We recently chatted with Clio’s Damien Riehl (Solutions Champion) and Joe Kaczrowski (Manager of Legal Content). This talk follows our presentation, Old Fashioned Research in the Age of AI. Damien walks us through the Vincent vLex, Clio Grow, legal taxonomies (er…’ontologies’), symbolic AI, and more.
This is doing superhuman work at superhuman speed with a higher precision and recall than a human would because it has six bots.
We also try to tease product announcements from Joe but he says we’re going to have to wait for ClioCon (Let me know if you’d like to meet me in Boston). We conclude with a quick take on regulating AI’s risk to humanity.
See also: 471 Billion Melodies
In this week’s presentation, Damien noted:
This is why I left the practice of law… 10 years ago. I said someday we’re going to be able to draft a motion that is statistically likely to win. And it’s taken 10 years, but here we are.
Now, it’s important to note that Damien isn’t speaking ill of lawyers here. After all, he serves them well in his role at Clio. What’s highlighted here in our conversation with Damien is the new roles lawyer’s might play. It’s a theme, maybe. If you’re not already familiar, you should check out Damien’s All the Music project. Among the things we love about All the Music, is the fact that Damien and his partner, Noah Rubin, expressed their advocacy in a lawyerly build. It wasn’t just a popular TEDx talk, though that was certainly part of it. Following the popularity of Damien’s 2020 talk, courts appear to have course corrected from the Blurred Lines decision (Williams v Gaye, 895 F3d 1106 (CA 9, 2018). See for example, Gray v Hudson, 28 F4th 87, 92 (CA 9, 2022); Skidmore as Trustee for Randy Craig Wolfe Trust v Led Zeppelin, 952 F3d 1051 (CA 9, 2020) (Citing Williams v. Gaye and Crushing Creativity: The Blurred Lines Case and Its Aftermath, 92 S. Cal. L. Rev. Postscript 67, 75 n.22 (2018) (PDF); Structured Asset Sales, LLC v Sheeran, 673 F Supp 3d 415 (SDNY, 2023).
Whatever restructuring AI might force upon the profession, All the Music models a method whereby legal professionals might actively steer technology toward advocacy, rather than merely being subject to it (i.e., what’s it mean for me!?, plus tears)