You may have seen her on a webinar or listened to her on another podcast. Katherine Casey has a distinguished eDiscovery career. She was once a director at KPMG and PwC and at Gibson Dunn before landing in the C Suite at Disco and now several years on at Reveal Brainspace, which operates several well known tools such as Logical IPO Trial Director.

Kloth’s described as an AI baddie and she’s on the New York State Bar’s AI Task Force that published recommendations on the ethical use of AI back in April. She does all the conferences. She knows all the people and they know her.

Kat Casey, thank you. Oh thank you for, for having me. I’m going to blush now.

Goodness, what an intro. Or your reputation certainly precedes you and it’s hard to miss you. If you’re active on social media, if you’re in, if you’re in ilta, if you’re a member of the ALA Legal Tech in general, you’re probably going to come across a Kat Casey post or article or something.

Potentially my alter ego Techno cat. It’s a lot about AI lawyers embracing it and an egregious amount of sparkles. We could all use some more your published eDiscovery content.

So helpful. You’ve got such a long career behind you there on eDiscovery. Some distinguished positions.

Could you offer this audience some of your practical tips for preservation and collection? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that’s changed the most in the almost 20 years I’ve been at eDiscovery is kind of the volume ready velocity of data in that there are new platforms and tools emerging and dominating the market and potentially able to be completely banned, as in the case of TikTok. And so it’s more important than ever to understand all the applications that your organization is using.
Right now there’s 80 to 90% of people using shadow IT, or my new favorite term, AI smug.

So you need to understand what tools, applications and platforms are hosting data that’s potentially, you know, subject to a preservation obligation. So map it, understand it, reevaluate it, have policies that more than anything is the number one thing, and have contingencies in place. I know a lot of us are moving to preserving in place, but as was the case with like TikTok, some of these smaller platforms, very big dominant positioning, can have a whole host of potentially discovered data and
then can be pulled offline.

So you need to have a way to quickly grab that data so that you don’t have a big spoliation issue. So plan broad, understand where your data lives and don’t just rely on preserving in place because you need to be able to kind of tactically react and grab data as you need it. And that’s a little bit different than what I would have said a couple years ago, but I think with the consumerification of AI and other applications, there’s an entire generation of us that grew up with this cell phone that
has all these great sexy tools.

And we expect our business tools to be great and sexy too. Which means, I think more people are embracing shadow it alternative applications. Which means the universe of data that’s discoverable is much more widely spread and disparate.

And we as practitioners need to know where those risks lie, know where the landmines are, and help navigate it. I don’t know if that answered the question, but that’s kind of what’s been top of mind for me. Yeah, no, it’s, it’s very helpful, especially some of the things you brought up.

Like, what was that first thing you said? AI smuggling. So smuggling. Smuggling what, Harry Potter Muggles? Well, no, smuggling like, like smuggling like, like a smuggler.

On the. Because what it is is people are trying to, they, they may have a policy about not using certain AI applications, but I mean, 25 years of being pavlovged to Google for me was undone in about 25 days of using generative AI. I think a lot of people are creating exposure by using AI, which we should be, but not under the purview of their organizations.

And so it’s kind of beholden on organizations to not just say, oh, we banned X, Y or Z application. You really have to look further. Because I didn’t know they were using it as never defensible in front of the judge.

Hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. That’s something I hear talked about a lot, especially when it comes to like, which tools are actually safe or how you should like structure a query with a tool or a prompt and you know, what kind of information should you include or could you include? Like, what risk are you taking when you put something.

A prompt. That may be my number one advice to anyone. And a lot of what I’ve been talking about is prompt engineering and embracing generative AI.

I literally have been screaming about AI like CISPAs pushing a boulder up a hill that’s on, you know, boulders on fire falling back on me for 20 years. But the number one thing I tell people is if you haven’t read the terms and conditions, actually read them, because every tool out there is clearly telling you how and when they’re capturing your data and how they’re going to use it. And if the tool is free, you are the product.

And that isn’t to say don’t use the tools. But you know, there have been cases around confidential information getting out from people putting proprietary code in, like Samsung. There have been cases of confidential information kind of being triangulated or being, you know, used to train the models.

And so you’ve got to be really careful. There’s even a concern about potentially vitiating privilege by putting confidential information in. Oh, and by the way, much like a Google search, it’s not discoverable in every case, but it’s still a discoverable thing that could actually be relevant in a case.

So. So there’s just, there’s a lot of things to think about, you know, as you’re navigating this really, truly exciting time, this AI renaissance. I am here for it.

I am a fan girl. But there’s a lot of, especially in legal things to kind of bring our legal mindset to. Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, it’s a, it’s a crazy world out there, especially thinking about how there’s a lot of opportunity to enhance our work when it comes to productivity and efficiency. But then in the legal space, there’s also the opportunity created by people using tools badly and creating opportunities for plaintiffs attorneys. So like I’m thinking about the McDonald’s case that settled several months back because of BIPA in Illinois where they had their an AI analysis on drive throughs.

So, yeah, there’s a lot of, a lot of opportunities out there in this AI landscape. It’s all about balancing, like fear and desire. But also, much like a tsunami, we aren’t going to stop it one molecule of water at a time.

The transformation is here and happening. One thing I point people to is we try to compare this AI moment to other things, like maybe to the Internet or to the printing press or the written word. And it’s not really like that.

It took 20 years to get 100 million users of the Internet and they were still publishing that. The Internet is dead 19 years in. It took 10 years to get 100 million Netflix users.

It took 65 days for one application of Genai to get 100 million users. It’s much more ubiquitous and moving at a much faster speed, both in terms of adoption of consumer grade, which has kind of been the barrier of lawyers embracing it. They’re like, oh, I don’t want to explain this new foreign thing, well, if your nephew, your son, your client, your brother, your neighbor all using AI, that barrier’s gone.

So it’s much more ubiquitous. But also just the speed of the models changing. We’ve had 6, 7, 8 OpenAI models drop in the last 18 months.

We’ve got deep seq, we’ve got all these other models that are dropping. Oh, and there’s an entire revolution around AI agents who can act on your behalf. So just things are moving very quickly and trying to not embrace AI is backwards looking and will hurt you in the long run.

You kind of have to embrace it. It’s just about finding that safe, defensible, ethical way of doing it. I’ve seen a lot of attorneys that are, you know, they’re pretty eager to use it in areas like marketing, you know, or on their, on their website for articles, social media, things like that.

But when it comes to using it in their Word product or even in eDiscovery, be a little bit more timid, understandably. What could you speak to as far as what generative AI tools are available in eDiscovery and how are folks actually using. Yeah, so the, the interesting thing is because the plane isn’t already built, people are building it a little bit differently each major technology company.

So one of the first kind of shots across the bow was kind of AI chatbots. You can ask questions in free form like you would to Google, but like conversationally and interrogate your data source using AI. You know who’s talking about fraud in the data set? You know what is the name of the person with this title? Is there any discussion of xyz? So that’s kind of the generative AI powered chatbots and or gen powered search.

So the chatbot is more of a helper. The gen AI powered search is sort of think of it like. Well no, don’t think of it like this.

It’s not like search terms on steroids because it’s not relying what you already know about the data set. It’s letting you ask questions to find out what you don’t know. And then the next piece is Genai powered review.

One flavor is basically using Genai to kind of do the seed set like you would with predictive code, not predictive coding. Scratch that tar 1.0 and 2.

0. There’s also which was what we’re developing at Reveal, Genai powered search that can almost function like another reviewer, another person in the universe that’s operating in parallel to you, where the magic happens with all of these Whether you’re doing the chatbot, the search optimization or the automated review, is that ideally it shouldn’t be operating in a vacuum. It shouldn’t be.

I have my workflow, my AI workflow, my Gen AI workflow. That’s stupid. What it should be is I have my workflow.

Here’s where machine learning plays, here’s where data visualization plays in. You know, I can take the questions from like our tools called Ask from Ask and then I with the answers I can look in the actual data at the documents itself. I can push that into say the cluster wheel, which shows me the concepts that are part of the answer to my question.

So being able to have Gen AI play with this battle, test it already court approved machine learning and more legacy AI is where the magic happens in my mind. Because you’re not starting at zero, you’re building on the mountain we’ve already been building for 20 years. So that’s kind of where I see it right now.

And I think ideally what we’re going to keep seeing is not people aren’t going to stop at say AI rebukes. I think adoption on that will be slower because it feels a little bit more foreign, but that we’re going to keep finding other little ways to either identify things Genai is better at than our existing tools or find completely new things we hadn’t thought of using AI to uncover. You know, summarization, connecting the dots and the data a little bit differently, making suggestions for how you
even create the prompt.

There’s a lot of different ways that, you know, AI can work with Genai to make the end result of I have to look at less documents to get my answers happen. And I think that’s what we’re working towards. Not so much can I look at every document more quickly, but can I get to the answers in a way that I can articulate to the judge that is defensible and repeatable and statistically valid without it costing as much time and money.

So that’s kind of the universe as I see it now. Yeah, that’s awesome. You mentioned like existing AI tools, are there any non generative AI tools that are available that you think are very much underutilized? All of them.

So you mentioned back in the day that I was the global Director of Technology, I think it was for Gibson Dunn for several years. And one of my crowning achievements is I brought AI and I brought Brainspace in, but my adoption rate was still very, very low for even things like email threading, let alone just basic visualization so my hope, and I sometimes get eyebrows raised, sometimes my own eyebrow raises over it. My hope is that Gen AI is the gateway drug to use these underutilized tools which
are everything from, you know, organizational things like, I mean email threading uses AI.

People don’t think that, but basic things like that to anomaly detection. So using AI to see data points that stand out and shouldn’t be there, to sentiment analysis, you know, identifying aggression or moods that maybe are aligned with bad behavior or high risk, to visualizations like concept clustering which is identifying key concepts and bringing them together. Or social network analysis which is communication maps, who’s speaking with who, with what frequency, or just basic dashboards that
kind of present all that together.

And then even further along we’ve got things like Reveal has an AI model library and Pure Relativity has something similar where there’s off the shelf models you can plug in that are trained on a big universe of data to do certain types of cases, you know, find privilege or find potential fraud or harassing behavior to. Even the next step is having AI models that are powered by non generative AI that are bespoke to your data set, that you can build with our data science team, with whoever, and
then carry it on to other cases. And then you as the client own the ip.

So across this is a pretty wide spectrum. And, and then where the magic happens to my mind is okay, I can use Genai search to ask questions, reduce the data volume, then push it into all of these universe things and same thing even with automated review. Like if you’re using Genai to review in parallel in a more effective way, you can use all those other visualizations and AI to reduce the universe of data that requires review to begin with.

I mean it’s exciting. Like I think it’s, we’re finally at the point where, here’s how I like to describe it. Gen is AI so simple, so intuitive, a lawyer will actually use it as historically.

Well, like historically we had all this great stuff, but a lot of times it would be a legal technologist, which is awesome. But I think where the adoption kind of falters is a lot of times the key members of the case team with the case knowledge are hesitant to deal with stuff that feels really technical or like a relational database. And so having this kind of way to just write a sentence, typos and all free form and ask questions about the data like a lot of the Genai search or the chatbots do,
that’s something even a partner would be comfortable doing.

It doesn’t feel like the barrier of entry to gaining all of these great insights is being lowered by having consumer human centric approaches to building AI. Building AI that is, it doesn’t feel like AI, it just feels like I’m getting better answers faster. I’m interested where it really empowers the smaller teams to do more work.

You know, like some of the things you posted about reviews that were, you know, 9 million documents and you like got them down to 50,000 or something like it’s like huge. You know, I think they’re the ones who can benefit the absolute most because. Not just because of the David and Goliath, yes, that’s part of it.

But because there’s not necessarily bureaucracy or countervailing pressures that don’t benefit from being more efficient. If you are small and lean and mean, you know, litigation boutique, a small plaintiff firm, you know, being able to get to those answers more quickly, you’re not thinking, oh, I don’t get to push through this cost for a hundred reviewers. You’re thinking, I didn’t have money for a hundred reviewers, I wouldn’t have found this information any other way.

This is awesome. So I think we’ll probably see more adoption with small and mid sized firms that are using it as a way to level up. But also they don’t have as much to push back against on.

They don’t, they can, they can get adoption more quickly because their option is to not find the information otherwise. I wanted to circle back when you were talking about preservation earlier and I wanted to ask you what is forensically sound data? You were talking about this recently in some of the articles that came out with ilta. You know, it really, it varies.

I mean, I think that having someone that can attest to using the right tools and technology with the appropriate, you know, ENCE type certification, that’s part of it. Being able to capture data at the moment in time as opposed to, to something that may have had the metadata modified over time. Especially when we’re dealing with a lot of ephemeral messaging or continuous communication becomes much more challenging.

And then I think it’s, I mean frankly it’s not my super area of expertise. So I may push back a little on going too in the weeds of it, but it’s something that’s much more complicated than we have established it over the last 20 years because the nature of data itself is much more mobile, adaptable and ephemeral in nature. And so forensically sound requires more moment in time capture and additional delving into metadata that we may not have done for more traditional linear four corners of the
document sort of information.

I was recently talking with someone that was commenting on how it’s really hard to have like ethical walls in Microsoft Office 365. And they were like, yeah, it’s because they don’t like, it doesn’t have an audit trail like, you know, like imanage your. Net documents.

And I was thinking, well, actually it does. Not everybody really has access to like you have to go into Purview or you have to have like a certain, you know, role that has to be assigned to you to be able to like use the ediscovery and Purview. Well, you have to have a license for it.

You have to have paid. Yeah, right, right. But it does like, I mean, everything’s not everything, but almost everything is tracked in some way like that metadata, you know, or certainly in Office365 or it’s tracked than people realize.

Even like Purview in particular, if you’re using some of their Genai agents to kind of collaborate on material. If you interact with other data that’s in the universe of material that Purview has access to, you may both be modifying and creating an additional record that is then stored in a totally different place because it’s the generative AI functionality than traditional information. There’s almost like there’s parallel places information is being stored and custodians who may not have been
given user access rights to certain pieces of material, if it’s accessed by Purview and they build upon it may suddenly then have an additional copy of the information.

So it’s trackable, it’s audible. It’s also more complex than people realize as they start leveraging tools, they maybe don’t have as clear an understanding of where the data is living and what is being captured. Right, right.

Like how the copilot follows teams retention policies. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Well, I wanted to ask you about some other fun topics and not just focus on discovery. I saw an article you wrote a couple of years ago. We were celebrating getting to a million views on LinkedIn and you were sharing some tips about, you know, some things that you had done that kind of helped you along the way.

If you rewrote that article today, what are some things that you would add to it? You know, I think, I think I mentioned it, but I think the, the thing that is the single most important thing is forget about views, forget about network, foster conversation. I, I’d rather have 10 or 15 really great comments or have like I have 30,000 followers, but probably a thousand of them are core people that I interact with on a frequent basis. Foster that network because I go to that network for advice, for
input, for insight.

Like my why was, you know, I was 23 when I started using LinkedIn and I was nervous to talk to all these people. But on LinkedIn there was no barrier. I could add a comment, ask a question.

So use LinkedIn, which, you know, not for virality because that’s up to an algorithm that they change every six months, but to foster a really good network of people that you’re actually having a conversation with. So occasionally I’ll catch myself. I’m like, I have told people a lot of stuff the last month.

I haven’t asked any questions. Shame on me. So, you know, ask questions, genuinely interact with people, elevate other people and then find who you is authentically you like.

I, I’m kind of known for like the bright colors and you know, a certain way of talking and I’m very consistent with that because it’s who I am. And by authentically being who I am, if people meet me in person, they’re not surprised. But also there’s a familiarity, like we have a relationship, a digital relationship that doesn’t feel fake or you know, like a lunatic of LinkedIn.

I follow them on Reddit. It’s my favorite subreddit. People that are just self promoting saying, oh, I’m so humble and so proud all the time.

Don’t do any of that stuff. Just be honest, be candid, share your wins, share your losses, but also ask questions, ask how you can help people. I think, you know, my network has grown pretty substantially, probably 4,000% or something crazy like that in the last five years.

And it was when I went from, I’m going to present a polished image and only share articles and only say things that HR won’t get mad at me about to. I’m just going to be honest. I’m going to be candid.

And you know, most people don’t think of lawyers and hot pink and sparkles. I don’t care. That’s sort of my jam.

Figure out what your jam is. And it may not be being outgoing, it may not be being an extrovert, it might be a little bit more professorial, but if that’s you, lean into it and you’ll find the people that are drawn to you when you’re authentically yourself are more valuable for you as a human, for your career development and for ideally what you’re doing with LinkedIn, which is using it to kind of create a digital network of friends, colleagues, peers and mentors. Yeah.

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I like that.

I like that answer a lot. That engagement, like creating like kind of the inner circle or whatever of your. Of your followers that you’re engaging with, commenting on their posts, they’re commenting on yours, and you’re building that trust and relationship with them is.

I’ve seen that just in a little time that I’ve been on LinkedIn and I’m tiny, you know, but. But like, if I put. Put up a post and it’s worth a darn, I can pretty much guarantee, like, Colin Levy’s gonna make a comment, you know? Yeah, same as I see him.

It’s like, so it’s. I know. Like, there’s a lot of these legal tech folks.

It’s like, very generous, you know, and interact on LinkedIn. It’s like we get something more out of it than just like, oh, look at me, look at me. Well, and, you know, I like to joke I’m kind of a disco ball.

Like, there might be a spotlight on me, but my hope is if there’s a spotlight on me, I’m then shining it on people in 20 directions. And the other thing is, like, the algorithm changes a lot, but it’s not complicated. Like, I, I know how I could go viral every single day, but the viral posts aren’t helpful to my community and they’re not really helpful to me.

Like, take for example, last year, my number one post was my foot. Right. I won’t even go into details on the whole foot.

Whatever. I literally, I had. I had torn my Achilles tendon and I was using like this, like a laser.

And so my foot was in a laser. And I was talking about, like, AI generated, like inorganic stem cells. It was really cool.

But then I looked at it. I’m like, I have 80,000. I think it was ultimately 120,000 people that looked at this post because there’s a foot in it that’s not helpful to anyone.

It was a cool thing. And so I could have done a whole series about five more pictures of my foot with a laser and had a million extra views, but that’s not helpful. And so I kind of try to balance the.

My number one mission today is this, is this AI renaissance is really scary for lawyers. We’ve never been. Or legal professionals, not just lawyers for legal industry.

We’ve never been the ones displaced by tech advancement. And so there are millions of people that are scared. And my entire mission is I want to talk about the big scary things and break them down in a simple way so they’re approachable and people feel like, okay, at least I understand this.

And my foot does not further that goal. So, like, that’s kind of another thing you kind of want to keep in there. Like, sometimes it’s easy to fall into.

Oh, that posted really well, I should do more like it. But really, like, ask yourself, is this talking to the people I want to talk to? Is this helping people? Is this helping me? And if not, you might have to say, bye bye foot post. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s awesome.

Like, I mean, you’ve got to keep yourself happy too, right? Be proud of, of what you’re putting out there, whether it’s a foot or not. I mean, it was just an old post. I just didn’t need to do any more of them.

I don’t regret it because it wasn’t about the vanity metric. No, no. I’m like, there’s a lizard, there’s vamp, and there’s my foot.

Awesome. But then I was like, when I dug deeper, I’m like, oh, I can see why this, you know, hit the algorithm. It’s not, it’s not doing what I want, which is educating, you know, my universe of people.

So, hey, I’m going to pivot. But that’s my other thing. So, like, figure out who you are, figure out what you want to do, have a conversation and then even if something does really well, if it’s not fostering that, then, you know, say goodbye to the likes and maybe do something different.

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Are you complaining about your website’s performance? Contact Naim and Creative today at infoamencreative.com or visit our website at naimandcreative.com to learn how we make sure our clients work. Websites are running smooth. I like some of what folks have talked about with like those vanity metrics, right about and, and being too focused on them because like what, at the end of the day, what are you really here for? Is it to help somebody? Is it to get some business? Is it both or you just want
the attention.

Maybe that vanity metric is what you’re here for. There’s people out there that. I think that is what they’re here for.

I had a great meeting with some other podcasters at the beginning of the year, and we were talking about promoting our podcast, and that became a part of the conversation. Like, what’s. Is the number of people that look at the podcast and watch it, download it, whatever.

Is that like the end goal? Or is it the one person that listens and actually gets a takeaway from it? And then, like, how do you actually measure that? You know, and sometimes there is no way to measure it other than your own intuition. So I like your advice. Like, if you’re putting something out there and you don’t feel right about it, well, it’s also, it’s like, it’s really having a clear grasp of your why.

Like, for me, my why is like, I’m a very good translator between tech and legal, and so I want to use that to help people. Right. And so that, for me, is my why.

Like, for you, if it’s, hey, I think this podcast will help people. Looking at the vanity metric of is this going broader? Is the way I’m communicating about it increasing over time? That’s great. Like, it’s.

It’s about balancing that. Like, I think it all comes back to, am I having a conversation? Am I. Am I doing my goal, whatever that is, and am I being authentic? And if it’s those three things, then, you know, you will see growth as a result of that. So it’s not that the views don’t matter.

More people are seeing my stuff today than they were when I first wrote that during COVID But it was by recalibrating that I made sure it was growth in the areas I wanted to see growth and reaching people I could be helpful for. Yeah. So, you know, growth’s not a four letter word, both literally and metaphorically.

Oh, gosh. Well, you’ve been doing so well. I am so intimidated by your travel schedule and all these conferences you do.

It’s like, I. I just don’t know how you get, like, work done. I can imagine. Sometimes it’s on the plane.

Oh, on the plane. On a break from circumference, like running the hotel room for something. But how many conferences did you do last year? So I think between like, virtual and irl, it was.

I think I averaged like one a week. Um, I was. I know it slowed to go around the globe three times.

Um, it’s kind of lumpy though, like I’ll have. I had a couple weeks where I hit like three events in a week. And then there’s a couple weeks in the summertime where it’s kind of quiet before the big ILTA push.

Um, we’re about to kind of really. We’re beginning the crazy conference season. Well, we’ll be in full swing by the time this airs.

I think Legal week is next week, but. But we’ve got evolve coming up. I think University of Florida just happened.

Like we’re in the beginning of the first half of conferences and then there’s a second one. So yeah, it’s constantly on the go, but it’s. I also get fomo.

If I’m not at an event, I’m like, oh, I should be there, I should be talking with people, I should be helping them out. And so it’s. I always say I’ll travel less.

And then I’m like, or I could still go to that other conference. Well, I wanted to ask you from your experience with these conferences, which one’s the most accessible and valuable for for solo and small firm return? So it depends what they’re looking for. If they’re looking for some basic education, kind of connecting with people, I recommend small regional, whether it’s association based or the smaller niche was like evolves a good niche one.

It’s not that small, but it’s kind of a little bit narrow where you can actually connect with people. But if you’re looking for a big platform to access the most people like the main ilta, not sponsoring necessarily, but maybe sponsoring but just attending, you’re more likely to meet a broad cross section of people. So I think balance it between the low cost regional either, you know, ABA or WBA or Masters or any of those smaller regional ones that might kind of be, you know, when they discover
whatever a niche within your, your geographic area.

But then if you’re looking to kind of connect, understand the tools and technology and the big trends and you want to level up real quickly, that’s where you know the Iltas of the world can be incredibly powerful and your podcast focuses with CIOs. It’s my number one recommendation for CIOs. I think for practitioners that are very discovery focused, there’s a ton of value in Legal Week, which is again happening next week.

But for CIOs, I know when I was at Gibson it was the number one event that my CEO for a bigger firm but he always wanted to go to because you could see the macro trends of what tools and technology can help you kind of, you know, as your force multiplier and also have an access to a broader swath of people in different geography, sizes of firms and such. So balance the two. And there’s a ton of free stuff too.

The cles, the webinars use that because some very, very brilliant people are literally 612 inches away from you through the screen at a lot of the virtual conferences and virtual events you can attend. Yeah, absolutely. That’s great advice.

I’ve been a member of Ulta since 2012, definitely a big fan of the community and the conference when I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to go to it. One thing I noticed there, that was actually pointed out to me in 2023 when I was in a session about the technology report they do every year. A lot of the small firm groups don’t go to ilta.

You know, it’s. It’s. Well, you start seeing Clio there now, but they haven’t for years.

They haven’t went. You don’t see Smoke Ball there. Yeah, typically it’s the bigger, like Net Documents and Imanage, you know, or Outer Air will be able to.

What I’ll say is they’re there, they just may not be sponsoring. Sponsorship’s kind of expensive. So if you have a smaller legal technology company you work with, not that CLIO is small, there probably is a team there.

There probably is an event of some kind. What’s nice for the smaller firms that you might be able to have 10 or 15 meetings, even if it’s not a marquee sponsor. But also balance it out.

There’s cost to it. It’s not an inexpensive event. It’s super valuable, depending on what you’re looking for.

But there’s also regional niche events. There’s the GC Forum, which I think is San Fran. There’s a bunch of individual city and state aceds groups, association of Certified Ediscovery Specialists, Women Ediscovery Ala, which is association of Legal Assistance.

But it’s also like paralegals. So it just. It depends what you want kind of look, look what’s in your geography.

And if you’ve got budget, ulta’s great. If you don’t, there’s a whole host of regional stuff that you may not even have to travel out of town for. And then virtual, like I think with COVID the quality of virtual content skyrocketed.

There’s a lot of inexpensive to free cles. There’s some pay to play ones like Ali and Pli. Aceds, edrm, women need discovery, all do different stuff.

And then there’s even virtual or hybrid conferences. Like the University of Florida conference is actually 1,000 people attend. Virtually 200 attend in person.

So there’s a mix of stuff out there and there’s no one right way to Tetris it together. It’s just about kind of getting up and connecting and learning. Well, which of the conferences are your personal favorites and which are the most productive for Revill? So my absolute favorite is Legal Week, which we’re heading into.

But I may be biased because they literally have built me a personal technocat stage and I just get to have like 40 podcasts and we kind of. That’s the reveal takeover. So where we.

I’ll be introducing or either me or Wendell be introducing Rob Lowe for the keynote. So we’re very dialed in there. So I love that.

And then I spent a decade in New York, so it’s kind of a homecoming. But that one I see is really good for big macro connection and it’s. While it is expanding into contract analytics, it’s a little bit more E Discovery focused.

Another great one, if you’re a little more senior, you’re looking to kind of just brainstorm is there’s the Sedona conference and then there’s edi, the Ediscovery Institute. Both great. University of Florida’s Ediscovery conference again, that one I think will have just happened.

Really, really great. A lot of brilliant people regionally. There’s the Master’s conference, which is Legal, Tech, Cyber and eDiscovery.

It hits 12 cities throughout the year. Solid is great. It’s a little bit more aimed at corporate and kind of is cross functional across different tools and technologies than it does TED talks.

So seven minutes, Go, go, go. And then my absolute favorite is a new one that just started is actually called Women in AI. You could come as an ally, but it’s sort of focused not just on AI and legal, but different ways.

Women in AI are across finance and medical and legal, kind of reshaping the industry. So that one was a great one. All shout outs to the other Cat.

Cat Moon. We occasionally get confused. It’s not like the Highlander.

There can be more than one. And let me think what else. Oh, and of course Ilsa, obviously your shirt reminded me.

Ilta and Ilta Evolve are great. We’ve worked with them forever. So there’s this whole universe and net diligence.

There’s all sorts of. I’m thinking from the lens mainly of I’ve 20 years of eDiscovery. So those are the ones I think of.

But there’s ABA Tech show which is a little more broader. There’s a whole universe of contract analytic and cyber and compliance focused ones and there’s no one wrong way to go. They’re all pretty good.

It’s a lot of high praise in a lot of conferences. You know it’s funny like I think I tried to pinpoint every conference I went to and they all kind of blurred together. I couldn’t even just search by like I have 75,000 pictures which is a problem in and of itself and I couldn’t even search to make sure which one was a conference day versus not.

Wow. Well, what other social networks other than LinkedIn are good for you for business? Yeah, yeah. So.

So my, my main jam is LinkedIn. I, I sort of am good at that. I have played around a little bit with TikTok so initially I pretty much used it to because it was easier to edit videos than any other app application.

There are of course concerns and considerations about it potentially being a vector for Chinese misinformation and Chinese state owns it. So be careful with that one. But there is a lot talk community that’s pretty, pretty active there.

People like Alex Hsu post often X Twitter, the Artist formerly known as Twitter. I’ve never really figured out how to do it very well so I’m not a big proponent of it. I’ve got maybe a thousand followers and I tweet very occasionally.

But folks like you mentioned, Colin Levy, he’s very active on there and there’s a pretty good legal and legal tech community. I don’t. I have Facebook, I have an Instagram, I even have a technocat specific Instagram but I don’t really use them as much.

It’s not as active a community. Um, I’ve played around with some of the different Discord servers which again that’s a little bit even dorky for me. They’re not as active and I’m sure like we tried when what was it.

What was the. The audio only. I tried that one.

That was not great. The where it was clubhouse. I think that was last year, year before.

Um but honestly I feel like the, the community it’s strongest on LinkedIn. Um and then also LinkedIn groups like I’ve got an AI baddies group which is know focused on bringing people that like AI and AI Esquire is another group I have where it’s just how do I as a lawyer embrace technology and keep myself in the loop and in the driver’s seat. So there’s also subgroups within LinkedIn that are really good for just kind of sharing more tailored information.

So if anyone wants to join them, just ping me. But, yeah, I feel like for us, LinkedIn does a really good job. It can be annoying, it can be fun, but it’s a nice community that’s been fostered.

There’s. Yeah, I’m most comfortable on LinkedIn, definitely. Yeah.

I mean, it’s, it’s. It’s very clearly, like, designed for work. It’s professional network.

So it’s like, if that’s what you’re in it for, why not just that’s the place to be, you know, so well. And I’ve always felt a little awkward, like, trying to promote business on Facebook, you know, so I’m like, oh, that’s where my high school friends are and family is. And it’s like, you know, posting about politics and I don’t want to mix that, you know.

No, I think, like, for me, I noticed a long time ago a lot of my best friends were similar to me. They were in the same industry, similar interest. And so we have kind of that.

I’m okay bringing a little of the personal into the professional. I don’t like. You were saying, I don’t like bringing the professional into the personal.

That’s why for years, I actually had an ediscovery cat because that was my old name before I translated it. Facebook. Like, as a decoy.

If a client asked me if they could connect on Facebook, which, shockingly, they did 10 years ago. So I really separated church and state. But with LinkedIn, it’s like, as I’ve kind of been more authentic and candid, I bring a little bit of the personal.

Not too much. It’s not Facebook, but I feel more comfortable going that direction than the other. It’s a balancing act with TikTok.

I literally only post videos. I’m going to then reshare on LinkedIn. So I don’t know if I’m tiktoking, right? But I get in trouble for not using it, so.

So I always have somebody else send me a link and sometimes I can play it, sometimes I don’t because I refuse to install the app. And they’re like, why not? Why don’t you try? It’s always this big thing, you know. So my caution is the algorithm is probably the best algorithm out there for social media, for dopamine response.

Like, I will go on to get a few ideas and blink and it’ll have been an hour. Like it must be doing something with my brain where it’s just incur. Like it’s the positive reinforcement it is giving is very potent when LinkedIn.

I can do it all. Yeah, that. See, that’s why I don’t do it.

I know myself. I would sit there and doom scroll for two hours. Like, you know, I’ve got to.

I’ve got stuff to do. Same. Same.

Awesome. Well, thank you. This has been such a great conversation.

There was something else I had written down I wanted to ask you about. I had. I overheard a big firm attorney talking about limiting the other side’s ability to use AI tools and like litigation stipulation.

Like, but that’s not something I’m super familiar with. So I wanted to ask you about it. Like, how would that work? I don’t know.

Just in your opinion, like, how would that work if you’re on a team and suddenly you’re limited because of the other side’s stipulation? I think it’ll be really challenging to do because there’s such a delta in the understanding of what even AI is. We’ve noticed it even a step back, not even from opposing parties making stipulations, but from judges making rulings about AI disclosures. They vary from disclose.

If you’re doing research using generative AI to tell me every time you use AI, which on its face doesn’t sound too crazy until you’re like, well, the GPS I used to get here is AI. The Google search I use, the Lexus search I use, the spell check I use. That’s all AI.

So I think there’ll be challenges for opposing sides to effectively tailor what their stipulations are. And I think as gen AI and AI in particular becomes more integrated into legacy tools like it’s available on Lexis and Westlaw now it’s getting baked into. I want to say netdocuments has functionality a lot of like, I mean obviously Purview as well and Copilot.

A lot of basic business tools have genai built in. It’s going to be very hard to try to exclude that. I think you’ll see people negotiating an ESI protocols on if and how specific functions are used.

Like, you know, we explicitly agree or do not agree to have any sort of gen AI automated first pass review, that sort of stuff. I can see having teeth, but opposing side saying you can’t use AI is going to be very challenging because one, we’re already using AI extensively. Two, people are confusing generative AI which is AI that makes stuff and write stuff and create stuff with a AI, which is AI that connects the dots or makes a recommendation.

And so because of that confusion, they’re thinking, oh, it’s only new things they’re going to use. Not realizing all of these tools that are very table stakes, standard business already use AI extensively. So if you say don’t use AI, it would be like saying don’t use the Internet.

Right. It’s very challenging. Or you know, you can’t use the cloud.

Right. It’s a little too broad. So.

So I think what you’ll see is courts pushing back on overrod stipulations or specific language, say in an ESI protocol, because the people making it don’t understand what AI means in legal and legal tech or in business. Two, I think there’s an evolution of the acceptance of AI. I always joke like three months after ChatGPT was released, there was a South park episode written about and written by ChatGPT.

And you know what happened after that? My nephew, my mom, the lady at the United Airport lounge started talking to me about AI. It’s gone mainstream and it’s hard. It would be like telling someone in 2004, you can’t email anything, you can’t research anything online.

The ship may have already sailed. Right. We already may be too familiar with and comfortable with using AI.

So what I think you’re going to see is those broad stipulations will probably be shot down, even judge disclosure requirements of all AI shot down. But you might see specific language about you can’t use AI in this specific manner. You have to disclose if you’re doing it in this specific way and.

Or you have to validate that there was a human in the loop, a human in the driver’s seat, a human QCing that. It wasn’t like the Avianca case where the Guy copied what ChatGPT said, pasted it and submitted as a motion that that wasn’t bad AI going Rome, that was bad lawyer being lazy. So that case is talked about pretty often.

Well, you know what I keep saying, people miss the boat. Here’s what the guy did. His son said, ChatGPT is awesome.

How did he validate that? He watched one YouTube video and then he took what ChatGPT said, pasted it into a motion, and then when the judge called him out for it, he asked ChatGPT, was the citation correct? To me, that’s a lot of laziness. Because you know what? You can ask also ask ChatGPT, please provide me the link to the case you’re citing, click the link and read the case. Which is what you would do if a first year associate made you a motion or a brief.

That sounded too good to be true with cases you hadn’t heard of. So it’s, you know, people are afraid that AI is going rogue. That’s not AI going rogue, that’s lazy lawyering.

We’ve had that forever. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned disclosure earlier and that’s something that’s certainly talked about a lot in some of my circles down here.

I want to ask what you think but then also like what came out of that task force as far as like when should an attorney or a practice disclose and like to who to their clients. I mean I focused more on the risks and opportunity. That was the section that I was the kind of the co chair on or the chair on.

Actually disclosure was, it was talked about a little bit, but not quite as much. It was more like prescribe, use, do not use. But looking at the disclosure discussion, I think what it comes down to is an AI being used in lieu of human legal decision making.

Is there an audit trail and transparency? Is there a way for the output of the AI to be validated and you have to disclose if there’s nothing humans in the process now using AI to solve the blank page problem. So to, to, you know, for a post at the wall, get some ideas, probably don’t need to disclose that. Using AI for final case citations probably do need to disclose that.

So I think what we’re going to see is right now there’s a lot of very broad disclose everything type things that are not going to stand because again spellcheck uses AI. Your spam filter, you’re even using like in like reveals advanced learning tools, stuff like that. For calling like that would email threading is AI, right? Or Boolean search in LexisNexis AI, right? All of that’s AI.

So if a lawyer could actually say I have nothing to disclose, I would be like malpractice. Right. So the overbroad ones are not going to be there.

Where I think the rubber is going to hit the road is the use case, the transparency, whether there’s a human in between the AI and the output and clearly disclosing when it’s kind of an alternative workflow. So if you’re using say Genai for automated first pass review, that is different from hey, I was using the Genai search function to summarize cases before I read them. Right.

With Lexis or westlaw. So It’s, I think we’re going to have to get a lot more granular and these broad kind of disclosure rulings or you know, proactive, you know, disclosing to the court, they’re going to have to get a little bit more nuanced because AI is such a broad universe. That would be like saying disclose.

If you use the Internet, you know, it’s too broad, you know, so when it comes to Westlaw and Nexus, which do you prefer? You know, I am going to plead neutral on that because too many people like both sides. I plead the fifth there, but both are doing great. Do you think it’s a good idea for any firm to sign a three year agreement with one or the other in this day and age where everything is changing so much? Like what if they sign a three year with Lexus and then they’re like, but co counsel’s
great.

You know, I think licenses make sense from a co innovation standpoint. Right. So these big players want to be dominant.

Like it’s not like Lexus will innovate and Westlaw will not. That’s not a scenario. So you’re going to want to have a relationship where you can help build the tool that works better for you, be part of, you know, building solutions that work better for you.

Waiting for seeing who’s going to win means you lose because then you’re behind the eight ball and if you make the wrong decision, like you could look at renegotiating or I just don’t think, I think it’s like if someone were to look at using open AI versus Google, Llama versus Claude. Those are foundational AI models. They’re all a little bit different.

Some are better than others. Each new release is a little better than others. But they’re all have the same fire under their metaphorical ones and zero buts to innovate.

They’re all innovating. So whichever one you pick, you’re going to be ahead of not picking one to develop with. So I don’t think there’s a negative to, to picking, I don’t know, picking a side.

I guess I’m just not gonna do it. I hear you. Well, this has been awesome.

This has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today. You’re so generous with your time and generous in this community.

I certainly encourage anybody that’s into legal technology, whether you’re an attorney or not. Follow Kat Casey. Follow Kat Moon too if you want.

Both cats have some great material. How would they find you if they wanted to find you, cat. So I am Kat Casey on LinkedIn.

If the background is hot pink, that is definitely me. I also got a website, www.thetechnocat.com and I am the technocat.

I think it’s the underscore TechnoCat on TikTok. But LinkedIn’s usually the best way to find me and I’m pretty liberal with adding people. As long as you don’t ask me to add you in Cyrillic or in Mandarin and I can’t read it, then I’m going to probably add you.

That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me and thank you for listening in today. Some listeners.

I hope you’ll find me again next month. I put out episodes every month. This is Ryan with CIO Legal.

And if you think that your firm could benefit from a part time CIO, look me up. I started 200 month, month to month you can find me at CIO legal. Thank you.

Sa.