[00:00:00] Scott, how are you this afternoon? Living the dream. One day at a time. Ted, thanks for, uh, having me on. Yeah, it's a long time coming. We, we connected a while back and, uh, had some great conversations and I knew I had to have you on the podcast. Um, before we jump into the agenda, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about who you are, what you do, and where you do it? Yeah, sure. Um, so serial entrepreneur, uh, cut my teeth at Amazon, turn of the century. I was on the white Y 2K team for the biggest, like nothing burger that ever happened. Uh, and kind of since then I've been, uh, building, scaling and selling, uh, B2B enterprise SaaS companies. Um. Did one in the mobile space called Urban Airship. We were the first ones to do push notifications. Uh uh, we did a, I did a, a, let's see here, a vacation rental platform that we launched in March of 2020. That was, that was a no win situation there. Um, and then just kind of dabbled around. With a couple different things. And about, uh, two and a half, three years ago, um, had [00:01:00] sold another company and, uh, was thinking about what's next. Obviously everybody was thinking about ai. Uh, and so my wife, who's an insurance defense attorney, she runs a practice here in Oregon. She's got Oregon, Washington, Idaho. 65 associates, paralegals, attorneys, um, she kind of jokingly but not jokingly said, uh, well, why don't you build something that helps me for once? And so that was the impetus for Case Mark. Uh, she has been a, my co-founder and it, obviously she's my wife, but like we, we've really built this in lockstep. And when you see an attorney use your solution and it doesn't work, or you see how they use it and you realize, wow, we did not build this for the, for the customer. That's really informative. Um, and so over the last, you know, I'd say six plus months or so, um, we've had a pretty significant shift in the business. We had built a bunch of infrastructure to solve kind of what we call these easy buttons. So click and uh, upload a file, click an easy button, get some AI generated work, product depo sums, meron, those kinds of things. We since realized, well, we have a platform that we've kind of built here, and so we just launched back in December, case.dev. [00:02:00] So one API key, 15, 16 different primitives across OCR file storage, transcription, translation, um, legal research, all those pieces, um, along with some tools like basically a chat GPT wrapper and a one button, or already an easy button, uh, uh, play. Now what we're finding is that Enterprise is coming to us saying, look, I, I need a chat solution, but I also want to have all that data stored in a place where I can build my own solutions on top of it, whether through vibe coded or AgTech. Um, and so that's been really, really powerful for us. And then of course when you take something like case.dev with a, a security and privacy perimeter, um, and then feed that to an agent, um, that's autonomous. It gets really, really interesting. So exciting times. Um, you know, we're, we're, we've really. Like turn a corner. It's been busy as all get out and uh, and you know, life is good, man. Yeah. Good. Yeah. You know, we have been undergoing a little bit of a identity shift here at info dash two because of similar, uh, [00:03:00] conclusions I think that we've both drawn in the market, which is so historically. We have been known as an internet and extranet provider in specifically for law firms. And what we realized a couple of years ago with the advent of ai, um, at least in the mainstream, is that what our core infrastructure really is, it's the integration layer, we call it integration hub that powers all of our web parts that get rendered in SharePoint. And now we are. I just did a LinkedIn live today with Gowing to show how you can use this integration layer to build solutions using Azure AI search, Azure Open ai. You keep the data within your four walls and we can, uh, create agent capabilities and chunking and efficient use of, uh, AI search indexes. And we've really kind of just changed our thought patterns [00:04:00] around like. Okay, what is core infrastructure at info dash? It's not intranet and extranet, it's the integration hub and intranet and extranet are use cases, um, that build on top of that. But I really think there's like a huge opportunity now because I think, you know, both of us see that there's tremendous value in bringing that integration. Two law firms so that they can leverage their collective knowledge and wisdom in building AI solutions because these out of the box tools, you know, the, um, they really require you to bring your data to ai. And we like to say we, we allow you to bring AI to your data. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know if you would agree, but it seems like steal that one. Yeah, the integration piece is like, so extremely valuable right now. Yeah, I mean, I, I think, I think the integration point is, is really critical right now. And, and, uh, uh, I, I mean I think that's a super smart way of thinking about this [00:05:00] from a, a platform perspective. Um, you know, it, it feels like right now that. Look, when we saw ai, at first we were like, wow, AI is gonna be great. This is amazing. But as we look at it, AI is just a forcing function for legal as they rethink not only how they adopt technology. I mean, let's be honest, legal's kind of fought technology tooth and nail for the last. 30, 40 years. Um, and so they're looking for solutions that allow them to, um, uh, you know, not only leverage this ai, but they're gonna have to fundamentally probably rethink their businesses. Which means if you don't have a platform or technology provider you're partnered with on this, who can help you do that, um, and, and, and be really extensible and flexible, you're gonna struggle, I think. And so I think the way that you're thinking about it, the way that we're thinking about it is, is, is I think the future for this stuff. It's not gonna be. One big piece of software that you shove all your stuff into, it's gonna be these, you know, set of component parts that are flexible, uh, and malleable. And AI is just one component of that, in my opinion. [00:06:00] Um, uh, and you know, again, I, I think there's just, there's so much change that's about to, to about, about to happen here. Um. You what was really interesting to me, so this week we sponsored a, my wife and I sponsored this event, um, down in LA and it was, it was basically an event designed for plaintiffs and defense attorneys to get into the same room. There were about 120 of the, the who's who of, of, you know, plaintiff and defense folks. There was the heads of the consumer, uh, or the retail, uh, uh, association for attorneys, the defense counsel for Southern Oregon, like, or Southern California. They're all there. We literally worked the entire room and chatted with everybody and we said, what are you doing with ai? And they're like, huh? I don't know. We've looked at it, you know, we kind of kicked the tires or we tried something or we're, you know, it's just the adoption isn't happened nearly as fast as we see it happening in LinkedIn, right? Like all of us in our little bubble all chatting with each other and it's taken a lot longer. And I think that's another piece that people haven't really thought about here. [00:07:00] Um, this is gonna take a decade. It's a decade of disruption that we're gonna go through that's more than just ai. It's. Gonna be, how do, how does the technology shift? How do I adopt it? And then how does my business sort of, you know, fold around that? Or how do I leverage that to do it? So it's, this is interesting dates here for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna do something I usually don't do. I usually don't screen share. Um, but I'm gonna do it because I, I created this graphic for the LinkedIn Live today, and I think it is perfectly aligned with what we're discussing here. So, um, I'm gonna pull this up. This is, um, this is a pie chart of how law firms differentiate themselves. So today it's very much about the people. The trust, the brand, the footprint, the practice depth, the marquee wins that a law firm has on the board. And tomorrow, whenever tomorrow may come, um, the client service model is going to take a disproportionate size of that [00:08:00] differentiation equation, and that's largely gonna be driven by the tech enabled. Legal service delivery machine that these law firms are going to have to build. And in order to be differentiated, you can't use off the, just off the shelf tools. You have to tap into that collective knowledge and wisdom of law firms and, you know, buying Harvey and Lara. Look, they're great platforms. I've seen 'em in action. Like they, they work really well, but if your competitor down the street can also buy these platforms. By definition that's not differentiating. So, um, we believe that the client service model is going to be a huge part of the post transformation law firm differentiation story. Would you agree with that? And does this look like where you think things are headed? I do, I do. And I think, uh, what's what's also really [00:09:00] interesting here, uh, you know, one of the things that we've adopted, um, we sort of, we sort of poached it from how Databricks does it, that sort of concept of that forward deployed engineer. Somebody who's actually embedded with that firm, um, who's helping them not only use your technology, but think through their future roadmap as sort of, you know, twists and turns come through. That, that for us has been, you know, a really, really big one. You know, to your point, you know, look, Harvey and Lara have done a great job of, of answering the question, which is AI's coming, what am I gonna do? Well, there's a safe bet by choosing one of those providers, but I was literally just on a call, you know, an hour ago with, with the head of innovation for pretty big, you know, an am AM log call 20. Right. And he said, we're currently piloting both Lara and Harvey, and he's like. I don't get it. He's like the foundational models that they're just wrapping. They do kind of the same stuff. He's like, am I missing something? And I said, no, you're not missing anything at all. And I said that the key for you is what does your firm [00:10:00] do that you need to, and that you want to differentiate on? And then you guys are gonna have to build some of those components and it's gonna be more than just the ai. It's how do you think about this from a sort of platform perspective and. He is like, oh, okay, well that makes sense. And you know, of course, uh, you know, any of these deals take a long time 'cause there's so much of 'em are relationship driven. Um, and uh, but it, it was eye opening to hear that, especially in light of the sort of what happened this week with the cloud for legal, you know, webcast heard round the world in legal tech. Right. And, uh, uh, so that's been really interesting to kind of see all, all of those pieces, um, kind of come together. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and so let's, let's dive into that a little bit because this was, this is an interesting one. So to put, so they had about, I, I've heard different numbers. 20, 25,000 people attend. Let's put that in perspective. There are 25,000 ILTA members total in the world, right? So International Legal Technology Association. So these are. You know, they [00:11:00] come from several function areas, but primarily KM innovation. It, you've got some finance, some marketing, but it's, it's a global organization and there are 25,000 of those people, and there were 25,000 people. On this webinar. Webinar. So if that doesn't tell you something about the interest in the topic of how can we leverage these foundation models to do some of the things that we're paying a premium for today, then I don't know what other signal you need. But you know, my read on that is there is a strong appetite, and I know several AmLaw 50 firms, I even know an AmLaw 10 firm. Is using Claude out of the box. Um, in parallel. Uh, one of, well, one of them is um, one of them is using Claude exclusively. Another one is using Harvey and Claude. So, but you [00:12:00] know, there's a real appetite, I mean, you know, for x number of dollars a month that it's going to cost to for one of the foundation models. You know, Harvey and Leggo are 1200 a month, 15, 15. 2000, although, yeah, I've, I've heard that they're really knocking that price down. I'm, I'm hearing two and 300 bucks. Interesting. Um, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's inevitable, right? Because those, those folks are now, they're probably duking it out with each other now, right? To, to beat each other up. And it's always, I think it's good to have multiple, you know, big players in the market anyways. That's, so, that's just good for the consumers, I think. Um, what was interesting is, you know, I I, I love that you put that in perspective of the, of the ELTA membership. 'cause I, I think that's, that's a great way to frame this. 'cause we've all been to ELTA Con or, you know, evolve or whatever it is. Um. When you think about the fact that Mark Pike, the, the, the guy, one of the folks who, who hosted that? He's the guy, the one guy at Anthropic who built the Claude for Legal plugin. Mm-hmm. One guy. Right? So when you think about the impact [00:13:00] there, um, you know, no wonder when they launched that plugin, you know, legal tech saw a, a kind of a, a market cap haircut, right? Um, and, but what was interesting is he said, he, he, I called this quote out in one of my posts. He said, uh, you know, off the shelf, Claude for Legal probably isn't the best for your firm. What you should do is. Put your custom tweaks in it, the things that make your firm special, put those in there. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, that sounds like a great idea, right? I mean, if you do the math, that's probably not a good idea. And one of the biggest things we see from our customers is they always ask us, are you gonna train with the data? Are you sharing the, you know, do you have zero data retention? Um, and then can you give me a place where I can build my own skills in private so that I can maintain, you know, my secret sauce, my, you know. Of course that that's a draw there, and it's just interesting to me to see the fervor amongst the legal community. They're so excited about Claude and I get it. I, I love, I think it's actually a pretty killer solution. But at the same time, you know, [00:14:00] this is another vendor that will come back to potentially, you know, you don't put all your eggs in one basket, that we've all learned this. Um, and so while they're the darlings today, something bad could happen down the road. Maybe they have a security vulnerability or they actually do train with their data, which I'm convinced these big, um, LLM uh, providers are gonna have to do at some point. Um, that, that's gonna be a, a big, a big, a big thing there. But, you know, it's interesting, the other piece that came out during that web webinar. The demos they did were inside of Microsoft Word office. And then on top of getting access to all your Google, you know, Gmail, your Google calendar, all that stuff. They're like, if, if Anthropic doesn't have an answer for the productivity suites, they're gonna have to, because I think the big players will box them out at some point. Um, uh, and you know, it just was interesting to say, wow, interoperability is really killer. Until you're the one that you're being interoperated with and you're competing, right? So I don't know how that's gonna [00:15:00] shake out. Do I really think they're gonna put up these walls in between those? I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised though. Um, there's just too much at stake. You know? This is a $10 trillion opportunity at least. Uh, so it's gonna be interesting to see how all that, all that plays out, but. Boy, I, I, my, my LinkedIn feed was just a wash in that one. Boy, I, I tell you, um, it was, and I did a post on it during the, the webinar. And for whatever reason, I think, I think Mark, um, from, from Anthropic commented on it. And so I, I got swept up in the wave and it was one of the most like, you know, viral posts I've had in a while. Um, and all I'm doing is talking about a webinar I was on, right? I mean, that goes to your point. People are crazy about this right now. Um, but it also to me shows here's what's, here's what's coming down the road here. Um, that to me is pretty exciting. And anytime there's a disruption like this, I think there's opportunities for companies like ours to be able to come in and, and sort of realize some value, create some, some interesting momentum. And so, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm bullish on it no matter what. I, I don't see it as a.[00:16:00] I don't see, you know, anthropic as competitive to what we're doing, even though we do wrap some of their stuff. There's a whole bunch of other value you can add to the mix here. Um, so yeah. Yeah. And there was news I saw, uh, on Artificial lawyer this week. I believe it's Freshfields is partnering directly with Anthropic. So, you know, you've got Magic Circle firms and you know, AM Law Top Am law firms. Directly to the Frontier Labs, um, for capabilities. And there's been a lot of chatter this week. Um, renewed chatter. This has been out in the ether for quite some time, but about how, you know, the Harvey's and Agoras are, it is. A necessity to make investors whole, that they displace a certain amount of law firm revenue. Like the valuations just don't work any other way. Um, legal tech as a, as a whole is about a $60 billion a year industry. And you've [00:17:00] got Harvey at 11 billion Lara at whatever they are, seven, 8 billion, 5.5. Yeah. Right? And so you know, right there. Now that's market cap. That's not annual revenue. But to put it in perspective, Thomson Reuters pre SAS apocalypse was 65 billion in market cap. That's a very diversified, well established, entrenched business that has a hell of a data moat. Right with Westlaw, so, um. The only way to make the math work is if they displace a certain amount of law firm revenue. A non-trivial amount. 20, 30, a hundred percent, 40, 50. Like I don't know what the number is. Well, it's, yeah, it's interesting. I don't dunno if you've seen the ads recently from, from Harvey. So Harvey's been talking about, Hey, we're gonna be your partner. We're gonna do this, we're gonna do this. We're gonna be, you know, your, your co-pilot, you know, not necessarily co-pilot, but, but, uh, we're gonna work hand in hand with you law firms to deliver this AI and, and you're, this is gonna [00:18:00] be great. And then they just announced their agents and they said, our agents will just do the legal work for you. Um, and actually, honestly, it's a, it's a thing that we've realized too, which is. Do I want to like duke it out with the, all these companies that are well financed, um, for that 60, for that piece of that $60 billion pie? Or would I rather build tooling that allows me to go after the 1.1 trillion in legal spend? That's where it's much more interesting. And you know, the piece that we found is, geez, there's close to 60%. I mean, depending on how you slice and dice it, 60% of the work that's done, um, by law firms can be automated by these agents. Um, and you know, when we think about how you can couple these, you know, highly formed skills with an autonomous agent that has access to your data, um, you know, even if you only get 50 or 60% of the way there, that's a massive savings. Um, which means we. Instead of necessarily targeting law firms that you're gonna be working with, you might go directly to the, uh, folks who are paying the bill, whether it's inside [00:19:00] corporate counsel that has to like farm out, uh, bills. Um, or, you know, as we've found a bunch of luck with the insurance carriers, they have a massive edict to drive down their billables. Well, guess what? If we can take a demand package in. Guess what? An AI generated demand package. Um, and then process that for the insurance company before they send it to the panel firms. Um, we're finding internally for every dollar they spend with us, they save $5 in billables. Now you'd think the insurance, uh, defense firms, those panel firms, the same one that my wife's, um, works for, they'd be freaked out about that, but instead. They're like, yay, we, we are swimming in cases. We have no lack of cases. What we need are tools to answer that. Um, and the flip side of course is now that all these AI tools are out there for generating these, these demand packages, guess what? The amount of litigation is gonna go up. So you've gotta have an answer, uh, the ying to the yang on this stuff. So it's, it's, to your point, I think. The real value [00:20:00] that will be realized in this sort of post AI world is gonna be from companies that unfortunately, whether the law firms like it or not, are gonna take some money out of their pockets, um, to create value somewhere else. I mean, anytime there's a disruptive bit of technology, um, you see that, um, you know, I, I. I, I would love to introduce the 2026 legal profession to the 1996 media, uh, uh, industry. Um, when they started striking deals with Google, saying, Hey, cool. Yeah, you can have our, our, our, all of our content. You're gonna drive traffic our way. That sounds great. You know, the same thing is happening here. Yeah, we, we'd love to help you, you know, do all this, uh, AI stuff. Just tell us how you do what you do. Um, and sounds great, right? Like, it just, the, the analogy here is identical and honestly, legal has just pushed off what should have happened probably in the nineties, because they didn't have the forcing function of AI to sort of make them do that. So it, it's, it's interesting days to say the least. Um, I mean, this, it's, it's, I hate to, you know. Pull up a a, a, [00:21:00] you know, a Tom Hanks quote from, from, uh, survivor or what, whatever that, or stranded I think, or whatever it was. Anyways, where, where he is like, you never know what the, the, the title bring in. Um, that's what it feels like with ai. You never know where your business is today or tomorrow. You might be obsolete. Tomorrow and then the next day. Holy crap. You're, you're like an instrumental piece of infrastructure. Um, and you just have to kind of roll with the punches and anyways, it's interesting for sure. Cast, cast away. Um, yeah, cast away. Thank you. God. Yeah. I, I came up with every other title, so, you know. That's funny. It is. Um, and, and, and that's, you're, you're so right how like I, I, I'll be. Perfectly candid. When we, when we first started our journey, I looked at our architecture and said to myself, this is limiting 'cause we deploy in the client's tenant and we have to wire up all those integrations. There's a lot of services that we have to deliver and it, it puts a cap on our tam. Because we can service. So there are 700 law firms on planet Earth. [00:22:00] If you exclude China that have a hundred or more attorneys, and that is our wheelhouse. So we can scale our architecture to meet 700, 700,000. No way. It's, we can't do it. So we were looking at this, you know, and. What it flipped the script when AI came to the table because this arch architecture now is a huge asset because it has a, it has, it has tentacles in all those systems, and it lights up all of Microsoft's, you know, capa AI capabilities. And, um, so you're, you're totally right, man. How quickly the flip or the script can flip. Um, I wanted to bring something up. I was telling you before we started that I read an article today about, uh, token. Subsidies and how investors in these Frontier Labs have been subsidizing the cost of tokens for purposes of establishing market share and how that it vice is starting to [00:23:00] close now with Anthropic, you know, essentially open claw really, um, ripped the roof off of that whole model because of its. 24 by seven nature can just consume, consume, consume. So anthropic has taken steps to put, you know, um, speed bumps in the way and what, what, and both chat BT and Anthropic are expected to IPO soon. Um, if that happens, we're gonna enter into a situation where. Investors are gonna demand returns. These token subsidies are gonna go away. And what I'm curious about, I'd be, I'd love to hear your take. How is this gonna affect the economics of these wrappers that, um, and I, I don't, I don't mean wrapper in a derogatory term. You could argue that info dash is a wrapper on top of SharePoint and you wouldn't Yeah, exactly. You know, it's semantics. I don't mean it in a negative [00:24:00] way, but. How is, you know, once, once these Frontier Labs remove the token subsidies and they have to pass that on to the Harveys and LARAs of the world, how is that gonna affect their economics and what is that gonna do to the pricing model that that law firms are paying you? You have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I, I think. To your point, the IPO is coming. I think that was one of the reasons too, that anthropic and open ai, and to a certain extent, you know, SpaceX and others are trying to expand their TAM so they can justify, you know, a, a big IPO price. Um, and uh, you know, like the quad for legal. Plugin probably added a couple billion, if not, you know, a hundred billion in, in valuation to, um, to anthropic as they, as they head out. Um, now I, I will say one thing that, that thankfully, um, we're still in a multi horse race here. Um, I can remember back in the day when we were all getting Ubers and going, [00:25:00] wow, I just paid $15 to go to the airport. That's amazing. I used to pay $50 in that cab to, to do that. Whoa, what a sweet deal. This is amazing. Wow. We're living in the future. Um, and that same, uh, that same Uber now is 180 or 200 bucks. 'cause guess what? They cleaned out the market. They squeezed their competitors out, and now they're the only in game in town. And, and guess what? Now you, now you monetize. Um, and, uh, and so thankfully right now where we're at is. We do have open ai, we do have anthropic out there. Um, to a lesser extent, you know, meta is still kind of playing catch up, um, uh, Google or, or you know, alphabet is playing catch up. And then you still also have SpaceX slash xai. I actually think they're gonna be, you know, don't count Elon out. Um, I actually thought the cursor. Uh, acquisition that they just did was brilliant because one cursor was lagging. Um, you know, and, and it's hard for me to even say this, right? At two and a half billion dollars in, [00:26:00] in revenue. They're having a hard time closing out this round. Um, the only hope for them really was some kind of acquisition. So where would you maximize? Well, it's gotta be with one of the big providers, but if, if they already have their own models, it doesn't, it's not a net. Positive for them. But if I'm SpaceX, it's a huge win for me. Anyways, long story longer. Um. I think as long as we have several of these horses in the race, we won't have this huge token squeeze. Somebody's gonna do that. Um, I think the, once the token squeeze happens, that's where we're gonna see a lot of the pressure on the open source models. Um, I'm, I'm still convinced the Chinese are, are subsidizing a lot of these models, um, because they'd love to kind of break the back of the sort of, you know. Our, our, our economy is, is very heavily dependent on the growth of these AI companies. And if you somehow undermine that for some reason, let's not forget, you know, what was a deep seek that launched, you know, a year ago or it was, and everybody was like, oh my God, Nvidia is screwed. And everybody, you know, [00:27:00] um. I, I liken that to, because a lot of these models are being, you know, they think they're being stolen. It's akin to being in the sixties. Um, we, it's July, 1969, we land on the moon. And could you imagine if, if Russia just showed up at Cape Canaveral and said, cool, well we're gonna go up to all of it's right here, so we can do that. Um, that's kind of what's happening. The race for these folks to build these models. Um, you know, and then being able to offer those on bare metal and, and basically have unlimited free tokens. That's where I think a lot of this will push, um, down the road. So I think there's a couple different ways it's gonna play out. The question is, does that, does that, do they tighten that, the belt on those, those models now? Or, or, you know, I, I don't know. We, I do think we're getting to a place with the markets where. I don't know if, I mean, there's not unlimited capital to fund these things, obviously, but it is a big, big race to go after. Um, so it's, it's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out. It's really, really interesting. Yeah, for sure. One thing I didn't really [00:28:00] understand, so that, that it, it's an option that XI has to purchase and it's a $60 billion. Valuation, which I thought was a pretty lofty number. Um, oh, I'll, I'll tell you exactly how they structured it. I, I don't know. But here's what they probably, this is what I would've done being hindsight, you know, whatever. Um, what they're saying is if we, IPO at probably, let's say $1.2 trillion, that's when your trigger kicks in and you get. 3% of whatever the, whatever the math is on it. Um, but, but other than that, it's probably, there's some breakup fee or, you know, something else that makes it much, much less. And it's a gamble on the part of, um, you know, Elon and SpaceX. But I think it's a smart one because this allows them to tell the. Data centers and space story and, and like, this is how much bigger of a tam this is. And oh, we have the developer infrastructure too, to go along with it, to match, you know, codex and, and uh, uh, cloud [00:29:00] code. So, you know, I, I get it. But your, to your point. It's kind of funny, but no, nobody got a check for $60 billion yesterday, right? No, no. It's an option, right? It's an option that that can be exercised and, um, yeah. You know, I think that, uh, where we are now, so I, I think there's a lot of people out there that. That believe that we're in a two horse race to the finish in terms of practice of law solutions with Harvey Leg, gore, I don't believe that at all. I think that we are in the, we are in the top of the first inning in this ball game and that the likelihood that those two are gonna run to the finish line, um, is, you know, there's a million examples of first movers that got. Um, the taste slapped out of their mouth. Uh, you know, MySpace, Yahoo, alt Vista. Yes. All these guys, Netscape, right. Um, it's very rare that that first [00:30:00] mover is the ultimate winner. So I think there's, we don't even know if LLMs are gonna be like the, the tech that that drives, you know, the, the long-term wave. Like things I'll, I'll, I have to be honest, I was really skeptical. Pre inference, right? Like, um, I really didn't see a path to get there because of the limitations. Um, the labs have really surprised me with the capabilities they've been able to deliver through inference. I mean, Claude 4.6 and now I'm testing 4.7. Um, seems also good, but I'm really annoyed. I can't force extended thinking, um, in 4.7. Um, but. And now chat. PT five, five is out, and I'm hearing really good things about that. And I did a side-by-side test. That graphic that I showed, I did that in Nano banana, which is Gemini and chat PT today, Chachi PT blew the doors off of nano banana, and that was like the [00:31:00] standard. So we are in a massive game of leapfrog here, right? It's like the, the model that's leading today is, could be second or third. Remember when Gemini three came out, it was like. Man, this is amazing. Um, and like, um, I never even really got comfortable with it before I started trying Opus and was like, no, no, no, I'm going this direction. But you know, again, we're in a game of Leapfrog, so it's like every days, so about though days, we got a new leader. Do you know when Opus 4.6 was launched? Do you remember? Was it January? It was February 5th. Was it February 5th? Was I, I thought that was the legal plugin date. That's right. Around this. This, no, that's, that's when Opus, 78 days ago was when I was released. I was just, I just go, I was just googling that Interesting. 78 days ago. Wow. And by the way, 4.7 is light years ahead of that in 78 days. I mean that, that to me is like talking about Holy [00:32:00] Toledo, you know, where's this all gonna go? Um, again, I think, I think it becomes a, a, a race for, especially for, you know, early stage startups like mine. I mean, you're, you're much further along. But, um, to me it's a, a survivability piece. In other words, how, how do you navigate this and, and learn as you go, but also remain nimble? Um, such that you don't get stomped on by anybody. Um, you know, it's interesting to see like folks like spell book, um, you know, their, their pivot towards the data side was actually really smart. Um, and I think it's part of the reason why they raised that round. In other words, it doesn't matter that CLO launched a, a word plugin, um, where their betting is that the data that they're anonymously aggregating will help you build a better contract, build a better red line, build a better, you know, deal. That's super interesting. The challenge, of course, is how do you get to scale? Um, I don't think they're, they're capitalized enough, but again, you know, these are the things that people are gonna be, be asking around this stuff. Um, it is, it is Brave New World stuff. Yeah. And, and the, my engineering team, every time a new model comes out there, [00:33:00] within. Probably a half an hour. They're like, this is amazing. Or this is horrible. Right. And it's, and it's usually binary. Yeah. Well, and I'm like, guys, don't worry. Just wait 15 more minutes. There'll be a new one. You know? Yeah. Um, yeah. I remember in my corporate day, I spent some time at Bank of America. We used to jokingly say, if you don't like your boss, just wait six months. You'll get reorged and you'll have a new one. Um, exactly, exactly. But you know, now, now we have, I feel like, you know, the scaling laws, I thought were going to level out because we had really sucked in all of the publicly available data. We're throwing all the compute and, um, that, that we have at scaling. What's happening with Anthropic and mythos and, um, if the hype is to be believed, and it sounds pretty credible in terms of its ability to find and exploit a. Um, um, [00:34:00] gaps in enterprise software. If, if this is true, this will be a massive step change north. And they didn't even train it specifically for cyber purposes. It was just a natural outcome of their innovation curve. So I'm wondering like, okay, what's that gonna look like for legal? For legal reasoning. If, if we're seeing these like ancillary benefits without, you know, a strong focus on any particular industry or vertical or path, and we're seeing this dramatic of an increase in capabilities, like what is mythos gonna mean to legal reasoning? You have any sense? Yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a, it's a great question. Um, and I, I honestly don't know. Um. I, I know a little bit about the Mytho seven, and just seeing the security side has been, has been pretty astounding, um, to think [00:35:00] about. I think fundamentally, whether it's legal or otherwise, I think you, you have to rethink how you're building and deploying and managing technology in the long run. And I'll just, I'll give you an example that's kind of ours internally, which is, you know, we have a platform where people can sign up, slap down a credit card, and start using compute. Right. So whether it's, you know, bare metal compute, GPUs or LLMs, they can do that, right? Um, and so we had a, a, a a component where people could, um, log in and if you slap down a credit card, we'd give you 25 credit, $25 in credits. Um, well all of a sudden we started seeing hundreds of signups come in and we were like, well that seems pretty bad 'cause it's pretty clearly something going on there. Um, and what they were doing is they were proxying our, uh. That $25 and slapping down bogus cards. Um, and, and then they were, they were doing it anyways. Our, our systems picked up on it. But the C cha, the, the interesting part was if we hadn't built our system from the ground up, [00:36:00] ally, in other words, we basically, I said. Hey, our internal agent, can you do a security scan and see what the heck's going on here? And said, sure enough, you're being targeted by this botnet. Here's the guy, and here's his GitHub. We can see that he has tools that do this. Here's how we'll block them, and here's my plan for deploying a stop to it. Um, and within probably an hour and a half, the signups stopped, and then all we saw was like poking from a bunch of their agents to try to find new ways in. Because, you know, it's, it's like, you know. Whatever you wanna call it. Cheetahs on the Serengeti, right? They're trying to find a, a, a gap and AI is just making it so that you can automate that. Um, and so it's gonna be really interesting to see where all this, this shakes out, but had we not built our tooling to take advantage of that, we would've been hosed. And I think if you apply that towards legal or, you know, health or any of these other spaces. People are gonna have access to these tools. And if you haven't rebuilt how you use [00:37:00] your technology and deploy and manage that technology, you're just gonna get further and further behind. Um, so while you might say, well, I'm not worried about ai, or, I tried it two years ago and it was, it was crap. Um, like you, you can't have your head in the sand on this stuff. Um, and. I don't think we're gonna get to, to a a GI anytime soon. I think we're gonna hit, uh, physical limits before that, especially here in the us. The challenge right now from a data center standpoint isn't, uh, square footage and silicon, it's power. Like we're out of power. Yeah. Right. And uh, you know, this is where I think the Chinese have absolutely crushed it. Their, their power capacity, power generation capacity is through the roof. Um, and that's, I think, gonna be a limiting factor for us. Um, anyway, so, so again, who, who knows what's gonna happen with these models? I'll be really curious to see what happens with Mythos. But again. It's mythos today, what's tomorrow? Right. Um, again, you know, you never know what the, what the next thing's gonna be, [00:38:00] um, that that comes along. Uh, but again, everybody's gonna be armed with these same tools. Uh, so, you know, there's some, some bigger sort of macro issues to think about that even beyond legal tech, but that's, that's super interesting. So, uh, let's talk about that. You alluded to timeline. So I, I have a, I have a theory here that, uh, um, if true should. Ease a little bit of heartburn. Um, we are so far behind. I talked to a, uh, GC at a Fortune 500 company yesterday and was asking some questions, um, about our, our extranet platform and like how they want to engage. But sidebar conversation, you know, I asked, Hey, how is the, how is the AI enablement. Working in, in, in your organization. And he said very slowly, and I asked why, and he said, because leadership [00:39:00] has given us a mandate without. Any change management or very limited change management resources or discipline, and the reality is that there is so much human friction that is going to have to get smoothed out. The tech is gonna get there years. Before the people are ready to adopt it and it's going to make meaningful change. And don't get me wrong, I think that AI is going to reshape our economy from top to bottom. The timeline, however, I think, is going to be far less aggressive than, than the tech innovation curve would suggest. And, and you know, like I'm talking to, um, I'm talking to chief innovation officers and chief knowledge officers at large law firms now, and they're like, Ted. I got a certain, I'm at the craps table and I got a certain amount of change management chips and I need to place them strategically on the board and I need to get [00:40:00] AI wins on the board. Um, and so it has slowed down some of our conversations, which, uh, we are very fortunate in that we're. Now an AI story. We just did a LinkedIn live with Galling today and showed off some of those capabilities so they can get a AI win on the board. But I don't know. What is your thinking on timeline? I don't, this is not gonna be a 18 month transformation. This is going to take more time, especially when you have things like what happened with Sullivan and Cromwell this week. You know, I mean, that's a, that is a top tier Wall Street firm that had a big. Oh, and, um, it's gonna make people really assess the risk and, and the need to have some risk management and quality assurance controls in place in order to really turn things loose. Would you agree? Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I, I actually think that, that they handled that pretty well. I mean, they look, they, they took ownership for it. They were very public. And then I think they're gonna [00:41:00] overcorrect, which are sort of the, like, that's the formula for, you know, brand strategy when you, when you have a PR disaster, right? I mean, that's the best that they can do. Um, now the, the reality is when you, when you look at a lot of these, you know, public cases that happen around, you know, hallucinations and other pieces, um, I think that, uh, a lot of them, um. The attorneys who are doing it are, are probably the same ones who, who do some shady stuff anyways, let alone not cite their, their, their sources. In terms of the adoption curve, you know, I, I look, we're, we're in that typical, it's a disruptive technology cycle. We've been fortunate enough to live through, what, almost like five of these now, right? So there was the.com boom and bus, and the graph is the same for every disruptive cycle, whether it's the television, the train, the car, all those things. Massive speculation because of the new technology leads to overinvestment, which leads to a bubble, which leads to a crash every single time. But then when you extend the timeline out and watch that the, the actual value of that new technology is significantly higher than even [00:42:00] the bubble. Right? So go back to, you know, 2001. And you're looking at companies that have multi-billion dollar valuations and you're like, wow, that they'll never get to be that big again. And now we're sitting on companies with multi-trillion dollar, um, valuations. So, um, I think the same thing is gonna happen with legal. To your point, the friction is actually, even though the technology is moving way faster than it did at the turn of the century, um, the, the human friction involved with these sort of what I'd call the holdouts from technology is what's gonna slow this down. And then we haven't even talked about. The potential legislative, um, uh, slowdowns that could come along too here. Um, I, I think it'll be less likely, but I think we're gonna see it, um, on an individual basis, whether it's at the state level. I doubt it'll happen at the federal level because of how much lobbying is happening on this stuff. But, um, you know, the, those are the, the, the key things here. So thinking about how, like, how to, how to map this out. Especially when you talk about some of these big players who, [00:43:00] uh, are investing a lot of money and their churn rates are pretty darn high. Um, how are they gonna continue to justify those valuations? Well, those will be the folks who kind of get kicked in the teeth from a valuation perspective. Google lived through that because they didn't raise a lot of money and they were throwing off cash from day one, and they had a differentiated technology that allowed them to do that. Um, I mean, Google was founded in 98, right? Right. During the, the craziness. Um, uh, but they only, I think they only raised, somebody told me the other day they only raised 12 million adventure, which is like bons to me when you think about, uh, so yeah, to, to your point. How this adoption and when it gets adopted, um, it's going to have a, a fundamental impact on how legal operates. The question is timing and you know, again, going back to this, this event that I was at 120 attorneys and they were just still kicking the tires and this was the leadership. From these firms, um, in LA of all places, which is like the, the home of plaintiff's attorneys, right. Um, and so, yeah, I, I, [00:44:00] I think, you know, there's a massive opportunity. It's just gonna take a little bit longer than people think. Yeah. So I see, I see this industry on a khap trajectory. So you have firms that are all in, and then you have firms that are limping in. And I think that we're, we're going to see that k. Shaped trajectory continue. I really feel like we're starting to get close to a tipping point where firms who have not invested in learning, um, are going to be so far behind that they're gonna have a really difficult time catching up. And the reason being is so much of the change is cultural, right? It's, it's people related, people change is the hardest change and. That takes time. You can't shortcut that. So to pivot an organization's culture, uh, I think it was, was it Drucker who said [00:45:00] strategy or culture eats strategy for breakfast? You know, couldn't, couldn't have. He said that 50 years ago it couldn't be more true. And there's so much cultural inertia that has to get redirected. And it's, and it's foundational, you know, it's the, the billable hour, internal firm compensation models, client engagement models, service delivery models, like all of these things that are the LLP structure, the organization structure for an LLP. Right? Like all, all these things. A hundred percent. Yeah. The part, the, the, the, the law firm. Partnership model operating on a cash basis is completely incompatible with the future state. It it, it is not going to be a law firm partnership that's going to come out the other side of this transition. I can guarantee you that it's gonna be an A BSC corp and that's gonna have capital. Uh, investment and expenditures, and it's gonna operate like a Fortune 500 company. I say it all the time on the podcast, the biggest law firm in the world is KE and they're not even, [00:46:00] or if they are just barely would be qualified from a revenue perspective to be in the Fortune 500. How could we have a trillion dollar industry and not have one, or maybe only one company law firm, that that is an outlier that would qualify to be in the Fortune 500 that shows that we're we're not built for scale. Sure. Yeah. I mean, without a doubt. I mean, I, I think. It, it's gonna be interesting to see how all that, that shakes out. I mean, just the idea of an LLP and how they, they, it doesn't, it doesn't behoove them to make investments in technology to advance their firm. Um, I think the other piece that's kind of interesting here too is if you, if you, you know, again, going back to that media industry analogy, you had the, the media heavyweights, you know, towards the back half of last century. That dominated the reach and how they, uh, uh, you know, how people engage with media and how media is produced and all those things. And then if fast forward 30 years, what happened? Well, you have a [00:47:00] bunch of big companies. Those, those media companies are still there. There's shells of what they used to be, right? Um, and, but then you have, you have Netflix and you have Meta, which for whether they like it or not, they're a media company. Um, and, and, and these are companies that essentially started from the ground up. Um, building and servicing that industry in a new way, and we're flexible to be able to do that. I think probably the same thing is gonna be true here, which is there'll still be these big law firms. They'll still exist. I think there'll be a shell of their former selves and they'll emerge. Companies that are founded probably right now or in the next, you know, 12, 18 months, um, that adopt a new model that are the second order, you know, fast follow folks. The, not the Yahoo, not the Alta Vistas that. Target that $1.1 trillion of value in the legal industry. Um, and it might be, it might be these, you know, quote unquote AI native firms. It might be somebody who uses agents to solve the legal, you know, problems around [00:48:00] compliance and other things. It's gonna be something like that. And the DNA will not be, you know, native to a law firm. It's gonna be something different to your point. Um, and you know, the thing is the inertia, the human inertia. Look at those media companies that struck deals with the Googles and other players. They thought they were getting a smoking deal by going in and, and partnering with those folks. And guess what? They got their, their asses handed to 'em, and pardon my French. But, um, and I think the same thing's gonna happen here. These, these firms don't know what's coming. Um, and they, they refuse to, you know, believe that that. The future could change from what, where we're at today, or they think that the impact will be ridiculously minimal. Um, and to me it's gonna be, you know, foundationally, you know, structural change, uh, for this. And so, you know, again, that creates opportunities for folks. Um, the big thing I'm seeing right now, I get approached by. You know, 3, 4, 5 year attorneys that are having, [00:49:00] uh, what I'd call midlife crises. And in other words, they're like, do I stick it out and try and become a partner somewhere? Or do I jump ship and try and find a way to, to leverage this tech to build something new to me that. Is gonna be the prototypical type person who joins a company or starts a company that says, you know what? I'm not doing the seven year partner track to get a slice of some pie that's gonna be shrinking. Um, it, it's just not worth it. Um, and, uh, and so, you know, again, I, I think this, that's exciting times. Yeah, I completely agree. Well, we, uh, we knew we wouldn't have any trouble filling up 50 minutes, and we, we, we didn't, we didn't get to have things nailed it, uh, on the agenda, but it was a really good conversation. Um, before we go, uh, why don't you tell folks how to find out more about you and what you do? For sure. Yeah, you can head over to case mark.com that has sort of all, all everything about us. And then if you're interested in building on top of, of kind of what we've been building, it's [00:50:00] case.dev, which is the, the, you know, one-stop shop for all things, uh, legal, tech, infrastructure and ai. And uh, uh, you know, don't hesitate to reach out and ping me, dm me, all that good stuff. Yeah. Awesome. Well it was a pleasure having you on and, uh, I hope to meet you in person real soon. Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure we will, Ted. It's awesome. Thanks for having me. Alright, take care. Thanks for listening to Legal Innovation Spotlight. If you found value in this chat, hit the subscribe button to be notified when we release new episodes. We'd also really appreciate it if you could take a moment to rate us and leave us a review wherever you're listening right now. Your feedback helps us provide you with top-notch content.