1 00:00:00,151 --> 00:00:02,077 Jessica, how are you this afternoon? 2 00:00:02,077 --> 00:00:04,557 Hi Ted, thanks for having me, I'm great. 3 00:00:04,557 --> 00:00:05,557 Yeah, good. 4 00:00:05,557 --> 00:00:07,697 It's so glad you could be here. 5 00:00:07,837 --> 00:00:13,357 You and I got connected through Kara Peterson with Describe AI. 6 00:00:13,637 --> 00:00:14,004 had her. 7 00:00:14,004 --> 00:00:20,561 I was just on a call with Kara this morning planning a session that we're going to be doing at the LSC conference in January. 8 00:00:20,563 --> 00:00:21,288 Oh, awesome. 9 00:00:21,288 --> 00:00:22,683 What is LSC? 10 00:00:22,803 --> 00:00:24,616 the Legal Services Corporation. 11 00:00:24,616 --> 00:00:36,643 do their Innovations in Technology Conference where legal aid, tech innovators, people in the court space come together to sort of talk about tools that can help the justice gap. 12 00:00:36,877 --> 00:00:37,677 Interesting. 13 00:00:37,677 --> 00:00:37,977 Yeah. 14 00:00:37,977 --> 00:00:43,177 So Legal Aid of North Carolina, I think I might've told you this on our last time we spoke. 15 00:00:43,177 --> 00:00:48,348 They were like one of our first legal clients, not the first, but really early on. 16 00:00:48,348 --> 00:00:51,967 I forget the fellow's name there. 17 00:00:52,128 --> 00:00:55,388 This has been, she's 15, 16 years ago. 18 00:00:55,388 --> 00:01:02,899 I'm not sure if he's still there, but they needed a VDI that's virtual desktop infrastructure. 19 00:01:02,899 --> 00:01:15,059 It's where, you know, people log into remote desktops and we were Citrix partners at the time because we were consultants and it was early days. 20 00:01:15,399 --> 00:01:18,279 So we would do, we would say yes to anything, right? 21 00:01:18,279 --> 00:01:23,999 Any kind of, any kind of work, just anything that brought revenue in the door and paid the bills until we found our niche. 22 00:01:24,459 --> 00:01:30,699 Um, so yeah, I have a good, uh, a good understanding and history with, the legal aid folks there. 23 00:01:30,699 --> 00:01:31,737 It's an awesome organization. 24 00:01:31,737 --> 00:01:32,658 really innovative. 25 00:01:32,658 --> 00:01:39,117 They do a lot of really interesting stuff and they're on the cutting edge, so they've continued uh in this space too. 26 00:01:39,237 --> 00:01:40,430 good, that's good to hear. 27 00:01:40,430 --> 00:01:42,152 So let's get you introduced. 28 00:01:42,152 --> 00:01:47,242 So you're a lawyer, a researcher, you work at the Free Law Project. 29 00:01:47,242 --> 00:01:48,454 Fill in the gaps for us. 30 00:01:48,454 --> 00:01:51,673 Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and where you do it. 31 00:01:51,673 --> 00:01:54,707 Okay, so I am a lawyer, but I've never really practiced. 32 00:01:54,707 --> 00:01:57,841 I went straight into legal technology. 33 00:01:57,841 --> 00:02:04,601 I spent 12 years as a project manager at Cali, which is the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction. 34 00:02:04,601 --> 00:02:09,958 I managed their Ada J Author project, which is their document assembly tool in the legal aid court space. 35 00:02:09,958 --> 00:02:16,804 So teaching law students how to automate documents, talking to legal aid attorneys in courts and teaching them how to use the software. 36 00:02:16,816 --> 00:02:22,119 Everything about plain language, accessibility, making the process easier for self-represented litigants. 37 00:02:22,119 --> 00:02:34,276 About a year ago, I jumped over to the FreeLaw project and I started as a user researcher project manager on a grant funded project to figure out if there is an open source 38 00:02:34,276 --> 00:02:39,831 alternative to e-filing that we could build or a tool or some sort of open source case management. 39 00:02:39,831 --> 00:02:41,133 was very open-ended. 40 00:02:41,133 --> 00:02:42,238 Over the past year, 41 00:02:42,238 --> 00:02:50,882 I've sort of brought my love of access to justice and self-represent litigants into the Free Law Project, sort of turned our uh focus. 42 00:02:50,882 --> 00:02:54,463 And about two weeks ago, I became the director of a new division. 43 00:02:54,463 --> 00:02:57,446 We're calling the Justice Initiative, Justice Initiatives Division. 44 00:02:57,446 --> 00:03:08,371 And we're going to build out tech tools for the courts, for um legal aid, for self-represented litigants, all open source, all within free law projects, open data and 45 00:03:08,371 --> 00:03:09,722 technology to make 46 00:03:09,722 --> 00:03:14,309 the law better with a real focus on a tool we're calling the Lydigan Portal. 47 00:03:14,309 --> 00:03:21,703 That'll be our first one, but we're open to other avenues to make the legal system better through technology for self-represented Lydigan. 48 00:03:21,989 --> 00:03:22,689 That's awesome. 49 00:03:22,689 --> 00:03:22,939 Yeah. 50 00:03:22,939 --> 00:03:26,731 You know, A2J gets like, this is my impression. 51 00:03:26,731 --> 00:03:28,181 I don't know if you would agree or not. 52 00:03:28,181 --> 00:03:35,535 Like A2J gets a lot of, I'll call it honorable mention, but not really enough airtime in the space. 53 00:03:35,535 --> 00:03:41,899 It is such a massive, huge issue and we all know it. 54 00:03:41,899 --> 00:03:47,417 you know what, you know, like when I go to conferences, I went to TLTF, 55 00:03:47,417 --> 00:03:52,241 two years ago and there was an awesome, can't remember her name. 56 00:03:52,241 --> 00:03:55,764 She presented on, she was actually impacted. 57 00:03:55,764 --> 00:04:00,927 So she was a struggling single mom, accidentally bounced a check. 58 00:04:00,927 --> 00:04:06,390 They initiated a, in some States it's a criminal offense, including North Carolina to bounce a check. 59 00:04:06,390 --> 00:04:11,107 And that little minor infraction ended up really 60 00:04:11,107 --> 00:04:16,831 causing her to lose access to employment and all sorts of things. 61 00:04:16,831 --> 00:04:24,426 so I think it's important that we talk about it in more depth than just A to J, it's a problem. 62 00:04:24,426 --> 00:04:26,558 We know it, but not really doing much about it. 63 00:04:26,558 --> 00:04:32,623 So maybe you can kind of quantify the problem because you shared some interesting statistics last time we spoke. 64 00:04:32,623 --> 00:04:34,759 What's the magnitude of the gap? 65 00:04:34,759 --> 00:04:35,519 Yeah. 66 00:04:35,519 --> 00:04:37,039 So, I mean, I went to law school, right? 67 00:04:37,039 --> 00:04:38,999 So I graduated in 2011. 68 00:04:38,999 --> 00:04:49,299 I left it and had no idea that there was this whole world of people that can have life-changing consequences like you described, and they don't have access to a lawyer. 69 00:04:49,299 --> 00:04:54,599 So a lot of times we think about, you know, you're too poor to afford attorneys so that one is provided for you, right? 70 00:04:54,599 --> 00:04:56,999 The law and order stereotype. 71 00:04:57,179 --> 00:04:59,739 But that's not the case in civil law. 72 00:04:59,739 --> 00:05:03,589 There's no constitutional right to an attorney in a civil case. 73 00:05:03,589 --> 00:05:09,641 And people don't understand that civil cases can be as life impacting as a criminal case. 74 00:05:09,641 --> 00:05:12,922 So you can get up to a year in prison in a civil case. 75 00:05:12,922 --> 00:05:17,313 You can lose your kids in custody, family matters, divorce. 76 00:05:17,313 --> 00:05:18,383 You can lose your home, right? 77 00:05:18,383 --> 00:05:20,444 Foreclosure, eviction. 78 00:05:20,444 --> 00:05:22,686 You can have your paycheck taken away, right? 79 00:05:22,686 --> 00:05:24,313 If you have a debt issue. 80 00:05:24,313 --> 00:05:31,531 And so there's all of these things that are bubbling up in civil court that are hugely impacting people's lives. 81 00:05:31,531 --> 00:05:33,482 Civil court's actually where they're spending a lot of time. 82 00:05:33,482 --> 00:05:38,204 Most people are interacting with the justice system through civil court and they don't have the right to an attorney. 83 00:05:38,204 --> 00:05:39,514 So some statistics, right? 84 00:05:39,514 --> 00:05:46,286 So the Legal Services Corporation is the entity funded by Congress to provide for legal aid across the country. 85 00:05:46,286 --> 00:05:50,467 There are LSC funded legal aid organizations in every state. 86 00:05:50,947 --> 00:05:57,845 And they have an interesting project called, or a funding stream called uh the TIG. 87 00:05:57,845 --> 00:06:06,313 So technology innovation grants, special money set aside to do innovative things with technology to impact the justice gap. 88 00:06:06,313 --> 00:06:10,176 So the justice gap in general, right? 89 00:06:10,176 --> 00:06:16,241 2022 study from the Legal Services Corporation, it's literally called the justice gap report. 90 00:06:16,241 --> 00:06:22,387 Something like 92 % of people who are low income have a legal issue and they can't or don't address it. 91 00:06:22,387 --> 00:06:25,229 So people are sitting there 92 00:06:25,421 --> 00:06:36,082 Hundreds of millions of people, I think I did a little statistics with the census, something like potentially 100 million people are sitting around with life-changing, 93 00:06:36,082 --> 00:06:40,817 potentially legal issues and they're not dealing with them because they don't have money for an attorney. 94 00:06:40,817 --> 00:06:50,523 They don't know that it's a legal issue or they go to Legal Aid and there's not enough help there to actually get them the free lawyers that we've provided um through 95 00:06:50,523 --> 00:06:52,566 federal funding streams or local funding streams. 96 00:06:52,566 --> 00:06:59,146 So it's really a lot of people are dealing with a justice gap and technology is around to help. 97 00:06:59,146 --> 00:07:01,859 And so that's what I've spent my career working on. 98 00:07:02,284 --> 00:07:02,864 Interesting. 99 00:07:02,864 --> 00:07:03,184 Yeah. 100 00:07:03,184 --> 00:07:07,064 So my first entrepreneurial venture was a collection agency. 101 00:07:07,084 --> 00:07:09,104 So started it in 1992. 102 00:07:09,104 --> 00:07:11,775 I wasn't even old enough to drink at the time. 103 00:07:11,775 --> 00:07:17,315 Dropped out of college for a year, ended up going back part-time at night and finishing my degree. 104 00:07:17,315 --> 00:07:30,617 But that was an interesting business because I would say the vast majority of the debts that we were collecting, people just didn't care. 105 00:07:30,617 --> 00:07:42,207 It was, it wasn't, Hey, I'm a hardworking person and I fell on some hard times and you know, we would work with those people because it was in our best interest to do so even if 106 00:07:42,207 --> 00:07:52,416 they could pay us a very small amount, you know, a week or a month or whatever, it was something and it would keep the creditor at bay because something is better than nothing. 107 00:07:52,416 --> 00:07:57,990 but in certain circumstances, we, we would, um, file, civil actions. 108 00:07:58,138 --> 00:07:59,639 for bigger debts. 109 00:07:59,639 --> 00:08:07,665 And I would say probably 90 plus percent resulted in a default judgment because they just wouldn't show. 110 00:08:07,698 --> 00:08:13,710 And then we'd have to go about the process of, you we have to do collection agencies and collection attorneys. 111 00:08:13,710 --> 00:08:24,938 have to perform some due diligence before they even make, decide if it makes sense to file a case, because if there's no assets to attach the judgment to, then you've wasted your 112 00:08:24,938 --> 00:08:25,868 time. 113 00:08:26,163 --> 00:08:38,921 so, but yeah, I got a really interesting view of that, probably a bit skewed because, um, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who do fall on hard times and, really have 114 00:08:38,921 --> 00:08:39,772 good intentions. 115 00:08:39,772 --> 00:08:46,702 But in the collection business, you kind of see so much of the bad, it kind of skews your perspective a little bit. 116 00:08:46,702 --> 00:08:47,482 Yeah, it's funny. 117 00:08:47,482 --> 00:08:49,283 I actually grew up in a collection agency. 118 00:08:49,283 --> 00:08:50,983 My dad owned one when I was a kid. 119 00:08:50,983 --> 00:08:56,085 So I grew up walking the aisles like with the people working the phones and that kind of stuff. 120 00:08:56,085 --> 00:08:57,405 So it's a funny connection. 121 00:08:57,405 --> 00:09:02,938 But mine is my push here is not that – like a lot of people know that they owe the debt, right? 122 00:09:02,938 --> 00:09:06,008 But they don't know that there is a solution. 123 00:09:06,008 --> 00:09:08,599 They don't know their legal rights or their legal remedies. 124 00:09:08,599 --> 00:09:14,931 They don't know that the creditor has to follow certain guidelines or certain restrictions, rules. 125 00:09:14,931 --> 00:09:15,712 They have to have 126 00:09:15,712 --> 00:09:16,712 paperwork in place. 127 00:09:16,712 --> 00:09:22,624 And there's a lot of, for example, in the debt collection space, a lot of people are selling it pennies on the dollar. 128 00:09:22,624 --> 00:09:24,004 It's transferring hands. 129 00:09:24,004 --> 00:09:26,975 There's not a lot of proof about who owns the debt. 130 00:09:27,135 --> 00:09:33,377 My argument is that it's not necessarily we're trying to wipe away all of this debt that is legally owed, whatever it is. 131 00:09:33,377 --> 00:09:35,527 It's that you have to follow the rules. 132 00:09:35,527 --> 00:09:39,019 And so when I went to law school, I wanted to be in criminal defense. 133 00:09:39,019 --> 00:09:40,830 I didn't know going into law school what I wanted to do. 134 00:09:40,830 --> 00:09:42,528 I was sure it wasn't criminal defense. 135 00:09:42,528 --> 00:09:47,032 And then I took a criminal defense class and I was like, oh, no, I want to be a criminal defense attorney. 136 00:09:47,032 --> 00:09:48,893 Because for me, it's following the rules. 137 00:09:48,893 --> 00:09:58,905 Like, I would want to defend someone who's potentially guilty to ensure that the system works for that one person down the line that is innocent and that we don't let it slide. 138 00:09:58,905 --> 00:10:01,830 And so it's the same thing in like debt or court. 139 00:10:01,830 --> 00:10:09,790 Making sure that people are following the paperwork and that, you know, homes aren't getting foreclosed upon because lenders didn't follow the proper procedures because they 140 00:10:09,790 --> 00:10:17,170 were selling, you know, like 40,000 loans all bulked together for pennies on the dollar. 141 00:10:17,630 --> 00:10:26,450 It's just giving people who have to represent themselves because they're low income or because we live in a DIY culture and they don't want to spend $5,000 on an attorney, 142 00:10:26,650 --> 00:10:28,164 giving them the… 143 00:10:28,164 --> 00:10:38,458 the leg up or they know the heuristics, the rules of thumb, the procedures they're supposed to follow, the potential answers or the defenses that are available to them and 144 00:10:38,458 --> 00:10:39,418 letting them use it. 145 00:10:39,418 --> 00:10:41,399 So it's not wiping everything away. 146 00:10:41,399 --> 00:10:49,272 It's just putting people on an equity, having like an equal footing for whoever the party is, self-represented litigant or lawyer. 147 00:10:49,323 --> 00:10:49,623 Yeah. 148 00:10:49,623 --> 00:10:55,223 And there are, you know, fair debt collection practices act, fair credit reporting act that, they were put in place. 149 00:10:55,223 --> 00:11:02,603 There, there have been a lot of abuses in the debt collection space and it's a, it's a good thing. 150 00:11:02,603 --> 00:11:16,203 Like reputable debt collectors very much appreciate those statutes because they keep the, um, um, the bad behavior at a minimum, uh, cause there's some very stiff penalties for 151 00:11:16,203 --> 00:11:17,823 violating them. 152 00:11:17,843 --> 00:11:18,539 So. 153 00:11:18,539 --> 00:11:23,716 um Tell me about free law and what you guys specifically do with the free law project. 154 00:11:23,716 --> 00:11:37,628 Yeah, so we're a legal tech nonprofit and one of our first products uh or tools was Court Listener and it gathers up case law from state courts, from federal courts, all of the 155 00:11:37,628 --> 00:11:40,961 supreme and appellate level courts across the US. 156 00:11:40,961 --> 00:11:46,878 We had initial partnerships with the Harvard Case Law Access Project, so we have case law that goes back to the 1600s. 157 00:11:46,878 --> 00:11:54,098 So, you know, if you're a real nerd and you want to dive deep on the internet in what was going on in 1692, we have that for you. 158 00:11:54,098 --> 00:11:57,678 But we're providing this platform for free. 159 00:11:57,678 --> 00:12:03,518 We put the legal research tools out there on our website and people are free to use them. 160 00:12:03,518 --> 00:12:16,502 So a lot of small firms, solos, journalists, academic purposes are using it because the legal research tools that are out there are very expensive and can be cost prohibitive. 161 00:12:16,520 --> 00:12:23,946 We're also integrating that in for the self-represented litigants, the same idea that they're not going to have access to the underlying precedents that could support their 162 00:12:23,946 --> 00:12:24,436 case. 163 00:12:24,436 --> 00:12:25,178 It's available. 164 00:12:25,178 --> 00:12:28,020 We also have a tool called Recap. 165 00:12:28,020 --> 00:12:38,889 Recap Archive is PACER backwards, and it's uh about half a billion uh docket entries from the federal e-filing system. 166 00:12:38,889 --> 00:12:40,671 PACER is the federal e-filing system. 167 00:12:40,671 --> 00:12:43,668 It's got documents, dockets, ongoing litigation. 168 00:12:43,668 --> 00:12:47,500 final opinions in our case law and uh ongoing litigation. 169 00:12:47,500 --> 00:12:50,702 And we open it up for bulk downloads for free. 170 00:12:50,702 --> 00:12:51,992 Everyone can just go and use it. 171 00:12:51,992 --> 00:12:54,864 The tools are on our website if you want to search individually. 172 00:12:54,864 --> 00:13:05,410 Or we have APIs that are available so that people like Kara, that's how we uh were integrated into Describe, can use our legal data, which is sort of a unique corpus of 173 00:13:05,410 --> 00:13:08,321 content in the space, to train their tools. 174 00:13:08,321 --> 00:13:12,055 And so that the tools that are being built are being built on legitimate 175 00:13:12,055 --> 00:13:18,555 uh on legitimate data sources and that people have access to the same, it's that equity idea, right? 176 00:13:18,555 --> 00:13:24,573 They have access to the same content regardless of how much money you have to spend on legal research. 177 00:13:24,952 --> 00:13:25,482 Interesting. 178 00:13:25,482 --> 00:13:36,548 So my company info dash, we are intranet extranet provider and, we, it's not your, what, what, when people think of intranets, they think of like, Hey, where do I go to find the 179 00:13:36,548 --> 00:13:37,388 lunch menu? 180 00:13:37,388 --> 00:13:40,380 Like we, yeah, exactly. 181 00:13:40,380 --> 00:13:48,273 This is a much more, it's, we like to call it kind of digital workplace, but, as part of, build client dynamic client and matter pages. 182 00:13:48,273 --> 00:13:52,920 And in the past we have integrated with Pacer and. 183 00:13:52,920 --> 00:14:05,551 I hope your API is better than theirs because we had some real challenges like show stopping issues that we had to create workarounds where duplicate like it was just a mess. 184 00:14:05,551 --> 00:14:06,451 So. 185 00:14:06,720 --> 00:14:08,461 we also do advocacy too, right? 186 00:14:08,461 --> 00:14:10,912 So we want to make the system better altogether. 187 00:14:10,912 --> 00:14:17,457 Part of what I've been doing for the last year and what Mike Listner, my boss, did before I joined is the Open Courts Act. 188 00:14:17,457 --> 00:14:20,539 there was a 2023 version, there's a 2025 version. 189 00:14:20,539 --> 00:14:29,344 We're working with Congress to get changes to Pacers so that they're up to modern tech standards and that they are uh free where possible. 190 00:14:29,344 --> 00:14:30,074 It's kind of crazy. 191 00:14:30,074 --> 00:14:32,725 The Pacer system charges 10 cents a page. 192 00:14:32,725 --> 00:14:41,961 like you'd have to fax it somewhere or someone would have to physically make a copy, which was set, I guess, historically back in like the 90s when you had to call in and you had to 193 00:14:41,961 --> 00:14:46,194 like pay per page, which is crazy because that's not how the internet works today. 194 00:14:46,194 --> 00:14:47,736 Why are you paying 10 cents a page? 195 00:14:47,736 --> 00:14:50,898 One of the cool things we have is called the Recap Extension. 196 00:14:50,898 --> 00:14:55,120 It's a browser plugin that you can put in and there's 35,000 people who have it. 197 00:14:55,120 --> 00:14:58,489 And so it's crowdsourcing Pacer content. 198 00:14:58,489 --> 00:15:07,709 And so once someone buys it on their Pacer account, if they have the extension in, it gets sent to our system and then everybody has access to it because it's not violating their 199 00:15:07,709 --> 00:15:08,270 TOS. 200 00:15:08,270 --> 00:15:10,173 Once you buy it, you can do whatever you want with it. 201 00:15:10,173 --> 00:15:18,222 And so people are sharing what they're already purchasing, which is helping build up this open community of data in the legal space. 202 00:15:18,367 --> 00:15:19,168 Interesting. 203 00:15:19,168 --> 00:15:27,315 how Karen and I got connected, actually we were on a podcast together or LinkedIn live like a couple of years ago, but we got reconnected. 204 00:15:27,315 --> 00:15:38,732 there was a post about how all this new, I'm using air quotes here for listeners, all this new free law data that was available on hugging face. 205 00:15:39,032 --> 00:15:42,726 And Kara was like, yeah, there's that's really 206 00:15:42,726 --> 00:15:47,371 not the situation or there's much more to the story than that. 207 00:15:47,371 --> 00:15:50,875 And I think it was maybe that Harvard law project. 208 00:15:50,875 --> 00:15:53,386 didn't that, didn't that have an end date? 209 00:15:53,419 --> 00:15:53,699 did. 210 00:15:53,699 --> 00:15:56,399 They were scanning books till about 2018. 211 00:15:56,399 --> 00:16:01,819 So after about 2018, 2019, we have court scrapers that go out and pull in our data now. 212 00:16:01,819 --> 00:16:03,459 So we're not scanning books. 213 00:16:03,459 --> 00:16:05,679 We're pulling it from the source, from the courts. 214 00:16:05,679 --> 00:16:12,759 We have a whole team that spends a lot of time, you know, making sure the courts feel good and don't block us in terms of the scrapers. 215 00:16:12,759 --> 00:16:17,463 But we have 200 plus court scrapers that are out there pulling new content in every day. 216 00:16:17,622 --> 00:16:18,274 Interesting. 217 00:16:18,274 --> 00:16:29,031 And we talked a little bit about legal aid and I think you had mentioned that less than half or maybe even a fourth of people who qualify for assistance can actually get served 218 00:16:29,031 --> 00:16:29,923 through that channel. 219 00:16:29,923 --> 00:16:31,091 Is that accurate? 220 00:16:31,091 --> 00:16:32,091 Yeah, it's crazy. 221 00:16:32,091 --> 00:16:36,584 So people assume someone figures out that they have a legal issue, right? 222 00:16:36,584 --> 00:16:41,117 Like an eviction notice shows up on their door or they have some sort of custody issue. 223 00:16:41,117 --> 00:16:49,853 They figure out where their legal aid is, which, you know, they're Googling and SEO on legal aid websites is not necessarily going to be as high as, you know, John Smith, the 224 00:16:49,853 --> 00:16:53,185 local attorney who's going to have a lot of Google ads coming in. 225 00:16:53,205 --> 00:16:54,892 So they find their legal aid. 226 00:16:54,892 --> 00:17:01,024 They either sit in line on a hotline and wait to talk to someone to do intake or they show up in person. 227 00:17:01,024 --> 00:17:02,474 And then they go through the whole process. 228 00:17:02,474 --> 00:17:03,514 They tell their whole story. 229 00:17:03,514 --> 00:17:05,405 It's, hours of their life, right? 230 00:17:05,405 --> 00:17:14,169 And then they get told, well, I'm sorry, we don't have enough resources to help you because there isn't enough money for everyone who shows up to get a lawyer one-to-one. 231 00:17:14,169 --> 00:17:19,732 There's not enough money for even like low levels of representation, just help filling out a form, that kind of stuff. 232 00:17:19,732 --> 00:17:22,552 And so, yeah, we worked in my old job. 233 00:17:22,552 --> 00:17:25,032 We worked with Nevada Legal Services. 234 00:17:25,032 --> 00:17:29,592 They were telling us they'd turn away up to like 76 % of people one year. 235 00:17:29,592 --> 00:17:37,912 So it's like, it's so much bigger than that, because that's the people who figured out they had a legal issue, figured out they, know, legal aid was the right source for them. 236 00:17:37,912 --> 00:17:42,852 They were poor enough to go to legal aid and then made it there and they still got turned away. 237 00:17:42,852 --> 00:17:48,532 And the income levels for legal aid is something like 125 % of the poverty guidelines. 238 00:17:48,532 --> 00:17:54,552 I know what the poverty guidelines is today, but it's like somebody who makes like $19,000 a year for a family. 239 00:17:54,552 --> 00:17:57,532 If you have a kid, it's like, I don't know, $20,000 a year. 240 00:17:57,532 --> 00:18:03,912 Who is really able to live and handle and take time off work to address these issues? 241 00:18:03,912 --> 00:18:09,492 You just don't have that at $8 an hour salaries and you're scraping by. 242 00:18:09,492 --> 00:18:12,332 And so yeah, they're turning away huge numbers of people. 243 00:18:12,332 --> 00:18:17,812 And that's where the LSC's TIGs, the Technology Innovation Grants come in because 244 00:18:17,812 --> 00:18:20,883 um Legal aid saw that they were never going to have enough attorneys. 245 00:18:20,883 --> 00:18:28,436 There's never going to be the political will nationally to have one-to-one attorney representation funded by the public. 246 00:18:28,477 --> 00:18:29,977 And so they need to do something else. 247 00:18:29,977 --> 00:18:41,589 And so they turned to tech and that's where there has been, I don't know the year, but 20, 30 years of innovation in legal intake, in document assembly, in text messaging, in 248 00:18:41,589 --> 00:18:45,471 website improvement, in self-help resources because legal aid 249 00:18:45,640 --> 00:18:47,825 is end running around the court. 250 00:18:47,825 --> 00:18:56,773 The court's not providing this to self-represented litigants, so Legal Aid is doing it to help as many people as possible because they have to turn away so many for one-to-one. 251 00:18:57,174 --> 00:19:00,928 And then, you talked about something called the litigant portal. 252 00:19:00,928 --> 00:19:04,631 Is this a solution designed to help with this gap? 253 00:19:04,746 --> 00:19:05,116 Yeah. 254 00:19:05,116 --> 00:19:13,302 So the Litigant Portal is sort of my idea that came out of what Free Law Project had when I started and my history of working with self-represented litigants. 255 00:19:13,302 --> 00:19:20,277 And so there's been a lot of work in this TIG space in the court and Legal Aid for self-help, but it's still just disjointed. 256 00:19:20,277 --> 00:19:27,083 So there are legal help websites in um every state has at least one funded from LSC. 257 00:19:27,083 --> 00:19:30,856 There's a lot of document assembly software automated forms out there. 258 00:19:30,856 --> 00:19:31,899 So my old 259 00:19:31,899 --> 00:19:40,057 tool, A to J author had something like a thousand A to J guided interviews out there in the world, but it's very disproportionately divided. 260 00:19:40,057 --> 00:19:46,113 So Illinois has a couple of hundred, Michigan has a couple of hundred, Arkansas has like three or four. 261 00:19:46,113 --> 00:19:49,376 It's very unequal in the distribution. 262 00:19:49,376 --> 00:19:55,221 And then there's a lot, the final step of getting it to the courthouse is still missing. 263 00:19:55,221 --> 00:19:59,105 So in a lot of states, self-represented litigants are either 264 00:19:59,267 --> 00:20:03,059 can use e-filing if it's available, but it's permissive. 265 00:20:03,059 --> 00:20:07,111 It's not required like it is for attorneys or they're banned from using it. 266 00:20:07,111 --> 00:20:17,486 So they still, even if they get help filling out the form, they still have to take the day off of work and show up between nine to four at the courthouse that could be 50 miles from 267 00:20:17,486 --> 00:20:21,348 their home, probably not easy with public transportation. 268 00:20:21,368 --> 00:20:23,684 And then they get it in and they file it. 269 00:20:23,684 --> 00:20:25,466 And then there's no reminder. 270 00:20:25,466 --> 00:20:32,041 So um the litigant portal is the idea that came out of uh helping my mom with her doctor's appointments. 271 00:20:32,041 --> 00:20:36,055 The doctors all have my health app, mydoctor.com. 272 00:20:36,055 --> 00:20:38,047 They're always telling you to download the app, right? 273 00:20:38,047 --> 00:20:46,606 And you can communicate with the doctor whatever time, know, 830 at night when I'm laying in bed, if my kids are asleep, I can email my mom's doctor. 274 00:20:46,606 --> 00:20:47,816 I can schedule appointments. 275 00:20:47,816 --> 00:20:48,707 I get reminders. 276 00:20:48,707 --> 00:20:52,478 They send me 47 text messages that I have a dentist appointment on Tuesday. 277 00:20:52,478 --> 00:20:53,530 Like, I got it. 278 00:20:53,530 --> 00:20:55,271 That doesn't exist in the legal space. 279 00:20:55,271 --> 00:20:56,732 So that's what the Litigant Portal is. 280 00:20:56,732 --> 00:21:00,413 It's going to be an integrated into court system. 281 00:21:00,413 --> 00:21:07,366 So we're partnering with courts to have this on their websites rather than uh sitting somewhere else or an end run from Legal Aid. 282 00:21:07,366 --> 00:21:10,918 It's going to come from the court because that's where the justice is supposed to be occurring. 283 00:21:10,918 --> 00:21:13,179 They're going to learn about their rights and their remedies. 284 00:21:13,459 --> 00:21:15,800 So they're going to be able to tell their story. 285 00:21:15,800 --> 00:21:17,750 And some of this is going to have Gen. 286 00:21:17,750 --> 00:21:18,580 components to it. 287 00:21:18,580 --> 00:21:24,312 We have an AWS Imagine grant that's pending, fingers crossed, to build that in. 288 00:21:24,312 --> 00:21:27,133 So they're going to learn about their legal rights and remedies. 289 00:21:27,133 --> 00:21:29,884 And it's going to provide them with a sort of like, could do this. 290 00:21:29,884 --> 00:21:32,454 So you could get a warm handoff to Legal Aid. 291 00:21:32,454 --> 00:21:34,645 You could get a pro bono attorneys. 292 00:21:34,645 --> 00:21:37,986 Here's a list of bar association approved attorneys. 293 00:21:37,986 --> 00:21:40,367 Here's some DIY forms that you could do. 294 00:21:40,367 --> 00:21:42,461 They do the DIY forms. 295 00:21:42,461 --> 00:21:46,634 They're going to be taken down and help answer the questions, get the completed thing. 296 00:21:46,634 --> 00:21:50,677 And then because we're piloting with the courts, it's going to be e-filed directly with the court. 297 00:21:50,677 --> 00:21:52,148 They're going to get a case number back. 298 00:21:52,148 --> 00:21:55,840 They're going to potentially have a place for e-service from the other side. 299 00:21:55,840 --> 00:22:03,326 Because the other part of this is that it's hard for attorneys who have to work with self-represented litigants as the other side as well. 300 00:22:03,326 --> 00:22:05,347 And it's hard for the judges and the clerks. 301 00:22:05,347 --> 00:22:09,498 And it clogs up our justice system because the people don't know how to do it. 302 00:22:09,498 --> 00:22:12,439 and they do it wrong and everybody is frustrated. 303 00:22:12,439 --> 00:22:16,921 So let's use tech to sort of lubricate that and make it a smoother process. 304 00:22:16,921 --> 00:22:19,141 And so e-service can come back. 305 00:22:19,141 --> 00:22:23,063 Text message reminders that say, hey, you have court in three days. 306 00:22:23,183 --> 00:22:24,383 Don't bring your phone. 307 00:22:24,383 --> 00:22:26,254 Phones aren't allowed anymore in court. 308 00:22:26,254 --> 00:22:27,714 Here's the parking situation. 309 00:22:27,714 --> 00:22:28,885 Here's the public transit. 310 00:22:28,885 --> 00:22:33,329 Like all those things you don't need to know six weeks in advance. 311 00:22:33,329 --> 00:22:40,573 that you need to know just at the point in which you're ready to go to court and get that reminder that, you know, this is happening in three days, that's where we're going to 312 00:22:40,573 --> 00:22:44,165 feedback that just-in-time information to them. 313 00:22:44,165 --> 00:22:50,939 Kind of like a case management system, a platform for self-represented litigants, but that the court is providing. 314 00:22:50,939 --> 00:22:54,091 And so there's no money, there's no, you the plaintiff? 315 00:22:54,091 --> 00:22:55,552 Are you the defendant? 316 00:22:55,552 --> 00:23:00,174 Some of that happens in legal aid that they're focused more on like defendants than plaintiffs. 317 00:23:00,503 --> 00:23:02,467 So that's the litigant portal, the dream. 318 00:23:02,467 --> 00:23:09,453 And I'm onboarding a new dev today to help start building that dream and we're building partnerships and we're always looking for new courts too. 319 00:23:09,888 --> 00:23:10,880 And how are you funded? 320 00:23:10,880 --> 00:23:14,712 So we fund a lot of our nonprofit work on the back of our data licensing. 321 00:23:14,712 --> 00:23:21,016 So that corpus of data that I talked about, we have partners all over the legal tech space. 322 00:23:21,016 --> 00:23:25,698 Big, huge companies use our data through our APIs or our replicated database. 323 00:23:25,698 --> 00:23:29,320 They pay a monthly licensing fee that helps generate that. 324 00:23:29,320 --> 00:23:31,261 We're also grant funded. 325 00:23:31,261 --> 00:23:37,656 We have individual memberships and donations through our nonprofit that funds a lot of this access to justice work. 326 00:23:37,656 --> 00:23:39,147 So it's sort of a hodgepodge. 327 00:23:39,147 --> 00:23:41,510 but data or funding. 328 00:23:41,670 --> 00:23:52,852 So, um, you know, as somebody who's founded a couple of startups, I can tell you how high the bar is for raising external capital. 329 00:23:52,852 --> 00:24:00,880 We are very blessed in that we've had tremendous growth and, we demonstrated product market fit very early on in the journey. 330 00:24:00,880 --> 00:24:06,369 So we get bombarded with VCs knocking on our door, but we. 331 00:24:06,369 --> 00:24:07,989 are primarily bootstrapped. 332 00:24:07,989 --> 00:24:12,109 We've taken some money from the Legal Tech Fund and they've been great partners to work with. 333 00:24:12,169 --> 00:24:19,189 our strategy is to push off as much external capital raising as possible. 334 00:24:19,189 --> 00:24:23,460 So we maintain control of the business and can really drive it in the direction that we want to. 335 00:24:23,460 --> 00:24:34,136 that, raising a small amount of money, even for a startup that has incredible, we're 100 % year over year growth, like our 336 00:24:34,276 --> 00:24:38,480 LTV to CAC ratio, all the, SAS numbers look amazing. 337 00:24:38,480 --> 00:24:44,085 But as soon as you say, I want to raise a million dollars, VCs or lose interest. 338 00:24:44,085 --> 00:24:48,909 So like, can't imagine how hard and we're for, we're for profit. 339 00:24:48,909 --> 00:24:57,517 I can't how hard it would be to go to the market and try and get people to write you checks when you're in the A to J space. 340 00:24:57,517 --> 00:25:01,388 Like how do we, how do we, how do we 341 00:25:01,388 --> 00:25:02,429 How do you get this done? 342 00:25:02,429 --> 00:25:05,246 I mean, this seems like a big problem to solve. 343 00:25:05,317 --> 00:25:09,529 Yeah, I mean, a lot of this work has been funded through those TIGs, right? 344 00:25:09,529 --> 00:25:11,931 The government source of funding, but that's for innovation. 345 00:25:11,931 --> 00:25:16,554 It's not for sustainability and it's not for, you know, repainting the bridge every year, right? 346 00:25:16,554 --> 00:25:17,915 Like this is infrastructure. 347 00:25:17,915 --> 00:25:27,000 And so part of it is going to be that our court partners ultimately are going to have to fund this the same as they fund their websites, their paper, their court staff. 348 00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:32,959 mean, COVID showed us that the justice system can go online and it can still function, right? 349 00:25:32,959 --> 00:25:40,156 So all these rollbacks where you can't go have virtual hearings for court or a lot of the self-help that was out there, that's not fair to rollback. 350 00:25:40,156 --> 00:25:45,011 So part of the advocacy that Free Law Project is doing is that the courts have this responsibility. 351 00:25:45,011 --> 00:25:53,428 If 75 % of the people showing up to your business, the court is a business, are self-represented litigants, you have to have tools in place for them. 352 00:25:53,428 --> 00:25:59,023 And it's part of the cost of running business in America that we fund this sort of stuff. 353 00:25:59,023 --> 00:26:04,605 uh Part of us, Free Law Project, being a nonprofit is that we aren't taking any money off of the top, right? 354 00:26:04,605 --> 00:26:10,448 Like I need a salary to live, our devs need to live, but also like we're not, we don't have shareholders to report back to. 355 00:26:10,448 --> 00:26:12,370 And so there is a lower cost. 356 00:26:12,370 --> 00:26:23,445 I've worked on some presentations with like the team out of Suffolk's Lit Lab, and they're big at pushing on open source and procurement and working with nonprofits or academic 357 00:26:23,445 --> 00:26:26,226 institutions that can lower the cost. 358 00:26:26,255 --> 00:26:29,067 of this innovation in the court space. 359 00:26:29,067 --> 00:26:31,168 so, yes, it's going to cost money. 360 00:26:31,168 --> 00:26:34,946 Hopefully, it's less than what some commercial off-the-shelf products are. 361 00:26:34,946 --> 00:26:39,413 And hopefully, we have some philanthropic interest in access to justice. 362 00:26:39,413 --> 00:26:44,135 You talked about, you know, a lot of people don't know about this justice gap or it's surprising when you hear about it. 363 00:26:44,135 --> 00:26:44,938 It's… 364 00:26:44,938 --> 00:26:47,629 Also, room for movement there, right? 365 00:26:47,629 --> 00:26:52,630 So we can bring this to a whole new audience of people who are like, I didn't know it was that bad. 366 00:26:52,630 --> 00:26:54,111 Like, yeah, it's that bad. 367 00:26:54,111 --> 00:27:03,862 And big funders, big philanthropic organizations need to be looking at the justice system the same way that they're looking at public health or whatever their focus is. 368 00:27:03,862 --> 00:27:12,007 This is a huge problem in our democracy that we need to solve that, you know, 100 million people are left out on the 369 00:27:12,007 --> 00:27:16,499 on the doorstep and they can lose their kids and their house and their money. 370 00:27:16,499 --> 00:27:22,142 like, it's just every day, I endlessly talk to people about this and they're shocked. 371 00:27:22,142 --> 00:27:26,483 And I'm just like, yeah, that's real world that's happening in your community. 372 00:27:26,483 --> 00:27:28,185 Your neighbors are feeling this. 373 00:27:28,185 --> 00:27:37,229 And so we have to start caring because, you know, one of the tripods of our democracy is the justice system and people have to have trust that it will be fair and will be 374 00:27:37,229 --> 00:27:38,549 available for them. 375 00:27:38,718 --> 00:27:51,404 I mean, is it incumbent upon the private sector, like law firms and the bar and other organizations to help contribute to bridging this gap? 376 00:27:51,404 --> 00:27:55,527 Yeah, I mean, obviously I'd love if they wanted to be donations to Free Law Project. 377 00:27:55,527 --> 00:28:04,987 We have a justice partner circle that's for law firms who are really interested in making a big contribution to the space, either the justice initiative work that I'm doing or our 378 00:28:04,987 --> 00:28:07,189 research and our open data and that kind of stuff. 379 00:28:07,189 --> 00:28:14,426 But there is a responsibility that you are part of a system and that when you have, you should share. 380 00:28:14,426 --> 00:28:16,178 That's sort of a mindset, right? 381 00:28:16,178 --> 00:28:21,901 I think our whole society would be a whole lot better if everyone had the mindset that if you have enough, share. 382 00:28:21,901 --> 00:28:26,395 And a lot of the law firms or attorneys are already doing this stuff. 383 00:28:26,395 --> 00:28:31,437 They're members of their access to justice commission or they're members of their bar outreach or pro bono. 384 00:28:31,437 --> 00:28:37,250 have, know, attorneys have a pro bono sort of that's ingrained in us that we should be providing that. 385 00:28:37,614 --> 00:28:38,825 they're already doing the work. 386 00:28:38,825 --> 00:28:41,096 Sometimes all we're asking for is a connection. 387 00:28:41,096 --> 00:28:45,598 We don't even need the money, the dollars, if that's not going to work for you. 388 00:28:45,598 --> 00:28:53,561 You can make the connection and say, hey, you know, I golf with Judge so-and-so and he's complaining a lot about, you know, people showing up in his courtroom unprepared. 389 00:28:53,561 --> 00:28:58,263 Maybe I could make that connection to these people who want to do something or make the connection. 390 00:28:58,263 --> 00:28:59,644 You could be a door opener. 391 00:28:59,644 --> 00:29:04,435 So I read a couple of years ago, you could be a doer, you can be a donator. 392 00:29:04,435 --> 00:29:06,378 um or you can be a door opener, right? 393 00:29:06,378 --> 00:29:08,082 So if you can't do it, that's fine. 394 00:29:08,082 --> 00:29:10,527 If you can't donate, okay, do that if you can. 395 00:29:10,527 --> 00:29:14,533 Or you can be a door opener and think about who you know and those connections that you can make. 396 00:29:14,533 --> 00:29:18,329 So we're also looking for door openers if we can't get donors or doers. 397 00:29:18,400 --> 00:29:19,060 Yeah, interesting. 398 00:29:19,060 --> 00:29:21,300 I would think that there would be maybe some connect points. 399 00:29:21,300 --> 00:29:26,800 I know that a lot of big law firms are limited partners in the Legal Tech Fund. 400 00:29:26,820 --> 00:29:28,840 And I know they do some work there. 401 00:29:28,840 --> 00:29:36,400 That's like I mentioned, I saw a session on it at their summit a couple of years ago, but it's just such a massive problem. 402 00:29:36,400 --> 00:29:39,680 It's really going to need a multi-pronged solution. 403 00:29:39,920 --> 00:29:44,160 I saw an interesting article recently and I'm sure you did too. 404 00:29:44,160 --> 00:29:46,900 It was like, I can't remember if it was Washington Post or New York Times. 405 00:29:46,900 --> 00:29:48,200 And it talked about 406 00:29:48,200 --> 00:30:02,387 It was some major news outlet and they were talking about how it was a case study and I forget the details, but they basically went and dissected a scenario where a pro se 407 00:30:02,387 --> 00:30:06,309 litigant used Chad CPT to help solve her legal issue. 408 00:30:06,309 --> 00:30:08,650 And I forget what that legal issue is now. 409 00:30:08,650 --> 00:30:13,797 And I saw some really interesting commentary like is this UPL and you know, 410 00:30:13,797 --> 00:30:20,077 I feel like that's the last question we need to be asking in these scenarios, maybe just kind of high level. 411 00:30:20,077 --> 00:30:21,732 Do you know the article I'm talking about? 412 00:30:21,732 --> 00:30:22,499 um 413 00:30:22,499 --> 00:30:28,434 but I've had endless conversations about UPL and lawyers feeling like we're going to be eating their lunch. 414 00:30:28,434 --> 00:30:30,206 no one is doing this work, right? 415 00:30:30,206 --> 00:30:33,279 We're not taking your job, whatever size firm you are. 416 00:30:33,279 --> 00:30:35,650 These people are not coming to you anyway. 417 00:30:35,650 --> 00:30:39,724 There is someone who's been in the space forever, Mark Lauritsen. 418 00:30:39,724 --> 00:30:45,412 He's written a lot about First Amendment and how this sort of automated document assembly tools are not… 419 00:30:45,412 --> 00:30:50,937 the unauthorized practice of law, they have First Amendment rights, First Amendment protections, so like you can look into that. 420 00:30:50,937 --> 00:30:54,670 yeah, people that we're not eating your lunch, right? 421 00:30:54,670 --> 00:30:57,834 they're, with the innovation of Chat GPT, right? 422 00:30:57,834 --> 00:31:01,086 It's so available, everybody's using it. 423 00:31:01,086 --> 00:31:06,871 I sat next to a woman in a nail salon and she was talking to Chat GPT about what color she should paint her nails. 424 00:31:06,871 --> 00:31:11,124 And I was like, wow, that's deep in the weeds of like a friendship with your AI. 425 00:31:11,124 --> 00:31:15,525 But the idea that they're using it anyway, and so we need the guardrails. 426 00:31:15,525 --> 00:31:23,048 And there's 30 years of self-help tools that are out there that are legitimate, that are in plain language, that are in multiple languages, right? 427 00:31:23,048 --> 00:31:27,569 English, Spanish, French, whatever the native dialogue is in the jurisdiction. 428 00:31:27,569 --> 00:31:33,331 There are subject matter experts, the attorneys have written it, they know it's valid, it's not trash. 429 00:31:33,331 --> 00:31:38,762 Built on free-law projects, legal data so that there aren't hallucinated citations in it. 430 00:31:38,877 --> 00:31:49,031 Part of the Imagine grant that we have uh pending is we spend a lot of time doing the Gen.ai components with their solutions architect, with our AI developer, really thinking 431 00:31:49,031 --> 00:31:57,775 about the guidelines and how we're going to make sure that if someone comes in that they're given jurisdiction specific materials, that they're not getting stuff from Kansas 432 00:31:57,775 --> 00:31:59,847 when they're in Illinois or vice versa. 433 00:31:59,847 --> 00:32:03,374 I talked about how it's not um evenly dispersed across the country. 434 00:32:03,374 --> 00:32:05,165 So there's a lot of content in Illinois. 435 00:32:05,165 --> 00:32:07,185 And so that's going to pop up high on the SEO. 436 00:32:07,185 --> 00:32:09,849 And that's what the systems are trained on. 437 00:32:09,849 --> 00:32:14,051 But that's not going to help you in Kansas or in California or wherever. 438 00:32:14,151 --> 00:32:23,308 So jurisdiction specific, that there's human in the loop, that they're ensuring that whatever we put out and say, hey, you could do this, that people are checking that 439 00:32:23,308 --> 00:32:25,279 periodically to ensure that it's valid. 440 00:32:25,279 --> 00:32:26,790 Like use the AI. 441 00:32:26,790 --> 00:32:27,250 It's here. 442 00:32:27,250 --> 00:32:28,261 People are using it. 443 00:32:28,261 --> 00:32:32,952 Let's provide them the guardrails and the safety to ensure that they're getting 444 00:32:32,952 --> 00:32:41,618 the legal em outcomes that they're supposed to be getting and that they're not waiving their rights because they filed the wrong response or whatever. 445 00:32:41,618 --> 00:32:42,748 Like you want to protect people. 446 00:32:42,748 --> 00:32:43,549 That's the whole point. 447 00:32:43,549 --> 00:32:45,481 So our system is going to have guardrails. 448 00:32:45,481 --> 00:32:50,164 It's going to be in as many languages as possible that the jurisdiction wants to support. 449 00:32:50,164 --> 00:32:51,775 It's going to have a lot of accessibility. 450 00:32:51,775 --> 00:32:55,588 So there's a whole, you know, the WCAG standards for 451 00:32:55,737 --> 00:33:02,138 and ADA compliance and that kind of stuff, we don't want our tool to also be an additional burden for people who have accessibility issues. 452 00:33:02,138 --> 00:33:08,569 So that's also really important to us that we build a tool that the most amount of people can use in the safest parameters. 453 00:33:08,960 --> 00:33:14,364 And you talked about the courts funding, like courts are so like underfunded. 454 00:33:14,364 --> 00:33:19,266 mean, you just have to walk into one and it feels like, you know, a throwback. 455 00:33:19,266 --> 00:33:28,079 I, thankfully I haven't been in one in quite some time, but last time I was, it really felt like I was in a time warp. 456 00:33:28,079 --> 00:33:36,553 but something that we talked about last time that you mentioned that surprised me is that courts are spending quite a bit of money on things like 457 00:33:36,553 --> 00:33:38,108 commercial case management systems. 458 00:33:38,108 --> 00:33:39,119 that true? 459 00:33:39,491 --> 00:33:47,146 Yeah, we've done some FOIA work and we published it on our website if you guys want to check it out, FreedOutLaw, where we requested those contracts and these commercial 460 00:33:47,146 --> 00:33:48,748 off-the-shelf things. 461 00:33:48,748 --> 00:33:53,631 it's a little bit like I don't always believe them when they say they don't have money. 462 00:33:53,631 --> 00:33:58,534 Like the people I'm talking to, I believe that the self-help desk isn't properly funded. 463 00:33:58,534 --> 00:33:59,115 I get it. 464 00:33:59,115 --> 00:34:03,117 I mean, right now when we're recording this, we're in the middle of a government shutdown. 465 00:34:03,117 --> 00:34:07,920 The government saying they have no money and when they have like a trillion dollar budget, I'm like, hmm. 466 00:34:08,384 --> 00:34:09,965 Let's be relative here. 467 00:34:09,965 --> 00:34:11,646 So I think the courts have money. 468 00:34:11,646 --> 00:34:14,478 They have to prioritize where that money comes from. 469 00:34:14,478 --> 00:34:21,612 And if they don't have the money, let's talk to the legislature and talk about what a huge issue this is. 470 00:34:21,612 --> 00:34:30,538 All those lawyers that are working at big firms who are friends with senators and representatives, so and so, let's influence people that way and start getting proper 471 00:34:30,538 --> 00:34:30,938 funding. 472 00:34:30,938 --> 00:34:32,280 Like it's infrastructure. 473 00:34:32,280 --> 00:34:33,142 You got to paint 474 00:34:33,142 --> 00:34:34,273 or got to paint the bridge. 475 00:34:34,273 --> 00:34:36,296 The Golden Gate Bridge has to be painted every year. 476 00:34:36,296 --> 00:34:38,318 The roads have to be paved. 477 00:34:38,318 --> 00:34:44,364 The justice system has to work for self-represented litigants because that's who the majority of the people are. 478 00:34:44,384 --> 00:34:50,702 Our democracy falls if the justice system is not trustworthy or doesn't help the people that it's supposed to be helping. 479 00:34:51,149 --> 00:34:55,109 And know, and, gen AI is fantastic at legal work. 480 00:34:55,109 --> 00:34:59,129 So I have been running a very informal study since the beginning of the year. 481 00:34:59,369 --> 00:35:06,549 Um, it did not even a study, just an experiment where all of my legal work through info dash. 482 00:35:06,549 --> 00:35:18,189 And I mean, you know, we're a startup, so we're constantly negotiating new contracts and signing NDAs and you know, reorganizing our operating agreement and getting funding and 483 00:35:18,189 --> 00:35:19,369 all this sort of stuff. 484 00:35:19,509 --> 00:35:20,173 So we, 485 00:35:20,173 --> 00:35:21,764 You know, we have a four nine a program. 486 00:35:21,764 --> 00:35:26,919 I've been running every task that I send to a lawyer through AI just to kind of compare. 487 00:35:26,919 --> 00:35:31,963 is amazing how well AI does. 488 00:35:31,963 --> 00:35:41,130 So we had a, we had a dispute that we were looking contractually at, okay, what would happen if we can't come to a resolution on this? 489 00:35:41,150 --> 00:35:45,153 So I loaded the documents into. 490 00:35:45,583 --> 00:35:47,183 I can't remember which model we use. 491 00:35:47,183 --> 00:35:53,097 usually round Robin or I'll do one and then ask another model to kind of grade the output. 492 00:35:53,097 --> 00:36:05,893 And I had it outline what the process would look like if we did have to, if we couldn't come to a resolution, IE mediation, arbitration, map out a timeline, map out projected 493 00:36:05,893 --> 00:36:08,225 costs on both sides of the case. 494 00:36:08,225 --> 00:36:09,045 And 495 00:36:09,053 --> 00:36:13,316 It blew my mind how well it mapped this out. 496 00:36:13,316 --> 00:36:18,020 Now I don't, I don't let anything leave, out, go out the door. 497 00:36:18,020 --> 00:36:28,082 That's not looked at by an attorney, but I have been doing this kind of side by side comparison for awhile and it has really augmented me, what I do as a consumer of legal 498 00:36:28,082 --> 00:36:28,824 services. 499 00:36:28,824 --> 00:36:31,396 And you know, I don't really want to hear about UPL. 500 00:36:31,396 --> 00:36:33,948 Like I really don't care what people's opinions are on it. 501 00:36:33,948 --> 00:36:34,949 I'm going to do it. 502 00:36:34,949 --> 00:36:35,769 And 503 00:36:37,103 --> 00:36:37,698 Yeah. 504 00:36:37,698 --> 00:36:44,077 and good luck stopping people who, you know, like, like you said, pro se litigants who have absolutely no choice. 505 00:36:44,077 --> 00:36:46,119 I have a choice, but I'm, I'm going to do it. 506 00:36:46,119 --> 00:36:47,541 Um, 507 00:36:47,649 --> 00:36:49,031 DIY culture, right? 508 00:36:49,031 --> 00:36:53,171 I'm not going to necessarily call a plumber if the sink is leaky a little bit. 509 00:36:53,171 --> 00:36:57,158 I'm going to watch a YouTube video to try and figure out like what do I actually need to tighten, right? 510 00:36:57,158 --> 00:37:03,313 My first instinct is not going to be to hire a $5,000, have a $5,000 retainer with an attorney. 511 00:37:03,313 --> 00:37:11,034 I'm going to try and do it myself and see what I can find because that's sort of how my generation, others, that's we grew up on the internet, right? 512 00:37:11,034 --> 00:37:12,174 That's our first go-to. 513 00:37:12,174 --> 00:37:13,214 Is there a YouTube? 514 00:37:13,214 --> 00:37:14,454 Can I Google it? 515 00:37:14,454 --> 00:37:15,234 The doctor. 516 00:37:15,234 --> 00:37:16,894 I'm not going to go to the doctor every time. 517 00:37:16,894 --> 00:37:22,134 I'm going to Google my symptoms and hopefully not have some terrible disease that it tells me. 518 00:37:22,214 --> 00:37:24,534 But the guardrails are what's important. 519 00:37:24,534 --> 00:37:29,194 I think the AI is great if you have a little bit of subject matter expertise. 520 00:37:29,194 --> 00:37:36,274 And that's sort of what we want to ensure that if it came back to you and had a crazy contract term, you'd be like, that's insane. 521 00:37:36,274 --> 00:37:37,834 I've seen 14 of these contracts. 522 00:37:37,834 --> 00:37:38,814 That's clearly not right. 523 00:37:38,814 --> 00:37:40,219 It's hallucinating that. 524 00:37:40,219 --> 00:37:43,090 um Or you're like, no, that doesn't apply in Missouri. 525 00:37:43,090 --> 00:37:45,440 That's only in New York law, whatever. 526 00:37:45,640 --> 00:37:49,051 The self-represented litigant doesn't necessarily know that. 527 00:37:49,051 --> 00:37:53,894 A lot of the self-represented litigants, fifth grade reading level, they're in a super stressful situation, right? 528 00:37:53,894 --> 00:37:56,344 You're losing your kids, your house, whatever. 529 00:37:56,344 --> 00:38:00,786 That already shuts off part of your brain when you have the high cortisol levels. 530 00:38:00,786 --> 00:38:02,506 And maybe English isn't their first language. 531 00:38:02,506 --> 00:38:06,829 And so they don't have that sort of gut, like this doesn't seem legit. 532 00:38:06,829 --> 00:38:15,982 this feels like a lifeline because they can't get in anywhere else and they're just so happy to have something to handle their legal system or their legal issue. 533 00:38:15,982 --> 00:38:25,735 That's what we want to make sure that it's vetted by experts, it has a custom rag, the retrieval augmented generation, that it has a knowledge base that's structured in a way in 534 00:38:25,735 --> 00:38:32,025 which is only pulling from legitimate data sources, not Ted's basement server that has whatever cases on it. 535 00:38:32,025 --> 00:38:35,167 That's really our goal that people are using it. 536 00:38:35,167 --> 00:38:38,611 Let's facilitate it because the technology is easy. 537 00:38:38,611 --> 00:38:44,164 It's just the political will to make sure that these tools get to the people who need them and are funded properly. 538 00:38:44,299 --> 00:38:55,804 Yeah, I feel like with, with, with Jenny, I, there are so many innovations that law firms and lawyers have historically resisted like alternative business structures. 539 00:38:55,925 --> 00:38:56,605 Right. 540 00:38:56,605 --> 00:39:07,870 Um, I think that I had somebody on the podcast from an Arizona law firm who they said they were the only ones that didn't vote against, the ABS rules in Arizona. 541 00:39:08,250 --> 00:39:08,720 Right. 542 00:39:08,720 --> 00:39:09,591 Exactly. 543 00:39:09,591 --> 00:39:10,155 Um, 544 00:39:10,155 --> 00:39:23,939 You know, in the unauthorized practice of law, the UPL issue, I feel like if you're latching on to these old models and conventions in the legal world, you're really focused 545 00:39:23,939 --> 00:39:34,723 in the wrong place because I honestly think that lawyers are going to run to alternative business structures once they see the light, which is, wow, if I build a tech enabled law 546 00:39:34,723 --> 00:39:38,514 firm, I can sell it for a multiple of revenue. 547 00:39:38,648 --> 00:39:46,566 You know, like it, the valuation looks more like a tech company than a law firm, which, you know, would probably sell to three, three to four times EBITDA. 548 00:39:46,566 --> 00:39:48,709 And, I can scale, right? 549 00:39:48,709 --> 00:39:59,440 Instead of using people, humans as leverage, can use technology as leverage, but there's just so much tradition and old thinking. 550 00:39:59,761 --> 00:40:00,065 Yeah. 551 00:40:00,065 --> 00:40:01,695 the laws, it's a guild. 552 00:40:01,695 --> 00:40:03,425 You're meant to protect your members. 553 00:40:03,425 --> 00:40:05,146 I spent a lot of money to go to law school. 554 00:40:05,146 --> 00:40:08,227 I spent a lot of money to learn those hundred dollar words. 555 00:40:08,227 --> 00:40:08,907 I get it. 556 00:40:08,907 --> 00:40:17,849 would, you know, I didn't go down the traditional, you know, pathway of being a lawyer, but I get it why we'd want to protect ourselves and ensure that what we do, we spend a lot 557 00:40:17,849 --> 00:40:20,480 of time learning how to do it and making sure to safeguard people. 558 00:40:20,480 --> 00:40:23,992 Like we talked about the, you know, fair debt act and that kind of stuff. 559 00:40:23,992 --> 00:40:26,133 Same, we need legislation in place. 560 00:40:26,194 --> 00:40:29,655 But a lot of the stuff that tech is doing is so boring. 561 00:40:29,655 --> 00:40:35,047 No lawyer wants to copy and paste people's names onto a letter and answer to their landlord. 562 00:40:35,047 --> 00:40:37,678 Even if they were paying for it, nobody wants to do that. 563 00:40:37,678 --> 00:40:39,668 This came from my time in Chicago. 564 00:40:39,668 --> 00:40:44,139 can't remember now who said it, but let lawyers practice at the top of their license. 565 00:40:44,139 --> 00:40:46,920 All of this menial stuff, let the tech do it. 566 00:40:46,920 --> 00:40:53,664 Let AI generate the documents and then review it so that you can be creative, so that you can be the human. 567 00:40:53,664 --> 00:41:01,496 so that you can use all the things that make us uniquely special as lawyers, let's use those skills and build on top of the AI. 568 00:41:01,496 --> 00:41:06,478 I don't need to generate the LinkedIn content every time for a new post. 569 00:41:06,478 --> 00:41:14,532 Let the AI give me my first draft at that so that I can come and talk to you and have time to do that or to be creative or to think hard thoughts. 570 00:41:14,532 --> 00:41:17,123 That's what lawyers are really good at, thinking hard thoughts. 571 00:41:17,264 --> 00:41:20,798 If we let the tech do the menial stuff, we can really practice at the top of our license. 572 00:41:20,798 --> 00:41:25,213 And so that's what my push is with the AI, that it's not gonna eat your lunch. 573 00:41:25,213 --> 00:41:27,163 Just embrace it and go for it. 574 00:41:27,163 --> 00:41:27,964 Yeah. 575 00:41:27,964 --> 00:41:37,264 And it's like, like every discipline, you always have to look at what is the highest and best use of my, my, my time and my team's time. 576 00:41:37,284 --> 00:41:49,464 You know, it's amazing that in 2025, our biggest competitor are firms that decide to go custom dev and just go rebuild everything that we've been working on roughly for like 17 577 00:41:49,464 --> 00:41:49,944 years. 578 00:41:49,944 --> 00:41:53,104 And I have to have conversations with them. 579 00:41:53,156 --> 00:42:03,622 Um, at various stages in the process, we've had firms who have fully deployed, rolled it out, like spent all the money and rolled it out and then realized, my God, this is so much 580 00:42:03,622 --> 00:42:11,345 work to maintain and support and write documentation and the training and enhancements and bug fixes. 581 00:42:11,385 --> 00:42:16,427 We've had them all the way to that end, but obviously, where they've converted and go, this is too much. 582 00:42:16,427 --> 00:42:19,316 want an off the shelf product, but it's, 583 00:42:19,316 --> 00:42:24,517 the argument that I use when talking to them is what is the highest and best use of your team's time? 584 00:42:24,517 --> 00:42:26,418 Is it responding to support tickets? 585 00:42:26,418 --> 00:42:30,419 Because I got a team people who do just that for a bunch of different law firms. 586 00:42:30,419 --> 00:42:37,591 So why are you going to go re you know, essentially re resource um a function like that? 587 00:42:37,591 --> 00:42:42,093 So yeah, I'm really hoping that lawyers, the light bulb goes off and go, yeah, you know what? 588 00:42:42,093 --> 00:42:48,165 A lot of this stuff we, we could use our, our amazing IQ and training and 589 00:42:48,561 --> 00:42:51,168 skills in better ways than we are today. 590 00:42:51,168 --> 00:42:51,638 Yeah. 591 00:42:51,638 --> 00:42:53,910 there's, I mean, the empathy component, right? 592 00:42:53,910 --> 00:43:01,964 The like, the feeling, the connection with people, the hand holding that a lot of self-represented litigants need because no one is listening to them and these are terrible 593 00:43:01,964 --> 00:43:03,055 situations. 594 00:43:03,055 --> 00:43:08,919 We can provide that as lawyers where the like, the where does your name go on a form? 595 00:43:08,919 --> 00:43:09,739 That's crazy. 596 00:43:09,739 --> 00:43:14,003 Like type that into any of the document assembly tools that have existed for 30 years. 597 00:43:14,003 --> 00:43:17,034 But let's really do what we're good at as humans. 598 00:43:17,285 --> 00:43:18,106 Agreed. 599 00:43:18,106 --> 00:43:20,545 Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. 600 00:43:20,545 --> 00:43:23,774 I really appreciate you taking time. 601 00:43:23,774 --> 00:43:28,481 How do people find out more about you and the free law project? 602 00:43:28,481 --> 00:43:30,582 Yeah, so our website is Free.Law. 603 00:43:30,582 --> 00:43:32,574 You can check out all of our products from there. 604 00:43:32,574 --> 00:43:35,615 If you want to connect with me, I'm Jessica at Free.Law. 605 00:43:35,615 --> 00:43:37,377 We try to make it as easy as possible. 606 00:43:37,377 --> 00:43:38,927 So love to talk to you. 607 00:43:38,927 --> 00:43:45,661 We love talking to new lawyers about this, to law students, to different audiences, to different groups that might not understand the justice gap. 608 00:43:45,661 --> 00:43:53,068 I presented at Ilticon in August uh about project management, but like threw in about the justice gap. 609 00:43:53,068 --> 00:43:54,571 We can really make it work for the audience. 610 00:43:54,571 --> 00:43:57,215 So we want more door openers. 611 00:43:57,215 --> 00:44:00,690 So if you're out there, I'd love to talk to you about it. 612 00:44:00,839 --> 00:44:02,721 Well, it's been a great conversation. 613 00:44:02,721 --> 00:44:07,107 hope people take you up on that offer and thank you very much for all the great work that you're doing. 614 00:44:07,107 --> 00:44:08,321 Thank you, thank you for having me. 615 00:44:08,321 --> 00:44:09,523 It's been really fun. 616 00:44:10,488 --> 00:44:11,019 Bye. 00:00:02,077 Jessica, how are you this afternoon? 2 00:00:02,077 --> 00:00:04,557 Hi Ted, thanks for having me, I'm great. 3 00:00:04,557 --> 00:00:05,557 Yeah, good. 4 00:00:05,557 --> 00:00:07,697 It's so glad you could be here. 5 00:00:07,837 --> 00:00:13,357 You and I got connected through Kara Peterson with Describe AI. 6 00:00:13,637 --> 00:00:14,004 had her. 7 00:00:14,004 --> 00:00:20,561 I was just on a call with Kara this morning planning a session that we're going to be doing at the LSC conference in January. 8 00:00:20,563 --> 00:00:21,288 Oh, awesome. 9 00:00:21,288 --> 00:00:22,683 What is LSC? 10 00:00:22,803 --> 00:00:24,616 the Legal Services Corporation. 11 00:00:24,616 --> 00:00:36,643 do their Innovations in Technology Conference where legal aid, tech innovators, people in the court space come together to sort of talk about tools that can help the justice gap. 12 00:00:36,877 --> 00:00:37,677 Interesting. 13 00:00:37,677 --> 00:00:37,977 Yeah. 14 00:00:37,977 --> 00:00:43,177 So Legal Aid of North Carolina, I think I might've told you this on our last time we spoke. 15 00:00:43,177 --> 00:00:48,348 They were like one of our first legal clients, not the first, but really early on. 16 00:00:48,348 --> 00:00:51,967 I forget the fellow's name there. 17 00:00:52,128 --> 00:00:55,388 This has been, she's 15, 16 years ago. 18 00:00:55,388 --> 00:01:02,899 I'm not sure if he's still there, but they needed a VDI that's virtual desktop infrastructure. 19 00:01:02,899 --> 00:01:15,059 It's where, you know, people log into remote desktops and we were Citrix partners at the time because we were consultants and it was early days. 20 00:01:15,399 --> 00:01:18,279 So we would do, we would say yes to anything, right? 21 00:01:18,279 --> 00:01:23,999 Any kind of, any kind of work, just anything that brought revenue in the door and paid the bills until we found our niche. 22 00:01:24,459 --> 00:01:30,699 Um, so yeah, I have a good, uh, a good understanding and history with, the legal aid folks there. 23 00:01:30,699 --> 00:01:31,737 It's an awesome organization. 24 00:01:31,737 --> 00:01:32,658 really innovative. 25 00:01:32,658 --> 00:01:39,117 They do a lot of really interesting stuff and they're on the cutting edge, so they've continued uh in this space too. 26 00:01:39,237 --> 00:01:40,430 good, that's good to hear. 27 00:01:40,430 --> 00:01:42,152 So let's get you introduced. 28 00:01:42,152 --> 00:01:47,242 So you're a lawyer, a researcher, you work at the Free Law Project. 29 00:01:47,242 --> 00:01:48,454 Fill in the gaps for us. 30 00:01:48,454 --> 00:01:51,673 Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and where you do it. 31 00:01:51,673 --> 00:01:54,707 Okay, so I am a lawyer, but I've never really practiced. 32 00:01:54,707 --> 00:01:57,841 I went straight into legal technology. 33 00:01:57,841 --> 00:02:04,601 I spent 12 years as a project manager at Cali, which is the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction. 34 00:02:04,601 --> 00:02:09,958 I managed their Ada J Author project, which is their document assembly tool in the legal aid court space. 35 00:02:09,958 --> 00:02:16,804 So teaching law students how to automate documents, talking to legal aid attorneys in courts and teaching them how to use the software. 36 00:02:16,816 --> 00:02:22,119 Everything about plain language, accessibility, making the process easier for self-represented litigants. 37 00:02:22,119 --> 00:02:34,276 About a year ago, I jumped over to the FreeLaw project and I started as a user researcher project manager on a grant funded project to figure out if there is an open source 38 00:02:34,276 --> 00:02:39,831 alternative to e-filing that we could build or a tool or some sort of open source case management. 39 00:02:39,831 --> 00:02:41,133 was very open-ended. 40 00:02:41,133 --> 00:02:42,238 Over the past year, 41 00:02:42,238 --> 00:02:50,882 I've sort of brought my love of access to justice and self-represent litigants into the Free Law Project, sort of turned our uh focus. 42 00:02:50,882 --> 00:02:54,463 And about two weeks ago, I became the director of a new division. 43 00:02:54,463 --> 00:02:57,446 We're calling the Justice Initiative, Justice Initiatives Division. 44 00:02:57,446 --> 00:03:08,371 And we're going to build out tech tools for the courts, for um legal aid, for self-represented litigants, all open source, all within free law projects, open data and 45 00:03:08,371 --> 00:03:09,722 technology to make 46 00:03:09,722 --> 00:03:14,309 the law better with a real focus on a tool we're calling the Lydigan Portal. 47 00:03:14,309 --> 00:03:21,703 That'll be our first one, but we're open to other avenues to make the legal system better through technology for self-represented Lydigan. 48 00:03:21,989 --> 00:03:22,689 That's awesome. 49 00:03:22,689 --> 00:03:22,939 Yeah. 50 00:03:22,939 --> 00:03:26,731 You know, A2J gets like, this is my impression. 51 00:03:26,731 --> 00:03:28,181 I don't know if you would agree or not. 52 00:03:28,181 --> 00:03:35,535 Like A2J gets a lot of, I'll call it honorable mention, but not really enough airtime in the space. 53 00:03:35,535 --> 00:03:41,899 It is such a massive, huge issue and we all know it. 54 00:03:41,899 --> 00:03:47,417 you know what, you know, like when I go to conferences, I went to TLTF, 55 00:03:47,417 --> 00:03:52,241 two years ago and there was an awesome, can't remember her name. 56 00:03:52,241 --> 00:03:55,764 She presented on, she was actually impacted. 57 00:03:55,764 --> 00:04:00,927 So she was a struggling single mom, accidentally bounced a check. 58 00:04:00,927 --> 00:04:06,390 They initiated a, in some States it's a criminal offense, including North Carolina to bounce a check. 59 00:04:06,390 --> 00:04:11,107 And that little minor infraction ended up really 60 00:04:11,107 --> 00:04:16,831 causing her to lose access to employment and all sorts of things. 61 00:04:16,831 --> 00:04:24,426 so I think it's important that we talk about it in more depth than just A to J, it's a problem. 62 00:04:24,426 --> 00:04:26,558 We know it, but not really doing much about it. 63 00:04:26,558 --> 00:04:32,623 So maybe you can kind of quantify the problem because you shared some interesting statistics last time we spoke. 64 00:04:32,623 --> 00:04:34,759 What's the magnitude of the gap? 65 00:04:34,759 --> 00:04:35,519 Yeah. 66 00:04:35,519 --> 00:04:37,039 So, I mean, I went to law school, right? 67 00:04:37,039 --> 00:04:38,999 So I graduated in 2011. 68 00:04:38,999 --> 00:04:49,299 I left it and had no idea that there was this whole world of people that can have life-changing consequences like you described, and they don't have access to a lawyer. 69 00:04:49,299 --> 00:04:54,599 So a lot of times we think about, you know, you're too poor to afford attorneys so that one is provided for you, right? 70 00:04:54,599 --> 00:04:56,999 The law and order stereotype. 71 00:04:57,179 --> 00:04:59,739 But that's not the case in civil law. 72 00:04:59,739 --> 00:05:03,589 There's no constitutional right to an attorney in a civil case. 73 00:05:03,589 --> 00:05:09,641 And people don't understand that civil cases can be as life impacting as a criminal case. 74 00:05:09,641 --> 00:05:12,922 So you can get up to a year in prison in a civil case. 75 00:05:12,922 --> 00:05:17,313 You can lose your kids in custody, family matters, divorce. 76 00:05:17,313 --> 00:05:18,383 You can lose your home, right? 77 00:05:18,383 --> 00:05:20,444 Foreclosure, eviction. 78 00:05:20,444 --> 00:05:22,686 You can have your paycheck taken away, right? 79 00:05:22,686 --> 00:05:24,313 If you have a debt issue. 80 00:05:24,313 --> 00:05:31,531 And so there's all of these things that are bubbling up in civil court that are hugely impacting people's lives. 81 00:05:31,531 --> 00:05:33,482 Civil court's actually where they're spending a lot of time. 82 00:05:33,482 --> 00:05:38,204 Most people are interacting with the justice system through civil court and they don't have the right to an attorney. 83 00:05:38,204 --> 00:05:39,514 So some statistics, right? 84 00:05:39,514 --> 00:05:46,286 So the Legal Services Corporation is the entity funded by Congress to provide for legal aid across the country. 85 00:05:46,286 --> 00:05:50,467 There are LSC funded legal aid organizations in every state. 86 00:05:50,947 --> 00:05:57,845 And they have an interesting project called, or a funding stream called uh the TIG. 87 00:05:57,845 --> 00:06:06,313 So technology innovation grants, special money set aside to do innovative things with technology to impact the justice gap. 88 00:06:06,313 --> 00:06:10,176 So the justice gap in general, right? 89 00:06:10,176 --> 00:06:16,241 2022 study from the Legal Services Corporation, it's literally called the justice gap report. 90 00:06:16,241 --> 00:06:22,387 Something like 92 % of people who are low income have a legal issue and they can't or don't address it. 91 00:06:22,387 --> 00:06:25,229 So people are sitting there 92 00:06:25,421 --> 00:06:36,082 Hundreds of millions of people, I think I did a little statistics with the census, something like potentially 100 million people are sitting around with life-changing, 93 00:06:36,082 --> 00:06:40,817 potentially legal issues and they're not dealing with them because they don't have money for an attorney. 94 00:06:40,817 --> 00:06:50,523 They don't know that it's a legal issue or they go to Legal Aid and there's not enough help there to actually get them the free lawyers that we've provided um through 95 00:06:50,523 --> 00:06:52,566 federal funding streams or local funding streams. 96 00:06:52,566 --> 00:06:59,146 So it's really a lot of people are dealing with a justice gap and technology is around to help. 97 00:06:59,146 --> 00:07:01,859 And so that's what I've spent my career working on. 98 00:07:02,284 --> 00:07:02,864 Interesting. 99 00:07:02,864 --> 00:07:03,184 Yeah. 100 00:07:03,184 --> 00:07:07,064 So my first entrepreneurial venture was a collection agency. 101 00:07:07,084 --> 00:07:09,104 So started it in 1992. 102 00:07:09,104 --> 00:07:11,775 I wasn't even old enough to drink at the time. 103 00:07:11,775 --> 00:07:17,315 Dropped out of college for a year, ended up going back part-time at night and finishing my degree. 104 00:07:17,315 --> 00:07:30,617 But that was an interesting business because I would say the vast majority of the debts that we were collecting, people just didn't care. 105 00:07:30,617 --> 00:07:42,207 It was, it wasn't, Hey, I'm a hardworking person and I fell on some hard times and you know, we would work with those people because it was in our best interest to do so even if 106 00:07:42,207 --> 00:07:52,416 they could pay us a very small amount, you know, a week or a month or whatever, it was something and it would keep the creditor at bay because something is better than nothing. 107 00:07:52,416 --> 00:07:57,990 but in certain circumstances, we, we would, um, file, civil actions. 108 00:07:58,138 --> 00:07:59,639 for bigger debts. 109 00:07:59,639 --> 00:08:07,665 And I would say probably 90 plus percent resulted in a default judgment because they just wouldn't show. 110 00:08:07,698 --> 00:08:13,710 And then we'd have to go about the process of, you we have to do collection agencies and collection attorneys. 111 00:08:13,710 --> 00:08:24,938 have to perform some due diligence before they even make, decide if it makes sense to file a case, because if there's no assets to attach the judgment to, then you've wasted your 112 00:08:24,938 --> 00:08:25,868 time. 113 00:08:26,163 --> 00:08:38,921 so, but yeah, I got a really interesting view of that, probably a bit skewed because, um, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who do fall on hard times and, really have 114 00:08:38,921 --> 00:08:39,772 good intentions. 115 00:08:39,772 --> 00:08:46,702 But in the collection business, you kind of see so much of the bad, it kind of skews your perspective a little bit. 116 00:08:46,702 --> 00:08:47,482 Yeah, it's funny. 117 00:08:47,482 --> 00:08:49,283 I actually grew up in a collection agency. 118 00:08:49,283 --> 00:08:50,983 My dad owned one when I was a kid. 119 00:08:50,983 --> 00:08:56,085 So I grew up walking the aisles like with the people working the phones and that kind of stuff. 120 00:08:56,085 --> 00:08:57,405 So it's a funny connection. 121 00:08:57,405 --> 00:09:02,938 But mine is my push here is not that – like a lot of people know that they owe the debt, right? 122 00:09:02,938 --> 00:09:06,008 But they don't know that there is a solution. 123 00:09:06,008 --> 00:09:08,599 They don't know their legal rights or their legal remedies. 124 00:09:08,599 --> 00:09:14,931 They don't know that the creditor has to follow certain guidelines or certain restrictions, rules. 125 00:09:14,931 --> 00:09:15,712 They have to have 126 00:09:15,712 --> 00:09:16,712 paperwork in place. 127 00:09:16,712 --> 00:09:22,624 And there's a lot of, for example, in the debt collection space, a lot of people are selling it pennies on the dollar. 128 00:09:22,624 --> 00:09:24,004 It's transferring hands. 129 00:09:24,004 --> 00:09:26,975 There's not a lot of proof about who owns the debt. 130 00:09:27,135 --> 00:09:33,377 My argument is that it's not necessarily we're trying to wipe away all of this debt that is legally owed, whatever it is. 131 00:09:33,377 --> 00:09:35,527 It's that you have to follow the rules. 132 00:09:35,527 --> 00:09:39,019 And so when I went to law school, I wanted to be in criminal defense. 133 00:09:39,019 --> 00:09:40,830 I didn't know going into law school what I wanted to do. 134 00:09:40,830 --> 00:09:42,528 I was sure it wasn't criminal defense. 135 00:09:42,528 --> 00:09:47,032 And then I took a criminal defense class and I was like, oh, no, I want to be a criminal defense attorney. 136 00:09:47,032 --> 00:09:48,893 Because for me, it's following the rules. 137 00:09:48,893 --> 00:09:58,905 Like, I would want to defend someone who's potentially guilty to ensure that the system works for that one person down the line that is innocent and that we don't let it slide. 138 00:09:58,905 --> 00:10:01,830 And so it's the same thing in like debt or court. 139 00:10:01,830 --> 00:10:09,790 Making sure that people are following the paperwork and that, you know, homes aren't getting foreclosed upon because lenders didn't follow the proper procedures because they 140 00:10:09,790 --> 00:10:17,170 were selling, you know, like 40,000 loans all bulked together for pennies on the dollar. 141 00:10:17,630 --> 00:10:26,450 It's just giving people who have to represent themselves because they're low income or because we live in a DIY culture and they don't want to spend $5,000 on an attorney, 142 00:10:26,650 --> 00:10:28,164 giving them the… 143 00:10:28,164 --> 00:10:38,458 the leg up or they know the heuristics, the rules of thumb, the procedures they're supposed to follow, the potential answers or the defenses that are available to them and 144 00:10:38,458 --> 00:10:39,418 letting them use it. 145 00:10:39,418 --> 00:10:41,399 So it's not wiping everything away. 146 00:10:41,399 --> 00:10:49,272 It's just putting people on an equity, having like an equal footing for whoever the party is, self-represented litigant or lawyer. 147 00:10:49,323 --> 00:10:49,623 Yeah. 148 00:10:49,623 --> 00:10:55,223 And there are, you know, fair debt collection practices act, fair credit reporting act that, they were put in place. 149 00:10:55,223 --> 00:11:02,603 There, there have been a lot of abuses in the debt collection space and it's a, it's a good thing. 150 00:11:02,603 --> 00:11:16,203 Like reputable debt collectors very much appreciate those statutes because they keep the, um, um, the bad behavior at a minimum, uh, cause there's some very stiff penalties for 151 00:11:16,203 --> 00:11:17,823 violating them. 152 00:11:17,843 --> 00:11:18,539 So. 153 00:11:18,539 --> 00:11:23,716 um Tell me about free law and what you guys specifically do with the free law project. 154 00:11:23,716 --> 00:11:37,628 Yeah, so we're a legal tech nonprofit and one of our first products uh or tools was Court Listener and it gathers up case law from state courts, from federal courts, all of the 155 00:11:37,628 --> 00:11:40,961 supreme and appellate level courts across the US. 156 00:11:40,961 --> 00:11:46,878 We had initial partnerships with the Harvard Case Law Access Project, so we have case law that goes back to the 1600s. 157 00:11:46,878 --> 00:11:54,098 So, you know, if you're a real nerd and you want to dive deep on the internet in what was going on in 1692, we have that for you. 158 00:11:54,098 --> 00:11:57,678 But we're providing this platform for free. 159 00:11:57,678 --> 00:12:03,518 We put the legal research tools out there on our website and people are free to use them. 160 00:12:03,518 --> 00:12:16,502 So a lot of small firms, solos, journalists, academic purposes are using it because the legal research tools that are out there are very expensive and can be cost prohibitive. 161 00:12:16,520 --> 00:12:23,946 We're also integrating that in for the self-represented litigants, the same idea that they're not going to have access to the underlying precedents that could support their 162 00:12:23,946 --> 00:12:24,436 case. 163 00:12:24,436 --> 00:12:25,178 It's available. 164 00:12:25,178 --> 00:12:28,020 We also have a tool called Recap. 165 00:12:28,020 --> 00:12:38,889 Recap Archive is PACER backwards, and it's uh about half a billion uh docket entries from the federal e-filing system. 166 00:12:38,889 --> 00:12:40,671 PACER is the federal e-filing system. 167 00:12:40,671 --> 00:12:43,668 It's got documents, dockets, ongoing litigation. 168 00:12:43,668 --> 00:12:47,500 final opinions in our case law and uh ongoing litigation. 169 00:12:47,500 --> 00:12:50,702 And we open it up for bulk downloads for free. 170 00:12:50,702 --> 00:12:51,992 Everyone can just go and use it. 171 00:12:51,992 --> 00:12:54,864 The tools are on our website if you want to search individually. 172 00:12:54,864 --> 00:13:05,410 Or we have APIs that are available so that people like Kara, that's how we uh were integrated into Describe, can use our legal data, which is sort of a unique corpus of 173 00:13:05,410 --> 00:13:08,321 content in the space, to train their tools. 174 00:13:08,321 --> 00:13:12,055 And so that the tools that are being built are being built on legitimate 175 00:13:12,055 --> 00:13:18,555 uh on legitimate data sources and that people have access to the same, it's that equity idea, right? 176 00:13:18,555 --> 00:13:24,573 They have access to the same content regardless of how much money you have to spend on legal research. 177 00:13:24,952 --> 00:13:25,482 Interesting. 178 00:13:25,482 --> 00:13:36,548 So my company info dash, we are intranet extranet provider and, we, it's not your, what, what, when people think of intranets, they think of like, Hey, where do I go to find the 179 00:13:36,548 --> 00:13:37,388 lunch menu? 180 00:13:37,388 --> 00:13:40,380 Like we, yeah, exactly. 181 00:13:40,380 --> 00:13:48,273 This is a much more, it's, we like to call it kind of digital workplace, but, as part of, build client dynamic client and matter pages. 182 00:13:48,273 --> 00:13:52,920 And in the past we have integrated with Pacer and. 183 00:13:52,920 --> 00:14:05,551 I hope your API is better than theirs because we had some real challenges like show stopping issues that we had to create workarounds where duplicate like it was just a mess. 184 00:14:05,551 --> 00:14:06,451 So. 185 00:14:06,720 --> 00:14:08,461 we also do advocacy too, right? 186 00:14:08,461 --> 00:14:10,912 So we want to make the system better altogether. 187 00:14:10,912 --> 00:14:17,457 Part of what I've been doing for the last year and what Mike Listner, my boss, did before I joined is the Open Courts Act. 188 00:14:17,457 --> 00:14:20,539 there was a 2023 version, there's a 2025 version. 189 00:14:20,539 --> 00:14:29,344 We're working with Congress to get changes to Pacers so that they're up to modern tech standards and that they are uh free where possible. 190 00:14:29,344 --> 00:14:30,074 It's kind of crazy. 191 00:14:30,074 --> 00:14:32,725 The Pacer system charges 10 cents a page. 192 00:14:32,725 --> 00:14:41,961 like you'd have to fax it somewhere or someone would have to physically make a copy, which was set, I guess, historically back in like the 90s when you had to call in and you had to 193 00:14:41,961 --> 00:14:46,194 like pay per page, which is crazy because that's not how the internet works today. 194 00:14:46,194 --> 00:14:47,736 Why are you paying 10 cents a page? 195 00:14:47,736 --> 00:14:50,898 One of the cool things we have is called the Recap Extension. 196 00:14:50,898 --> 00:14:55,120 It's a browser plugin that you can put in and there's 35,000 people who have it. 197 00:14:55,120 --> 00:14:58,489 And so it's crowdsourcing Pacer content. 198 00:14:58,489 --> 00:15:07,709 And so once someone buys it on their Pacer account, if they have the extension in, it gets sent to our system and then everybody has access to it because it's not violating their 199 00:15:07,709 --> 00:15:08,270 TOS. 200 00:15:08,270 --> 00:15:10,173 Once you buy it, you can do whatever you want with it. 201 00:15:10,173 --> 00:15:18,222 And so people are sharing what they're already purchasing, which is helping build up this open community of data in the legal space. 202 00:15:18,367 --> 00:15:19,168 Interesting. 203 00:15:19,168 --> 00:15:27,315 how Karen and I got connected, actually we were on a podcast together or LinkedIn live like a couple of years ago, but we got reconnected. 204 00:15:27,315 --> 00:15:38,732 there was a post about how all this new, I'm using air quotes here for listeners, all this new free law data that was available on hugging face. 205 00:15:39,032 --> 00:15:42,726 And Kara was like, yeah, there's that's really 206 00:15:42,726 --> 00:15:47,371 not the situation or there's much more to the story than that. 207 00:15:47,371 --> 00:15:50,875 And I think it was maybe that Harvard law project. 208 00:15:50,875 --> 00:15:53,386 didn't that, didn't that have an end date? 209 00:15:53,419 --> 00:15:53,699 did. 210 00:15:53,699 --> 00:15:56,399 They were scanning books till about 2018. 211 00:15:56,399 --> 00:16:01,819 So after about 2018, 2019, we have court scrapers that go out and pull in our data now. 212 00:16:01,819 --> 00:16:03,459 So we're not scanning books. 213 00:16:03,459 --> 00:16:05,679 We're pulling it from the source, from the courts. 214 00:16:05,679 --> 00:16:12,759 We have a whole team that spends a lot of time, you know, making sure the courts feel good and don't block us in terms of the scrapers. 215 00:16:12,759 --> 00:16:17,463 But we have 200 plus court scrapers that are out there pulling new content in every day. 216 00:16:17,622 --> 00:16:18,274 Interesting. 217 00:16:18,274 --> 00:16:29,031 And we talked a little bit about legal aid and I think you had mentioned that less than half or maybe even a fourth of people who qualify for assistance can actually get served 218 00:16:29,031 --> 00:16:29,923 through that channel. 219 00:16:29,923 --> 00:16:31,091 Is that accurate? 220 00:16:31,091 --> 00:16:32,091 Yeah, it's crazy. 221 00:16:32,091 --> 00:16:36,584 So people assume someone figures out that they have a legal issue, right? 222 00:16:36,584 --> 00:16:41,117 Like an eviction notice shows up on their door or they have some sort of custody issue. 223 00:16:41,117 --> 00:16:49,853 They figure out where their legal aid is, which, you know, they're Googling and SEO on legal aid websites is not necessarily going to be as high as, you know, John Smith, the 224 00:16:49,853 --> 00:16:53,185 local attorney who's going to have a lot of Google ads coming in. 225 00:16:53,205 --> 00:16:54,892 So they find their legal aid. 226 00:16:54,892 --> 00:17:01,024 They either sit in line on a hotline and wait to talk to someone to do intake or they show up in person. 227 00:17:01,024 --> 00:17:02,474 And then they go through the whole process. 228 00:17:02,474 --> 00:17:03,514 They tell their whole story. 229 00:17:03,514 --> 00:17:05,405 It's, hours of their life, right? 230 00:17:05,405 --> 00:17:14,169 And then they get told, well, I'm sorry, we don't have enough resources to help you because there isn't enough money for everyone who shows up to get a lawyer one-to-one. 231 00:17:14,169 --> 00:17:19,732 There's not enough money for even like low levels of representation, just help filling out a form, that kind of stuff. 232 00:17:19,732 --> 00:17:22,552 And so, yeah, we worked in my old job. 233 00:17:22,552 --> 00:17:25,032 We worked with Nevada Legal Services. 234 00:17:25,032 --> 00:17:29,592 They were telling us they'd turn away up to like 76 % of people one year. 235 00:17:29,592 --> 00:17:37,912 So it's like, it's so much bigger than that, because that's the people who figured out they had a legal issue, figured out they, know, legal aid was the right source for them. 236 00:17:37,912 --> 00:17:42,852 They were poor enough to go to legal aid and then made it there and they still got turned away. 237 00:17:42,852 --> 00:17:48,532 And the income levels for legal aid is something like 125 % of the poverty guidelines. 238 00:17:48,532 --> 00:17:54,552 I know what the poverty guidelines is today, but it's like somebody who makes like $19,000 a year for a family. 239 00:17:54,552 --> 00:17:57,532 If you have a kid, it's like, I don't know, $20,000 a year. 240 00:17:57,532 --> 00:18:03,912 Who is really able to live and handle and take time off work to address these issues? 241 00:18:03,912 --> 00:18:09,492 You just don't have that at $8 an hour salaries and you're scraping by. 242 00:18:09,492 --> 00:18:12,332 And so yeah, they're turning away huge numbers of people. 243 00:18:12,332 --> 00:18:17,812 And that's where the LSC's TIGs, the Technology Innovation Grants come in because 244 00:18:17,812 --> 00:18:20,883 um Legal aid saw that they were never going to have enough attorneys. 245 00:18:20,883 --> 00:18:28,436 There's never going to be the political will nationally to have one-to-one attorney representation funded by the public. 246 00:18:28,477 --> 00:18:29,977 And so they need to do something else. 247 00:18:29,977 --> 00:18:41,589 And so they turned to tech and that's where there has been, I don't know the year, but 20, 30 years of innovation in legal intake, in document assembly, in text messaging, in 248 00:18:41,589 --> 00:18:45,471 website improvement, in self-help resources because legal aid 249 00:18:45,640 --> 00:18:47,825 is end running around the court. 250 00:18:47,825 --> 00:18:56,773 The court's not providing this to self-represented litigants, so Legal Aid is doing it to help as many people as possible because they have to turn away so many for one-to-one. 251 00:18:57,174 --> 00:19:00,928 And then, you talked about something called the litigant portal. 252 00:19:00,928 --> 00:19:04,631 Is this a solution designed to help with this gap? 253 00:19:04,746 --> 00:19:05,116 Yeah. 254 00:19:05,116 --> 00:19:13,302 So the Litigant Portal is sort of my idea that came out of what Free Law Project had when I started and my history of working with self-represented litigants. 255 00:19:13,302 --> 00:19:20,277 And so there's been a lot of work in this TIG space in the court and Legal Aid for self-help, but it's still just disjointed. 256 00:19:20,277 --> 00:19:27,083 So there are legal help websites in um every state has at least one funded from LSC. 257 00:19:27,083 --> 00:19:30,856 There's a lot of document assembly software automated forms out there. 258 00:19:30,856 --> 00:19:31,899 So my old 259 00:19:31,899 --> 00:19:40,057 tool, A to J author had something like a thousand A to J guided interviews out there in the world, but it's very disproportionately divided. 260 00:19:40,057 --> 00:19:46,113 So Illinois has a couple of hundred, Michigan has a couple of hundred, Arkansas has like three or four. 261 00:19:46,113 --> 00:19:49,376 It's very unequal in the distribution. 262 00:19:49,376 --> 00:19:55,221 And then there's a lot, the final step of getting it to the courthouse is still missing. 263 00:19:55,221 --> 00:19:59,105 So in a lot of states, self-represented litigants are either 264 00:19:59,267 --> 00:20:03,059 can use e-filing if it's available, but it's permissive. 265 00:20:03,059 --> 00:20:07,111 It's not required like it is for attorneys or they're banned from using it. 266 00:20:07,111 --> 00:20:17,486 So they still, even if they get help filling out the form, they still have to take the day off of work and show up between nine to four at the courthouse that could be 50 miles from 267 00:20:17,486 --> 00:20:21,348 their home, probably not easy with public transportation. 268 00:20:21,368 --> 00:20:23,684 And then they get it in and they file it. 269 00:20:23,684 --> 00:20:25,466 And then there's no reminder. 270 00:20:25,466 --> 00:20:32,041 So um the litigant portal is the idea that came out of uh helping my mom with her doctor's appointments. 271 00:20:32,041 --> 00:20:36,055 The doctors all have my health app, mydoctor.com. 272 00:20:36,055 --> 00:20:38,047 They're always telling you to download the app, right? 273 00:20:38,047 --> 00:20:46,606 And you can communicate with the doctor whatever time, know, 830 at night when I'm laying in bed, if my kids are asleep, I can email my mom's doctor. 274 00:20:46,606 --> 00:20:47,816 I can schedule appointments. 275 00:20:47,816 --> 00:20:48,707 I get reminders. 276 00:20:48,707 --> 00:20:52,478 They send me 47 text messages that I have a dentist appointment on Tuesday. 277 00:20:52,478 --> 00:20:53,530 Like, I got it. 278 00:20:53,530 --> 00:20:55,271 That doesn't exist in the legal space. 279 00:20:55,271 --> 00:20:56,732 So that's what the Litigant Portal is. 280 00:20:56,732 --> 00:21:00,413 It's going to be an integrated into court system. 281 00:21:00,413 --> 00:21:07,366 So we're partnering with courts to have this on their websites rather than uh sitting somewhere else or an end run from Legal Aid. 282 00:21:07,366 --> 00:21:10,918 It's going to come from the court because that's where the justice is supposed to be occurring. 283 00:21:10,918 --> 00:21:13,179 They're going to learn about their rights and their remedies. 284 00:21:13,459 --> 00:21:15,800 So they're going to be able to tell their story. 285 00:21:15,800 --> 00:21:17,750 And some of this is going to have Gen. 286 00:21:17,750 --> 00:21:18,580 components to it. 287 00:21:18,580 --> 00:21:24,312 We have an AWS Imagine grant that's pending, fingers crossed, to build that in. 288 00:21:24,312 --> 00:21:27,133 So they're going to learn about their legal rights and remedies. 289 00:21:27,133 --> 00:21:29,884 And it's going to provide them with a sort of like, could do this. 290 00:21:29,884 --> 00:21:32,454 So you could get a warm handoff to Legal Aid. 291 00:21:32,454 --> 00:21:34,645 You could get a pro bono attorneys. 292 00:21:34,645 --> 00:21:37,986 Here's a list of bar association approved attorneys. 293 00:21:37,986 --> 00:21:40,367 Here's some DIY forms that you could do. 294 00:21:40,367 --> 00:21:42,461 They do the DIY forms. 295 00:21:42,461 --> 00:21:46,634 They're going to be taken down and help answer the questions, get the completed thing. 296 00:21:46,634 --> 00:21:50,677 And then because we're piloting with the courts, it's going to be e-filed directly with the court. 297 00:21:50,677 --> 00:21:52,148 They're going to get a case number back. 298 00:21:52,148 --> 00:21:55,840 They're going to potentially have a place for e-service from the other side. 299 00:21:55,840 --> 00:22:03,326 Because the other part of this is that it's hard for attorneys who have to work with self-represented litigants as the other side as well. 300 00:22:03,326 --> 00:22:05,347 And it's hard for the judges and the clerks. 301 00:22:05,347 --> 00:22:09,498 And it clogs up our justice system because the people don't know how to do it. 302 00:22:09,498 --> 00:22:12,439 and they do it wrong and everybody is frustrated. 303 00:22:12,439 --> 00:22:16,921 So let's use tech to sort of lubricate that and make it a smoother process. 304 00:22:16,921 --> 00:22:19,141 And so e-service can come back. 305 00:22:19,141 --> 00:22:23,063 Text message reminders that say, hey, you have court in three days. 306 00:22:23,183 --> 00:22:24,383 Don't bring your phone. 307 00:22:24,383 --> 00:22:26,254 Phones aren't allowed anymore in court. 308 00:22:26,254 --> 00:22:27,714 Here's the parking situation. 309 00:22:27,714 --> 00:22:28,885 Here's the public transit. 310 00:22:28,885 --> 00:22:33,329 Like all those things you don't need to know six weeks in advance. 311 00:22:33,329 --> 00:22:40,573 that you need to know just at the point in which you're ready to go to court and get that reminder that, you know, this is happening in three days, that's where we're going to 312 00:22:40,573 --> 00:22:44,165 feedback that just-in-time information to them. 313 00:22:44,165 --> 00:22:50,939 Kind of like a case management system, a platform for self-represented litigants, but that the court is providing. 314 00:22:50,939 --> 00:22:54,091 And so there's no money, there's no, you the plaintiff? 315 00:22:54,091 --> 00:22:55,552 Are you the defendant? 316 00:22:55,552 --> 00:23:00,174 Some of that happens in legal aid that they're focused more on like defendants than plaintiffs. 317 00:23:00,503 --> 00:23:02,467 So that's the litigant portal, the dream. 318 00:23:02,467 --> 00:23:09,453 And I'm onboarding a new dev today to help start building that dream and we're building partnerships and we're always looking for new courts too. 319 00:23:09,888 --> 00:23:10,880 And how are you funded? 320 00:23:10,880 --> 00:23:14,712 So we fund a lot of our nonprofit work on the back of our data licensing. 321 00:23:14,712 --> 00:23:21,016 So that corpus of data that I talked about, we have partners all over the legal tech space. 322 00:23:21,016 --> 00:23:25,698 Big, huge companies use our data through our APIs or our replicated database. 323 00:23:25,698 --> 00:23:29,320 They pay a monthly licensing fee that helps generate that. 324 00:23:29,320 --> 00:23:31,261 We're also grant funded. 325 00:23:31,261 --> 00:23:37,656 We have individual memberships and donations through our nonprofit that funds a lot of this access to justice work. 326 00:23:37,656 --> 00:23:39,147 So it's sort of a hodgepodge. 327 00:23:39,147 --> 00:23:41,510 but data or funding. 328 00:23:41,670 --> 00:23:52,852 So, um, you know, as somebody who's founded a couple of startups, I can tell you how high the bar is for raising external capital. 329 00:23:52,852 --> 00:24:00,880 We are very blessed in that we've had tremendous growth and, we demonstrated product market fit very early on in the journey. 330 00:24:00,880 --> 00:24:06,369 So we get bombarded with VCs knocking on our door, but we. 331 00:24:06,369 --> 00:24:07,989 are primarily bootstrapped. 332 00:24:07,989 --> 00:24:12,109 We've taken some money from the Legal Tech Fund and they've been great partners to work with. 333 00:24:12,169 --> 00:24:19,189 our strategy is to push off as much external capital raising as possible. 334 00:24:19,189 --> 00:24:23,460 So we maintain control of the business and can really drive it in the direction that we want to. 335 00:24:23,460 --> 00:24:34,136 that, raising a small amount of money, even for a startup that has incredible, we're 100 % year over year growth, like our 336 00:24:34,276 --> 00:24:38,480 LTV to CAC ratio, all the, SAS numbers look amazing. 337 00:24:38,480 --> 00:24:44,085 But as soon as you say, I want to raise a million dollars, VCs or lose interest. 338 00:24:44,085 --> 00:24:48,909 So like, can't imagine how hard and we're for, we're for profit. 339 00:24:48,909 --> 00:24:57,517 I can't how hard it would be to go to the market and try and get people to write you checks when you're in the A to J space. 340 00:24:57,517 --> 00:25:01,388 Like how do we, how do we, how do we 341 00:25:01,388 --> 00:25:02,429 How do you get this done? 342 00:25:02,429 --> 00:25:05,246 I mean, this seems like a big problem to solve. 343 00:25:05,317 --> 00:25:09,529 Yeah, I mean, a lot of this work has been funded through those TIGs, right? 344 00:25:09,529 --> 00:25:11,931 The government source of funding, but that's for innovation. 345 00:25:11,931 --> 00:25:16,554 It's not for sustainability and it's not for, you know, repainting the bridge every year, right? 346 00:25:16,554 --> 00:25:17,915 Like this is infrastructure. 347 00:25:17,915 --> 00:25:27,000 And so part of it is going to be that our court partners ultimately are going to have to fund this the same as they fund their websites, their paper, their court staff. 348 00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:32,959 mean, COVID showed us that the justice system can go online and it can still function, right? 349 00:25:32,959 --> 00:25:40,156 So all these rollbacks where you can't go have virtual hearings for court or a lot of the self-help that was out there, that's not fair to rollback. 350 00:25:40,156 --> 00:25:45,011 So part of the advocacy that Free Law Project is doing is that the courts have this responsibility. 351 00:25:45,011 --> 00:25:53,428 If 75 % of the people showing up to your business, the court is a business, are self-represented litigants, you have to have tools in place for them. 352 00:25:53,428 --> 00:25:59,023 And it's part of the cost of running business in America that we fund this sort of stuff. 353 00:25:59,023 --> 00:26:04,605 uh Part of us, Free Law Project, being a nonprofit is that we aren't taking any money off of the top, right? 354 00:26:04,605 --> 00:26:10,448 Like I need a salary to live, our devs need to live, but also like we're not, we don't have shareholders to report back to. 355 00:26:10,448 --> 00:26:12,370 And so there is a lower cost. 356 00:26:12,370 --> 00:26:23,445 I've worked on some presentations with like the team out of Suffolk's Lit Lab, and they're big at pushing on open source and procurement and working with nonprofits or academic 357 00:26:23,445 --> 00:26:26,226 institutions that can lower the cost. 358 00:26:26,255 --> 00:26:29,067 of this innovation in the court space. 359 00:26:29,067 --> 00:26:31,168 so, yes, it's going to cost money. 360 00:26:31,168 --> 00:26:34,946 Hopefully, it's less than what some commercial off-the-shelf products are. 361 00:26:34,946 --> 00:26:39,413 And hopefully, we have some philanthropic interest in access to justice. 362 00:26:39,413 --> 00:26:44,135 You talked about, you know, a lot of people don't know about this justice gap or it's surprising when you hear about it. 363 00:26:44,135 --> 00:26:44,938 It's… 364 00:26:44,938 --> 00:26:47,629 Also, room for movement there, right? 365 00:26:47,629 --> 00:26:52,630 So we can bring this to a whole new audience of people who are like, I didn't know it was that bad. 366 00:26:52,630 --> 00:26:54,111 Like, yeah, it's that bad. 367 00:26:54,111 --> 00:27:03,862 And big funders, big philanthropic organizations need to be looking at the justice system the same way that they're looking at public health or whatever their focus is. 368 00:27:03,862 --> 00:27:12,007 This is a huge problem in our democracy that we need to solve that, you know, 100 million people are left out on the 369 00:27:12,007 --> 00:27:16,499 on the doorstep and they can lose their kids and their house and their money. 370 00:27:16,499 --> 00:27:22,142 like, it's just every day, I endlessly talk to people about this and they're shocked. 371 00:27:22,142 --> 00:27:26,483 And I'm just like, yeah, that's real world that's happening in your community. 372 00:27:26,483 --> 00:27:28,185 Your neighbors are feeling this. 373 00:27:28,185 --> 00:27:37,229 And so we have to start caring because, you know, one of the tripods of our democracy is the justice system and people have to have trust that it will be fair and will be 374 00:27:37,229 --> 00:27:38,549 available for them. 375 00:27:38,718 --> 00:27:51,404 I mean, is it incumbent upon the private sector, like law firms and the bar and other organizations to help contribute to bridging this gap? 376 00:27:51,404 --> 00:27:55,527 Yeah, I mean, obviously I'd love if they wanted to be donations to Free Law Project. 377 00:27:55,527 --> 00:28:04,987 We have a justice partner circle that's for law firms who are really interested in making a big contribution to the space, either the justice initiative work that I'm doing or our 378 00:28:04,987 --> 00:28:07,189 research and our open data and that kind of stuff. 379 00:28:07,189 --> 00:28:14,426 But there is a responsibility that you are part of a system and that when you have, you should share. 380 00:28:14,426 --> 00:28:16,178 That's sort of a mindset, right? 381 00:28:16,178 --> 00:28:21,901 I think our whole society would be a whole lot better if everyone had the mindset that if you have enough, share. 382 00:28:21,901 --> 00:28:26,395 And a lot of the law firms or attorneys are already doing this stuff. 383 00:28:26,395 --> 00:28:31,437 They're members of their access to justice commission or they're members of their bar outreach or pro bono. 384 00:28:31,437 --> 00:28:37,250 have, know, attorneys have a pro bono sort of that's ingrained in us that we should be providing that. 385 00:28:37,614 --> 00:28:38,825 they're already doing the work. 386 00:28:38,825 --> 00:28:41,096 Sometimes all we're asking for is a connection. 387 00:28:41,096 --> 00:28:45,598 We don't even need the money, the dollars, if that's not going to work for you. 388 00:28:45,598 --> 00:28:53,561 You can make the connection and say, hey, you know, I golf with Judge so-and-so and he's complaining a lot about, you know, people showing up in his courtroom unprepared. 389 00:28:53,561 --> 00:28:58,263 Maybe I could make that connection to these people who want to do something or make the connection. 390 00:28:58,263 --> 00:28:59,644 You could be a door opener. 391 00:28:59,644 --> 00:29:04,435 So I read a couple of years ago, you could be a doer, you can be a donator. 392 00:29:04,435 --> 00:29:06,378 um or you can be a door opener, right? 393 00:29:06,378 --> 00:29:08,082 So if you can't do it, that's fine. 394 00:29:08,082 --> 00:29:10,527 If you can't donate, okay, do that if you can. 395 00:29:10,527 --> 00:29:14,533 Or you can be a door opener and think about who you know and those connections that you can make. 396 00:29:14,533 --> 00:29:18,329 So we're also looking for door openers if we can't get donors or doers. 397 00:29:18,400 --> 00:29:19,060 Yeah, interesting. 398 00:29:19,060 --> 00:29:21,300 I would think that there would be maybe some connect points. 399 00:29:21,300 --> 00:29:26,800 I know that a lot of big law firms are limited partners in the Legal Tech Fund. 400 00:29:26,820 --> 00:29:28,840 And I know they do some work there. 401 00:29:28,840 --> 00:29:36,400 That's like I mentioned, I saw a session on it at their summit a couple of years ago, but it's just such a massive problem. 402 00:29:36,400 --> 00:29:39,680 It's really going to need a multi-pronged solution. 403 00:29:39,920 --> 00:29:44,160 I saw an interesting article recently and I'm sure you did too. 404 00:29:44,160 --> 00:29:46,900 It was like, I can't remember if it was Washington Post or New York Times. 405 00:29:46,900 --> 00:29:48,200 And it talked about 406 00:29:48,200 --> 00:30:02,387 It was some major news outlet and they were talking about how it was a case study and I forget the details, but they basically went and dissected a scenario where a pro se 407 00:30:02,387 --> 00:30:06,309 litigant used Chad CPT to help solve her legal issue. 408 00:30:06,309 --> 00:30:08,650 And I forget what that legal issue is now. 409 00:30:08,650 --> 00:30:13,797 And I saw some really interesting commentary like is this UPL and you know, 410 00:30:13,797 --> 00:30:20,077 I feel like that's the last question we need to be asking in these scenarios, maybe just kind of high level. 411 00:30:20,077 --> 00:30:21,732 Do you know the article I'm talking about? 412 00:30:21,732 --> 00:30:22,499 um 413 00:30:22,499 --> 00:30:28,434 but I've had endless conversations about UPL and lawyers feeling like we're going to be eating their lunch. 414 00:30:28,434 --> 00:30:30,206 no one is doing this work, right? 415 00:30:30,206 --> 00:30:33,279 We're not taking your job, whatever size firm you are. 416 00:30:33,279 --> 00:30:35,650 These people are not coming to you anyway. 417 00:30:35,650 --> 00:30:39,724 There is someone who's been in the space forever, Mark Lauritsen. 418 00:30:39,724 --> 00:30:45,412 He's written a lot about First Amendment and how this sort of automated document assembly tools are not… 419 00:30:45,412 --> 00:30:50,937 the unauthorized practice of law, they have First Amendment rights, First Amendment protections, so like you can look into that. 420 00:30:50,937 --> 00:30:54,670 yeah, people that we're not eating your lunch, right? 421 00:30:54,670 --> 00:30:57,834 they're, with the innovation of Chat GPT, right? 422 00:30:57,834 --> 00:31:01,086 It's so available, everybody's using it. 423 00:31:01,086 --> 00:31:06,871 I sat next to a woman in a nail salon and she was talking to Chat GPT about what color she should paint her nails. 424 00:31:06,871 --> 00:31:11,124 And I was like, wow, that's deep in the weeds of like a friendship with your AI. 425 00:31:11,124 --> 00:31:15,525 But the idea that they're using it anyway, and so we need the guardrails. 426 00:31:15,525 --> 00:31:23,048 And there's 30 years of self-help tools that are out there that are legitimate, that are in plain language, that are in multiple languages, right? 427 00:31:23,048 --> 00:31:27,569 English, Spanish, French, whatever the native dialogue is in the jurisdiction. 428 00:31:27,569 --> 00:31:33,331 There are subject matter experts, the attorneys have written it, they know it's valid, it's not trash. 429 00:31:33,331 --> 00:31:38,762 Built on free-law projects, legal data so that there aren't hallucinated citations in it. 430 00:31:38,877 --> 00:31:49,031 Part of the Imagine grant that we have uh pending is we spend a lot of time doing the Gen.ai components with their solutions architect, with our AI developer, really thinking 431 00:31:49,031 --> 00:31:57,775 about the guidelines and how we're going to make sure that if someone comes in that they're given jurisdiction specific materials, that they're not getting stuff from Kansas 432 00:31:57,775 --> 00:31:59,847 when they're in Illinois or vice versa. 433 00:31:59,847 --> 00:32:03,374 I talked about how it's not um evenly dispersed across the country. 434 00:32:03,374 --> 00:32:05,165 So there's a lot of content in Illinois. 435 00:32:05,165 --> 00:32:07,185 And so that's going to pop up high on the SEO. 436 00:32:07,185 --> 00:32:09,849 And that's what the systems are trained on. 437 00:32:09,849 --> 00:32:14,051 But that's not going to help you in Kansas or in California or wherever. 438 00:32:14,151 --> 00:32:23,308 So jurisdiction specific, that there's human in the loop, that they're ensuring that whatever we put out and say, hey, you could do this, that people are checking that 439 00:32:23,308 --> 00:32:25,279 periodically to ensure that it's valid. 440 00:32:25,279 --> 00:32:26,790 Like use the AI. 441 00:32:26,790 --> 00:32:27,250 It's here. 442 00:32:27,250 --> 00:32:28,261 People are using it. 443 00:32:28,261 --> 00:32:32,952 Let's provide them the guardrails and the safety to ensure that they're getting 444 00:32:32,952 --> 00:32:41,618 the legal em outcomes that they're supposed to be getting and that they're not waiving their rights because they filed the wrong response or whatever. 445 00:32:41,618 --> 00:32:42,748 Like you want to protect people. 446 00:32:42,748 --> 00:32:43,549 That's the whole point. 447 00:32:43,549 --> 00:32:45,481 So our system is going to have guardrails. 448 00:32:45,481 --> 00:32:50,164 It's going to be in as many languages as possible that the jurisdiction wants to support. 449 00:32:50,164 --> 00:32:51,775 It's going to have a lot of accessibility. 450 00:32:51,775 --> 00:32:55,588 So there's a whole, you know, the WCAG standards for 451 00:32:55,737 --> 00:33:02,138 and ADA compliance and that kind of stuff, we don't want our tool to also be an additional burden for people who have accessibility issues. 452 00:33:02,138 --> 00:33:08,569 So that's also really important to us that we build a tool that the most amount of people can use in the safest parameters. 453 00:33:08,960 --> 00:33:14,364 And you talked about the courts funding, like courts are so like underfunded. 454 00:33:14,364 --> 00:33:19,266 mean, you just have to walk into one and it feels like, you know, a throwback. 455 00:33:19,266 --> 00:33:28,079 I, thankfully I haven't been in one in quite some time, but last time I was, it really felt like I was in a time warp. 456 00:33:28,079 --> 00:33:36,553 but something that we talked about last time that you mentioned that surprised me is that courts are spending quite a bit of money on things like 457 00:33:36,553 --> 00:33:38,108 commercial case management systems. 458 00:33:38,108 --> 00:33:39,119 that true? 459 00:33:39,491 --> 00:33:47,146 Yeah, we've done some FOIA work and we published it on our website if you guys want to check it out, FreedOutLaw, where we requested those contracts and these commercial 460 00:33:47,146 --> 00:33:48,748 off-the-shelf things. 461 00:33:48,748 --> 00:33:53,631 it's a little bit like I don't always believe them when they say they don't have money. 462 00:33:53,631 --> 00:33:58,534 Like the people I'm talking to, I believe that the self-help desk isn't properly funded. 463 00:33:58,534 --> 00:33:59,115 I get it. 464 00:33:59,115 --> 00:34:03,117 I mean, right now when we're recording this, we're in the middle of a government shutdown. 465 00:34:03,117 --> 00:34:07,920 The government saying they have no money and when they have like a trillion dollar budget, I'm like, hmm. 466 00:34:08,384 --> 00:34:09,965 Let's be relative here. 467 00:34:09,965 --> 00:34:11,646 So I think the courts have money. 468 00:34:11,646 --> 00:34:14,478 They have to prioritize where that money comes from. 469 00:34:14,478 --> 00:34:21,612 And if they don't have the money, let's talk to the legislature and talk about what a huge issue this is. 470 00:34:21,612 --> 00:34:30,538 All those lawyers that are working at big firms who are friends with senators and representatives, so and so, let's influence people that way and start getting proper 471 00:34:30,538 --> 00:34:30,938 funding. 472 00:34:30,938 --> 00:34:32,280 Like it's infrastructure. 473 00:34:32,280 --> 00:34:33,142 You got to paint 474 00:34:33,142 --> 00:34:34,273 or got to paint the bridge. 475 00:34:34,273 --> 00:34:36,296 The Golden Gate Bridge has to be painted every year. 476 00:34:36,296 --> 00:34:38,318 The roads have to be paved. 477 00:34:38,318 --> 00:34:44,364 The justice system has to work for self-represented litigants because that's who the majority of the people are. 478 00:34:44,384 --> 00:34:50,702 Our democracy falls if the justice system is not trustworthy or doesn't help the people that it's supposed to be helping. 479 00:34:51,149 --> 00:34:55,109 And know, and, gen AI is fantastic at legal work. 480 00:34:55,109 --> 00:34:59,129 So I have been running a very informal study since the beginning of the year. 481 00:34:59,369 --> 00:35:06,549 Um, it did not even a study, just an experiment where all of my legal work through info dash. 482 00:35:06,549 --> 00:35:18,189 And I mean, you know, we're a startup, so we're constantly negotiating new contracts and signing NDAs and you know, reorganizing our operating agreement and getting funding and 483 00:35:18,189 --> 00:35:19,369 all this sort of stuff. 484 00:35:19,509 --> 00:35:20,173 So we, 485 00:35:20,173 --> 00:35:21,764 You know, we have a four nine a program. 486 00:35:21,764 --> 00:35:26,919 I've been running every task that I send to a lawyer through AI just to kind of compare. 487 00:35:26,919 --> 00:35:31,963 is amazing how well AI does. 488 00:35:31,963 --> 00:35:41,130 So we had a, we had a dispute that we were looking contractually at, okay, what would happen if we can't come to a resolution on this? 489 00:35:41,150 --> 00:35:45,153 So I loaded the documents into. 490 00:35:45,583 --> 00:35:47,183 I can't remember which model we use. 491 00:35:47,183 --> 00:35:53,097 usually round Robin or I'll do one and then ask another model to kind of grade the output. 492 00:35:53,097 --> 00:36:05,893 And I had it outline what the process would look like if we did have to, if we couldn't come to a resolution, IE mediation, arbitration, map out a timeline, map out projected 493 00:36:05,893 --> 00:36:08,225 costs on both sides of the case. 494 00:36:08,225 --> 00:36:09,045 And 495 00:36:09,053 --> 00:36:13,316 It blew my mind how well it mapped this out. 496 00:36:13,316 --> 00:36:18,020 Now I don't, I don't let anything leave, out, go out the door. 497 00:36:18,020 --> 00:36:28,082 That's not looked at by an attorney, but I have been doing this kind of side by side comparison for awhile and it has really augmented me, what I do as a consumer of legal 498 00:36:28,082 --> 00:36:28,824 services. 499 00:36:28,824 --> 00:36:31,396 And you know, I don't really want to hear about UPL. 500 00:36:31,396 --> 00:36:33,948 Like I really don't care what people's opinions are on it. 501 00:36:33,948 --> 00:36:34,949 I'm going to do it. 502 00:36:34,949 --> 00:36:35,769 And 503 00:36:37,103 --> 00:36:37,698 Yeah. 504 00:36:37,698 --> 00:36:44,077 and good luck stopping people who, you know, like, like you said, pro se litigants who have absolutely no choice. 505 00:36:44,077 --> 00:36:46,119 I have a choice, but I'm, I'm going to do it. 506 00:36:46,119 --> 00:36:47,541 Um, 507 00:36:47,649 --> 00:36:49,031 DIY culture, right? 508 00:36:49,031 --> 00:36:53,171 I'm not going to necessarily call a plumber if the sink is leaky a little bit. 509 00:36:53,171 --> 00:36:57,158 I'm going to watch a YouTube video to try and figure out like what do I actually need to tighten, right? 510 00:36:57,158 --> 00:37:03,313 My first instinct is not going to be to hire a $5,000, have a $5,000 retainer with an attorney. 511 00:37:03,313 --> 00:37:11,034 I'm going to try and do it myself and see what I can find because that's sort of how my generation, others, that's we grew up on the internet, right? 512 00:37:11,034 --> 00:37:12,174 That's our first go-to. 513 00:37:12,174 --> 00:37:13,214 Is there a YouTube? 514 00:37:13,214 --> 00:37:14,454 Can I Google it? 515 00:37:14,454 --> 00:37:15,234 The doctor. 516 00:37:15,234 --> 00:37:16,894 I'm not going to go to the doctor every time. 517 00:37:16,894 --> 00:37:22,134 I'm going to Google my symptoms and hopefully not have some terrible disease that it tells me. 518 00:37:22,214 --> 00:37:24,534 But the guardrails are what's important. 519 00:37:24,534 --> 00:37:29,194 I think the AI is great if you have a little bit of subject matter expertise. 520 00:37:29,194 --> 00:37:36,274 And that's sort of what we want to ensure that if it came back to you and had a crazy contract term, you'd be like, that's insane. 521 00:37:36,274 --> 00:37:37,834 I've seen 14 of these contracts. 522 00:37:37,834 --> 00:37:38,814 That's clearly not right. 523 00:37:38,814 --> 00:37:40,219 It's hallucinating that. 524 00:37:40,219 --> 00:37:43,090 um Or you're like, no, that doesn't apply in Missouri. 525 00:37:43,090 --> 00:37:45,440 That's only in New York law, whatever. 526 00:37:45,640 --> 00:37:49,051 The self-represented litigant doesn't necessarily know that. 527 00:37:49,051 --> 00:37:53,894 A lot of the self-represented litigants, fifth grade reading level, they're in a super stressful situation, right? 528 00:37:53,894 --> 00:37:56,344 You're losing your kids, your house, whatever. 529 00:37:56,344 --> 00:38:00,786 That already shuts off part of your brain when you have the high cortisol levels. 530 00:38:00,786 --> 00:38:02,506 And maybe English isn't their first language. 531 00:38:02,506 --> 00:38:06,829 And so they don't have that sort of gut, like this doesn't seem legit. 532 00:38:06,829 --> 00:38:15,982 this feels like a lifeline because they can't get in anywhere else and they're just so happy to have something to handle their legal system or their legal issue. 533 00:38:15,982 --> 00:38:25,735 That's what we want to make sure that it's vetted by experts, it has a custom rag, the retrieval augmented generation, that it has a knowledge base that's structured in a way in 534 00:38:25,735 --> 00:38:32,025 which is only pulling from legitimate data sources, not Ted's basement server that has whatever cases on it. 535 00:38:32,025 --> 00:38:35,167 That's really our goal that people are using it. 536 00:38:35,167 --> 00:38:38,611 Let's facilitate it because the technology is easy. 537 00:38:38,611 --> 00:38:44,164 It's just the political will to make sure that these tools get to the people who need them and are funded properly. 538 00:38:44,299 --> 00:38:55,804 Yeah, I feel like with, with, with Jenny, I, there are so many innovations that law firms and lawyers have historically resisted like alternative business structures. 539 00:38:55,925 --> 00:38:56,605 Right. 540 00:38:56,605 --> 00:39:07,870 Um, I think that I had somebody on the podcast from an Arizona law firm who they said they were the only ones that didn't vote against, the ABS rules in Arizona. 541 00:39:08,250 --> 00:39:08,720 Right. 542 00:39:08,720 --> 00:39:09,591 Exactly. 543 00:39:09,591 --> 00:39:10,155 Um, 544 00:39:10,155 --> 00:39:23,939 You know, in the unauthorized practice of law, the UPL issue, I feel like if you're latching on to these old models and conventions in the legal world, you're really focused 545 00:39:23,939 --> 00:39:34,723 in the wrong place because I honestly think that lawyers are going to run to alternative business structures once they see the light, which is, wow, if I build a tech enabled law 546 00:39:34,723 --> 00:39:38,514 firm, I can sell it for a multiple of revenue. 547 00:39:38,648 --> 00:39:46,566 You know, like it, the valuation looks more like a tech company than a law firm, which, you know, would probably sell to three, three to four times EBITDA. 548 00:39:46,566 --> 00:39:48,709 And, I can scale, right? 549 00:39:48,709 --> 00:39:59,440 Instead of using people, humans as leverage, can use technology as leverage, but there's just so much tradition and old thinking. 550 00:39:59,761 --> 00:40:00,065 Yeah. 551 00:40:00,065 --> 00:40:01,695 the laws, it's a guild. 552 00:40:01,695 --> 00:40:03,425 You're meant to protect your members. 553 00:40:03,425 --> 00:40:05,146 I spent a lot of money to go to law school. 554 00:40:05,146 --> 00:40:08,227 I spent a lot of money to learn those hundred dollar words. 555 00:40:08,227 --> 00:40:08,907 I get it. 556 00:40:08,907 --> 00:40:17,849 would, you know, I didn't go down the traditional, you know, pathway of being a lawyer, but I get it why we'd want to protect ourselves and ensure that what we do, we spend a lot 557 00:40:17,849 --> 00:40:20,480 of time learning how to do it and making sure to safeguard people. 558 00:40:20,480 --> 00:40:23,992 Like we talked about the, you know, fair debt act and that kind of stuff. 559 00:40:23,992 --> 00:40:26,133 Same, we need legislation in place. 560 00:40:26,194 --> 00:40:29,655 But a lot of the stuff that tech is doing is so boring. 561 00:40:29,655 --> 00:40:35,047 No lawyer wants to copy and paste people's names onto a letter and answer to their landlord. 562 00:40:35,047 --> 00:40:37,678 Even if they were paying for it, nobody wants to do that. 563 00:40:37,678 --> 00:40:39,668 This came from my time in Chicago. 564 00:40:39,668 --> 00:40:44,139 can't remember now who said it, but let lawyers practice at the top of their license. 565 00:40:44,139 --> 00:40:46,920 All of this menial stuff, let the tech do it. 566 00:40:46,920 --> 00:40:53,664 Let AI generate the documents and then review it so that you can be creative, so that you can be the human. 567 00:40:53,664 --> 00:41:01,496 so that you can use all the things that make us uniquely special as lawyers, let's use those skills and build on top of the AI. 568 00:41:01,496 --> 00:41:06,478 I don't need to generate the LinkedIn content every time for a new post. 569 00:41:06,478 --> 00:41:14,532 Let the AI give me my first draft at that so that I can come and talk to you and have time to do that or to be creative or to think hard thoughts. 570 00:41:14,532 --> 00:41:17,123 That's what lawyers are really good at, thinking hard thoughts. 571 00:41:17,264 --> 00:41:20,798 If we let the tech do the menial stuff, we can really practice at the top of our license. 572 00:41:20,798 --> 00:41:25,213 And so that's what my push is with the AI, that it's not gonna eat your lunch. 573 00:41:25,213 --> 00:41:27,163 Just embrace it and go for it. 574 00:41:27,163 --> 00:41:27,964 Yeah. 575 00:41:27,964 --> 00:41:37,264 And it's like, like every discipline, you always have to look at what is the highest and best use of my, my, my time and my team's time. 576 00:41:37,284 --> 00:41:49,464 You know, it's amazing that in 2025, our biggest competitor are firms that decide to go custom dev and just go rebuild everything that we've been working on roughly for like 17 577 00:41:49,464 --> 00:41:49,944 years. 578 00:41:49,944 --> 00:41:53,104 And I have to have conversations with them. 579 00:41:53,156 --> 00:42:03,622 Um, at various stages in the process, we've had firms who have fully deployed, rolled it out, like spent all the money and rolled it out and then realized, my God, this is so much 580 00:42:03,622 --> 00:42:11,345 work to maintain and support and write documentation and the training and enhancements and bug fixes. 581 00:42:11,385 --> 00:42:16,427 We've had them all the way to that end, but obviously, where they've converted and go, this is too much. 582 00:42:16,427 --> 00:42:19,316 want an off the shelf product, but it's, 583 00:42:19,316 --> 00:42:24,517 the argument that I use when talking to them is what is the highest and best use of your team's time? 584 00:42:24,517 --> 00:42:26,418 Is it responding to support tickets? 585 00:42:26,418 --> 00:42:30,419 Because I got a team people who do just that for a bunch of different law firms. 586 00:42:30,419 --> 00:42:37,591 So why are you going to go re you know, essentially re resource um a function like that? 587 00:42:37,591 --> 00:42:42,093 So yeah, I'm really hoping that lawyers, the light bulb goes off and go, yeah, you know what? 588 00:42:42,093 --> 00:42:48,165 A lot of this stuff we, we could use our, our amazing IQ and training and 589 00:42:48,561 --> 00:42:51,168 skills in better ways than we are today. 590 00:42:51,168 --> 00:42:51,638 Yeah. 591 00:42:51,638 --> 00:42:53,910 there's, I mean, the empathy component, right? 592 00:42:53,910 --> 00:43:01,964 The like, the feeling, the connection with people, the hand holding that a lot of self-represented litigants need because no one is listening to them and these are terrible 593 00:43:01,964 --> 00:43:03,055 situations. 594 00:43:03,055 --> 00:43:08,919 We can provide that as lawyers where the like, the where does your name go on a form? 595 00:43:08,919 --> 00:43:09,739 That's crazy. 596 00:43:09,739 --> 00:43:14,003 Like type that into any of the document assembly tools that have existed for 30 years. 597 00:43:14,003 --> 00:43:17,034 But let's really do what we're good at as humans. 598 00:43:17,285 --> 00:43:18,106 Agreed. 599 00:43:18,106 --> 00:43:20,545 Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. 600 00:43:20,545 --> 00:43:23,774 I really appreciate you taking time. 601 00:43:23,774 --> 00:43:28,481 How do people find out more about you and the free law project? 602 00:43:28,481 --> 00:43:30,582 Yeah, so our website is Free.Law. 603 00:43:30,582 --> 00:43:32,574 You can check out all of our products from there. 604 00:43:32,574 --> 00:43:35,615 If you want to connect with me, I'm Jessica at Free.Law. 605 00:43:35,615 --> 00:43:37,377 We try to make it as easy as possible. 606 00:43:37,377 --> 00:43:38,927 So love to talk to you. 607 00:43:38,927 --> 00:43:45,661 We love talking to new lawyers about this, to law students, to different audiences, to different groups that might not understand the justice gap. 608 00:43:45,661 --> 00:43:53,068 I presented at Ilticon in August uh about project management, but like threw in about the justice gap. 609 00:43:53,068 --> 00:43:54,571 We can really make it work for the audience. 610 00:43:54,571 --> 00:43:57,215 So we want more door openers. 611 00:43:57,215 --> 00:44:00,690 So if you're out there, I'd love to talk to you about it. 612 00:44:00,839 --> 00:44:02,721 Well, it's been a great conversation. 613 00:44:02,721 --> 00:44:07,107 hope people take you up on that offer and thank you very much for all the great work that you're doing. 614 00:44:07,107 --> 00:44:08,321 Thank you, thank you for having me. 615 00:44:08,321 --> 00:44:09,523 It's been really fun. 616 00:44:10,488 --> 00:44:11,019 Bye. -->