting locally. I did that and on my blog, and then Facebook and Twitter came along and I realized that lawyers needed to understand these tools, even if they didn't use them. And eventually they all had to, because what happened on those platforms became evidence in cases and then cloud computing, right? And so I just kept tracking tech as it went along from 2005 on. And I was just fascinated by the implications. I've been like a Trekkie my whole since law school. I've always loved tech. My dad brought home a TRS 80 when I was ten and I had to learn Basic to program it to play Pong. And I took a Pascal programming language in college because I thought it was interesting. So I've always been peripherally interested in tech and science fiction and possibilities like that. And so it all just kind of aligned because I came along at the right time a little bit early on and have used all these platforms and tools a little bit ahead of the curve and was able to make I think I was the first person hired into a legal tech company. And now most tech companies have someone like me in our space. Attorneys that are now in the tech world. So I was able to create a position for myself that I love and that ultimately, I think became a position for lots of other attorneys and lots of other companies too, or something similar to it.

James Pittman: That's very true.

James Pittman: What do you see are the biggest barriers to adoption of technology in law firms?

Niki Black: Well, we're risk averse. We're trained to be precedent based. Those are the things that help us serve our clients well, right. We advise them over the risks and we help try to help them avoid risks that could impact them negatively. We rely on precedent to provide our opinions. And so if you're talking about technology adoption, neither of those traits, which are traits that serve us well and serve our clients well, match very well with technology adoption because you have to be willing to take some risks and you have to be curious and have a bit of a bigger picture than just legal. And some lawyers, that's challenging for them to do and some are resistant because what they're doing works very well, thank you very much, and they don't want to change anything. And I know plenty of lawyers like that at the top of law firms that just don't want their day to day to change. They know they're going to retire soon. They're the ones in power and so they have a lot of control in these firms in terms of what tech is used and adopted. And so, quite honestly, some of the older attorneys in our profession are in the way of adoption and always have been. And also I just think our inherent training can make it challenging. And concerns about confidentiality and our obligations to protect confidential information also are very valid concerns that lawyers really need to vet and when they choose tech, understand how those concerns can be impacted.

James Pittman: Let's talk in a little more detail about some of those fears and misconceptions. What are some common, let's say, misconceptions or fears that lawyers have about adopting new tech tools in their practice and then sort of the follow up to that would be how can they overcome them?

Niki Black: Well, so one concern is that it's going to be too disruptive, that the process is going to prevent them from doing what actually makes them money practice law. So there are a lot of concerns about how disruptive it's going to be and whether it's going to ultimately be a waste of time and money. And that can be addressed by making sure that you have buy in up front from everyone in your firm that's going to be using it. Include them in the process of testing out the software, because if you're going to choose software that someone else is going to be in more often than you, you need to make sure that they buy into it, because otherwise, once you've purchased it and moved all your data in, they're going to be resistant. So you want to make sure there's buy in up front. You want to make sure you understand how the data that you already have in one form or another, whether it's on documents or digital data that's housed somewhere else, how are you going to get the necessary data into the software and what's your plan going to be in that regard? That's another thing that can be disruptive if you realize that it's not all going to be able to get in in a timely fashion. So you need to decide, are you going to import all data since the beginning of your firm? Are you going to just import open cases, recently closed cases, new cases? How are you going to start putting data into that and get everybody's feedback and make sure they're on the same page and make sure that you understand how the company is going to be able to help you with data migration and then make sure that you have training. On the other side, you have an implementation plan and training. These are ways that you can make sure that you would do everything that you can to reduce the friction and the amount of time that it takes to implement new software into your law firm. So, I mean, that's one of the biggest concerns. And then there are security and ethics concerns, and those can be addressed by vetting the provider and making sure that you thoroughly understand how they're going to handle your law firm's data. I always recommend you use a legal provider, not a general consumer provider, because they already understand your ethical obligations and the compliance rules and how their software might potentially impact it. And they take steps to ensure that those are addressed, whereas a general consumer provider doesn't understand those things, doesn't have steps in place, and also often doesn't have the customer service available, especially if you're not paying for it, like free Gmail versus paid Gmail.

James Pittman: Are there any specific security and privacy concerns that lawyers should consider when using cloud based services to store their client data.

Niki Black: Absolutely. And the security and privacy concepts overlap, but they are slightly different. But I tend to lump them together when I answer questions like this. One thing that you do want to be aware of is how the provider accesses your data, who has access to it, and under what circumstances. You want to understand how they protect your data. So you want to understand where are the cloud servers located. You want to understand who owns them. Oftentimes it's Amazon EC two or Google. There are different companies that own and operate these cloud servers for all the other companies that create software or apps. And so you want to understand who owns those servers and the steps they take to protect both the physical server and also the data housed on the servers. And what steps does the company take to protect the data housed on those servers? Your law firm's data. You want to make sure there's redundancies in place that protect your firm's data. One of the most important ones is georedundancy, that you want your firm's data to be located in two different cloud servers based in two different locations. And you want to understand how frequently those cloud servers speak to each other and share data. So as your law firm is changing and adding data throughout the day, you want them to speak to each other frequently. So you have very current copies of your law firm's data in two different servers located in two different places, so that if one of the servers, a natural disaster, strikes and damages the server, even though that server is no longer functional. There's a recent copy of your law firm's data located on a server that's in a different geographic region that was not impacted by that natural disaster. And I always tell people that if both of those servers go out so there's one in California and one in New York, and they're both impacted by some sort of disaster, you're probably going to be packing your survival. Backpack and taking your family up into the hills. And you're not going to be super concerned about your law firm's data at that point. So those are some of the issues. It's sort of the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the data and the company that's going to be housing it. You really want to vet them. Oh, and also you want to keep your law firm's data stays in the United States and doesn't leave the borders of the United States because otherwise you may trigger privacy regulations and laws of other jurisdictions that may impact your ability to access your law firm's data.

James Pittman: Nikki, you've written a lot of articles on a variety of topics. One of them that I thought was very interesting was wearable devices. So let's talk about that a little bit. How do we influence lawyers'practices, and can you give us some examples of practical applications of wearable devices when you're working as a lawyer. Certainly the Apple Watch would be one.

Niki Black: I mean, that's the first one. The one that comes immediately to mind with me is the smartwatches like Apple's Watch. And those can be really useful in a number of different ways for lawyers. I think particularly, I often say for women lawyers, some of the features are very useful in part because women lawyers, the suits don't have those big huge pockets, so we can put our phones in and so oftentimes our phones are in our bag or in our purse. And so if you get an important message from an assistant, from an associate in your firm, or from someone in your family or a daycare provider or the like, you can set it up so that you only get the most important messages sent to your watch. That way, if you get a message that you really need to pay attention to, there's an unobtrusive way for you to get that notification and decide whether you really need to step out and take that notification. And then what's nice is you can make sure that it's not every single notification that would come to your phone that only the ones that come to your phone that are essential are pushed off to your watch so you get them. It's also really useful for if you travel a lot for work. I find it really helpful when I'm trying to navigate in a city, you don't have your watch or your phone out, which makes it look like you are a tourist and a target for pickpockets or whatever the like. Instead you get notifications on your wrist and it just kind of will let you know when it's time to turn left or turn right. And you don't look like as much of a newbie in the city. So I like it for that reason too. There's all sorts of other features that you can advance. Slides if you're giving a presentation using your watch, you can set the watch as a timer so that you can track if you're giving a talk or for whatever other reason, if it's your opening statement, so that you can see how much time you have left for what you had allotted for the opening statement. Or you can sometimes interact with it to show the slides that are up on the screen in front of a jury, if you will. So there's all sorts of ways that you can use a smartwatch. And I also talk about, I mean, I don't know if it's a wearable tech, but VR, that is wearable virtual reality. And when it comes to virtual reality and those virtual worlds, the only reason I ever tell lawyers right now, I think you need to understand them is more than anything else, just because like social media things happen there that can be part of litigation. There's evidence occurring, there are things happening that can become evidence. So you just want to have familiarity with those. Even if you don't choose to have a virtual storefront, which I don't think most lawyers need at this point, but you should at least be familiar and understand how to get data out of there that might be evidence in a case or how to locate it.

James Pittman: Well, I mean, that's an interesting topic and I'm quite interested in the Metaverse topics in general, so let's delve into that a little bit. If you had to theorize, what impact do you think augmented reality or virtual reality could have on the practice of law as a general proposition?

Niki Black: If we have another pandemic, I can very much envision court proceedings happening in the virtual world. There is actually a thing in the Metaverse, which is Facebook's online world, virtual world that's called Metacort. I don't know if it's still going on, but it's not lawyers, but they actually have entire cases and everybody shows up and there's a judge and they run it like a courtroom. They yell at people, they kick them out, they have like a bailiff and they run these little pretend trials, people that get up and testify. The judge makes a ruling and I don't know how many court shows they've watched because they're very believable judges, these people that sit up there. But it's fascinating and it does show the potential of really being able to litigate in the Metaverse if you had to. During the pandemic, one thing that I was a fan of was conferences in virtual reality where you had avatars simply because we were so isolated, it was a way to sort of feel like you were interacting with people. So that was an interesting experience. I was involved in a few conferences like that and I even talked to my local bar into having our virtual conference center with avatars. So there's a lot of potential, but I think as long as we have the real world and video conferencing, I don't know to what extent that's going to come to fruition anytime soon because the tech just isn't there yet.

James Pittman: Yeah, I think it's not going to lead. Legal professional is not going to lead on that. I think it's going to follow the adoption of VR in the broader society. I don't see the legal profession being the cutting edge of adopting virtual reality. We've talked about some of the regulatory requirements and complying with professional rules and that sort of thing.

James Pittman: How do you think legal tech tools assist lawyers in actually complying with regulatory requirements and law and make it easier to do so?

Niki Black: A lot of the financial functions and a lot of these, whether it's practice management, accounting functions, or the ability to run financial reports or to track payments, I think it really helps in terms of visibility and trust accounting, managing your trust accounts, visibility into those trust accounts. So for example, years ago I used to interview. Our customers and write about their experiences with my case on our blog. And one customer that I talked to sort of told me, off the record, if you will, that this person was on the ethics committee for the Bar Association in their state bar and was in charge of working with lawyers who had had their licenses temporarily suspended due to issues related to trust account management. And this person would always recommend that they set up their firms with my case because that way it gave the bar transparency into the finances so they could make sure that this person had figured out how to do it properly without improperly utilizing the trust account for things that were not allowed. And this person told me that they tended to just stay with my case after that because they found that it really helped them run their firm. But at the end of the day, it was actually something that they used while someone was on probation to make sure that they are actually complying and not misusing the trust account. So I thought that was really interesting and it's a great example of how these tools can be used for that.

James Pittman: Do you have a sense of how the law schools are doing as far as educating the student bodies on the types of technology that those students will actually be using out in practice? Do you think that they're doing it at all systematically or are they doing it in sort of a patchwork way? Would you have any recommendations for the law schools or what they should be doing to make sure that their students are graduating and are up to speed on the technology that's being used in the mean?

Niki Black: That's a great question and they're definitely doing it on an ad hoc basis, but it definitely depends on the school. So there are a few schools, a handful out there that are doing a great job. So like Suffolk Law in Boston, the law school in Salt Lake City, and Brigham Young? Yeah. Brigham Young Law School. Yeah brigham Young. Yeah. They have a pretty good tech program. And I know there's quite a few others across the country that have a tech forward approach, are trying to really encourage their students to learn about it, to learn about tech, understand tech, implement it in their practices when they graduate. But the vast majority are not they're not emphasizing tech. And for that reason, when they do offer tech classes, very few students go because the schools are not indicating that they think it's important to do so. So, for example, there's a tech committee with the New York Bar and someone who used to be the committee chair had organized sort of a group of us from across the state that all were involved in legal technology. He had set up with a bunch of different law schools across the state. He had a course in tech and technology and legal technology and then we would all go and talk at different times to this class, sometimes virtually, sometimes in person, and he would have it each semester at a different law school. And it was really interesting because this was like the only technology class that some of these schools had and hardly anyone showed up. And I think it was because the school was not emphasizing this as being important. They were just kind of doing this because they agreed to almost and they weren't emphasizing that it was important. It's not a requirement. And I know that some schools are considering having a requirement. There's a school that I spoke to that reached out to me that wanted my opinion on that they're considering, in addition to legal research and writing, to have like a technology requirement. But they're all just thinking about this still, most of them. And so that's what's interesting to me. So I don't think that there is a significant attempt across the board to do this. And if anyone's going to do it's often like a legal research and writing professor who thinks it's important, who tries to include it in their class. Most of them don't have this tech board approach. The ones that are unusual and they're.

James Pittman: Admirable it really seems inadequate. If I may be so bold, but I wonder if it would be something that could be done to approach sort of the association of Law schools and perhaps they should develop standards for minimum competency in the technology. That might be something that has to come into being at some point to help the situation so that people are not graduating behind the times as far as their understanding of the technology. Because we're getting to the point, if we're not already at the point, where I'm sure you would agree that it's really obligatory to have a command of the essential technologies that you're going to be using in the industry. Wouldn't you agree?

Niki Black: Oh, I think 100%. The duty of technology competence, which the vast majority of states have adopted as part of your duty of competence, requires you to have an understanding of different technology tools so you can make an educated decision about whether to use or not use them. If you just choose not to use them but don't understand them, that's not meeting your duty of tech competence. That's malpractice, in my opinion. I think that's an interesting approach, the idea of having a standard across all law schools, because at this point there's no financial incentives and most of them are financially incentive based. They don't have any financial incentives to include this in their program. It doesn't benefit them whether their students come out with that level of education in tech or not, so they're just not doing it.

James Pittman: Have you come across any innovative uses of technology in pro bono work or assisting vulnerable populations or to increase access to legal services?

Niki Black: That's an interesting question. Access to justice like age of J is not something I super involved in. So I know that there are some companies out there that specifically focus on that. They have some great products. But the challenge with that is the challenge with access to justice. In know, we're in a capitalistic know, LSC keeps getting defunded over and over. Every year, less and less money goes into LSC at a national level. So we're relying more and more on pro bono. And lawyers don't make money when they work pro bono, so they can only do so much of that. And so palladian, that's the tool that is for access to know. The access to justice tools, I think, have a hard time getting funded because people, the private equity companies and all the other types of funding that it's money driven, right? And they want to make money off of their investment. And the ATJ tools just don't have good promise for making money because they're there to do for the greater good. So I think there are some really interesting tools out there to do that. It's just they don't get funded as well and they're not a priority when it comes to getting funded and so they don't grow nearly as quickly.

James Pittman: That's unfortunate. Very unfortunate.

James Pittman: Let's go back for a second to what you were saying about the duty of technological competence. Now, is that just an interpretation of your general duty of competence? I mean that state bars have come up with it that of course, as a lawyer you have a duty to be competent when you are practicing the profession. So are you referring to something which is an interpretation of that role that exists in all of the state professional roles of responsibility?

Niki Black: Well, so the duty of technology competence is Model Rule either 1.1 or 2.1. I am forgetting which one. And in 2012, the Aba amended the comments to Model Rule. To that Model Rule. And it was comment eight, I believe, that they amended. And what that comment said was that lawyers in their duty of competence, general competence, includes a duty of technology competence. And the vast majority of jurisdictions at this point have adopted that interpretation and added that same commentary to their comments. Bob Ambrogi on his Law Sites blog has a section where he tracks as each jurisdiction adopts that. But at this point, the majority of jurisdictions have adopted the tech Competence Rule. And so, like you said, it's technically, I would say, an interpretation. The comments which help you interpret that rule have been amended to include the requirement of tech competence. So it is technically an interpretation. But then as it's adopted and the ethics opinions in different jurisdictions also acknowledge and adopt that requirement, it's really becoming more of a requirement rather than just an advisement.

James Pittman: Well, Megan, it's really evident that you're really passionate about seeking knowledge and staying up to date in this area. Do you want to share some of your favorite podcasts, books, resources, et cetera, that you follow or that have had an impact on your development as a legal technologist and advocate.

Niki Black: Yeah, sure. Bob Ambrogi's site is one the lawsite's blog, and that's great for just staying up on legal tech news and generally. Also, Bob has a webcast every Friday, which I'll be going to in about an hour. I'm on that along with a handful of other legal technology journalists from Legal Tech News, Aba Journal, above the Law. There's also a UK journalist, Caroline Hill from Legal. It insider. And every week at 03 Friday, we have a live webcast where we talk about the latest legal tech news and then it's also recorded. And so if you can't make it, you can watch the recording. As long as you're subscribed, you'll get the email link to that. So that's a great way to sort of keep up on the latest news each week. And then the above. The law has a legal tech section. I write a column there. So do a bunch of other people. Joe Patrice covers legal tech for above the law. Aba Journal is a great place. I have a column there and there are other people that also write about legal tech. Some of the law practice division of the Aba hosts Aba Tech Show every year. They plan that and they also have lots of articles that come out that are related to tech as well. So that's also a good resource. And then my co author Carolyn Elephant, she co authored Social Media for Lawyers with me. Her website, My Shingle is a really good resource, especially if you're interested in either starting a law firm or using AI in your firm. She's right now just started a course that is all about starting a law firm kind of from scratch and using AI, generative AI in particular, to really fill in the gaps in terms of creating templates or it's really good right now if you're giving it a piece of content to analyze or summarize or to create a template or to brainstorm. That's what it's the best use of generative AI is right now because you don't have to rely on it to give you fake information, you're just using it to pull information or summarize stuff from data you're already providing it. And so she really goes into a lot of ways you can use that when you're starting a law firm and she has a full course and also lots of research or lots of guides and other types of information. I think that you can either. I think most of them you can download for free. So her website, My Shingle is a great resource as well.

James Pittman: Yeah, I remember way back in the day, really, the main book that was out there was Jay Foonberg's book on how to start and build the law practice. And then there was another Aba book and I can't remember the author was called Flying Solo. So it's really great that there are resources like that that Carolyn is producing that are up to date and have really been brought into 2023 and using the tools that we're using now. Because if you look back about some of those well known books about starting a law practice, they were written really before all these tools were adopted. So kudos to Carolyn for that. That's my shingle and everyone should definitely check that out.

Niki Black: She has a book called Solo by Choice. She recently updated. It was the third know, Foonberg's is a great resource, but hers is updated and has a much more modern, I would argue, approach to starting a law firm because she continues to update it over the years to incorporate the new tech, the latest tech, into it.

James Pittman: That's super important. And I think justifies having Carolyn on our show as a guest to talk about that, talk about starting a law practice in 2023 with the tools that we have now.

James Pittman: So Carolyn, if you're listening, we're going to invite you. Nikki, do you want to give a shout out? I mean, aside from our affinity family here and the companies that are with Docketwise, in my case inside of AffiniPay, are there any other legal tech startups or companies that are out there that you think are making great strides in sort of advancing how lawyers are using mean?

Niki Black: I think that there are some really interesting AI companies out there. So there's a number of companies that have contract analytics, which is not anything that I did in my practice, but they're really interesting. Like Lawgeeks is one of them. There's a whole bunch of others that have come out, especially with the advent of generative AI and the broad scale release of that. And what contract analytics companies do is if you are in house counsel or you otherwise deal with contracts a lot, they help you quickly analyze the contracts and locate outlier clauses that shouldn't be there or perhaps that are missing and that should be included. So some of those tools are really interesting and I've really been interested in a lot of the generative AI stuff lately, including just the legal assistance. So co counsel was a super interesting one. That was case text tool that I mentioned previously was acquired by Thompson Reuters a couple weeks ago, but there's a whole bunch of other ones. My most recent Aba Journal article is about the specific type of function, legal assistance with generative AI capabilities. There's a whole bunch of them in beta right now. Law Droid has one called Copilot. They're all in beta and due to be released within the next few months it looks like. So those are some really interesting tools to look for. And what those do is they kind of act like basically like a gated chat GPT that has some of those guardrails on there that will prevent some of the hallucinations. But that sort of is a general assistant to you on your computer, but related to legal topics or with specific legal specific prompts built in so that you're more easily able to get information out of documents that you have or able to ask questions that are legal specific or able to create templates or there's all sorts of use cases. And when they're specifically limited to legal data sets, they can be really helpful and useful. So those are some other things that are really interesting that are coming down the pike.

James Pittman: So Nikki, you've written some articles about data analytics and I want to clarify that. It would seem to me that when we're talking about data analytics, we're really talking about two separate things. We're really talking about I mean, first of all, you can think about all the data that you could gain from the technology that you're using in your practice and analysis and reports that you might conduct on that data. That would be sort of one way, I'd think, about how lawyers need to engage in data analysis. The other kind of data analytics would be gathering data about outcomes in the legal system and using that to inform your legal strategy and your planning for your cases. So would you like to talk about these two areas and how you think lawyers should approach them?

Niki Black: Yeah, sure. In terms of the first category, you can get lots of information from your law practice management software or the software you use to run your firm, whether it's my case or docketwise. And what that type of software does is it helps you pull data from the platform and make sense of it in ways that will help you make better decisions about your firm. So it can either be like lead data, like where are the leads coming from, financial analytics data. You can understand where the money is coming from and going to outstanding balances, who in your firm is bringing in the most cases, who has the most originating fees, who is billing the most. So you can get all sorts of data about your law firm and make better decisions. And then there's litigation analytics data which is really near and dear to my heart given my background. And I think those are really interesting tools and they just help you make better decisions using artificial intelligence about where to file your case and how to litigate it. So the reason AI is so useful is and this predates generative AI. But the reason it's so useful is because when you have large amounts of data that are too difficult for humans to sift through or even just traditional tools, artificial intelligence is able to rapidly make sense of that data and provide usable actionable information. And so that's what it will do with litigation data, especially when you pulled out a pacer. When you talk about companies like Thompson, Reuters or Lexis or Bloomberg that also have lots and lots of litigation information in them as well. Because of the data sets they've accumulated or purchased over the years and now own, you're able to get a lot of actionable information about litigation. So it will help you decide, if you're in federal court, for example, where to even file the case, which district is going to have the most beneficial has had the most beneficial approach to your type of litigation in terms of where you're coming from with your client. And then once you file it in that district, you can learn all about the judge. How does the judge rule on different procedural issues? How do they rule on specific procedural mechanisms? So you want to accomplish one thing procedurally, but they always deny it. Maybe you can use a different procedural avenue to accomplish the same thing that they tend to grant more often than deny, and it helps you decide the best way to approach that particular thing you're trying to accomplish. Then also, you can learn all about all the different parties involved in a case, from lawyers to witnesses, to the parties themselves, to the judges and companies. And so you can get detailed reports that give you a host of information about all the different people and parties involved and organizations involved in a case. So, for example, with an expert witness, if you're in a Med Mal case and you have an expert witness, you can search and determine how often they testify generally, are they always in the plaintiff's side? Does it look like they're a professional witness and they don't practice anymore? It can give you information like that to help. And also, were parts of their testimony excluded? On what basis were they precluded from testifying? So you can try to make those same arguments on behalf of your client if you're the defense, who will preclude them from testifying about certain things that might be damaging to your case. So there's all sorts of really interesting ways that litigation analytics tools that predated Generative AI did. And now that there's Generative AI, there's just all sorts of other really interesting ways that are going to be coming down the pike in terms of analytics as well.

James Pittman: Yeah, and I can see a lot of those tools being useful for people that do immigration litigation, certainly, and immigration law in general. There's statistics on approval rates for various types of cases and the immigration court system approval rates for various types of claims across the different immigration courts. So it would be very interesting to see people utilize the full capability of doing data analytics to help them with their immigration litigation.

James Pittman: Mickey, can you share any success stories of law firms or individual lawyers who went from a position where they had not embraced legal tech and then went on to embrace it and have seen what you would consider remarkable improvements in their practice?

Niki Black: Sure. I referenced earlier that I used to interview my case customers and write about them for our blog. And so over the years, I probably talked to about 30 my case customers one on one, about how my case has really helped them streamline their firm and increase efficiencies and help them have better insight into their practices and grow more effectively. And so I think across the board, I can't think of any specific cases off the top of my head. They're all available on the blog, but at the end of the day, I found that with our customers, that the software, especially when they haven't used any software previously, it really does help them run their firms a lot more efficiently and effectively and have a lot more insight into what's happening on a day to day basis. And also it gives them a lot more flexibility and convenience because they can access their information from anywhere as long as they've got an Internet connection. So there really is a lot of built in convenience, flexibility and efficiency. When you start using software like Mikey's.

James Pittman: And Docketwise to run your you're as a successful author and legal technologist and speaker, you have a platform to influence positive change. How do you see your work contributing to the overall betterment of the profession and society?

Niki Black: I mean, that's an interesting question. It's really been a passion of mine. I've been lucky and fortunate that I was able to take a passion of mine and became my career. But I think that by all of my writings and speaking and my books, my continuing articles and I speak multiple times a year, twelve to 20 times a year across the country. By helping lawyers understand technology, it reduces the friction and makes them more comfortable with it and helps them use it in a proactive way that actually streamlines their practices and helps them be more effective lawyers and provide better client representation. So I really do feel like that's what I do. That's the essence of my job is it used to be as a lawyer, helping my clients improve their lives in one way or another and address the issues that they came to me with. And hopefully they would leave better off when they showed up at my door or at least received the best possible representation before they went to jail. Sometimes that was inevitable in some cases, but now I really think of my clients, if you will, as lawyers across the country and helping them understand tech, which is lawyers are not always very comfortable with something that they don't understand. And so that's another reason there's a lot of tech aversion. And so I really do try to break it down and make it into chunks that are digestible and interesting and really help them see the big picture and then dive into the very specific issues that they can learn about and try to implement in their practices. So I really do feel like that's the essence of what I do. And I'm fortunate that I get to work for a tech company that has that same goal and that they let me do what I do best, which is help lawyers understand tech and evangelize tech and make sure that they really become passionate about using it like I am.

James Pittman: That makes two of us, Mickey. And we're trying to do that very same thing here with our with our podcast.

James Pittman: Well, we're getting to the end of the hour. This has been an incredible discussion with Nikki Black of My Case, legal, technologist, author, speaker, blogger. And I want to thank Nikki for joining me. And please join us again for our next episode of Immigration Uncovered. Thank you, Nikki, for joining us.

Niki Black: My pleasure. Happy to be here.

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