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In this episode, Jody Sanders and Todd Smith chat with Colin Levy, Director of Legal and Evangelist at Malbek, about his journey from being a traditional in-house lawyer to a leading voice in legal technology. Colin shares his insights on the evolving landscape of the legal industry, emphasizing the importance of bridging the gap between technology and law. He discusses his role at Malbek, where he focuses on contract lifecycle management, and highlights the significance of legal tech in enhancing efficiency and client service. Colin also offers advice for lawyers looking to integrate technology into their practices, advocating for experimentation and a problem-solving approach.
Our guest is Colin Levy. He is the Director of Legal and an Evangelist from Malbek.
Colin, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to having this conversation with both of you.
Some of our readers who are on Twitter probably recognize your name, but they may not know much about you, and some of our readers probably don't know you at all. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, and how you got to where you are?
Absolutely. I look at myself as, in some ways, the anti-lawyer because I frequently focus a lot of my efforts both on Twitter and also on LinkedIn on abusing a lot of folks with this notion that the law is static and that the world that the legal industry operates in hasn't changed when the opposite has very much changed. Much of that change has been brought about by technology, and that's in part what drove me to want to learn more about the intersection of tech and law. It is because I saw the world changing and thought, "Either I'm crazy or there are others who think like me and think that the gap between the world of tech and the world of law needs to be closed."
When I was in my early days as a practicing lawyer, and I graduated from law school in 2010, I started reaching out to folks who were either teaching about technology to law students, paralegals, and/or to those creating tech tools. Those conversations really helped me learn more about this space and then in turn led me to want to speak out more about it, write more about it, and connect with more folks trying to close that gap. That has been my calling slash journey, if you will, for most of my career. It has been an ongoing journey. It's certainly not one that I expected to be on when I graduated from law school thinking I would be more of a traditional in-house lawyer but it has been the right journey for me to be on.
Did you start as a general practicing lawyer? When did you make your transition from practice to legal tech, or did you start knowing you wanted to do legal tech?
I started out initially as a more traditional in-house lawyer, but then I realized after my first role or two in that space that I don't want to be doing run-of-the-mill typical corporate work because I don't think that's going to be fulfilling for me. I also don't think that that is where I was going to be happiest, but I also didn't know a lot about what would truly make me happy professionally.
As I started to learn more about legal tech because I was prompted to learn more about it through interacting with technology and seeing this disconnect firsthand as a corporate lawyer, I realized this may be what I've been needing. Those initial conversations with others who were in the legal tech space and eager to bring more people into the fold helped me get on this journey.
For the majority of my career, I've been in legal tech, but the transition was not this event where I woke up one day and thought, "I want to be in legal tech." It was more a matter of slowly but surely having one conversation after another that then pulled me in this direction. I pivoted over time. Looking back, it, in some ways, makes sense, but at the time, I didn't realize I was making that transition until it fully happened.
Did you have any kind of technological background or specialty going in that led to this interest or was it more of having identified that gap that you spoke of that got you interested in going down this path?
I wasn't any kind of computer science person. I wasn't a big fan of programming or even computers when I was in high school because I saw computers back then as clunky, intrusive, and arduous, which, in many cases, they were. I also did have some inkling of an interest in technology because some friends and I started a website consulting company in high school, thinking that would be a big thing because websites back then were more of a big deal than they are now. I had some degree of interest in technology, but I wasn't sure exactly how that interest was going to play out.
When I identified that gap between tech and law, I realized, "This is what is drawing me. This is what will bring these two interests together in a way that makes sense to me." I'm not a programmer by background and I really had no interest in computer science even in college, but now, the interest is strong. It is expressed through the lens of the legal industry, the practice of law, and the delivery of legal services.
What does your company Malbek do?
Malbek, despite the name, does not make wine. We make software for enterprise companies that helps them manage their contracts from start to finish, meaning from creating the contract to negotiating to finalizing it to amending it, and so on. That's what we do. Since I have a transactional lawyering background, it makes sense for me to be with Malbek as their legal lawyer because that is an area I know well. I have dealt with the pain points of contracting for a long time during the course of my career. Those pain points that I personally had to deal with are the same pain points that Malbek seeks to address with its software.
You described yourself both as the director of legal and an evangelist. What does your evangelist role look like?
That is another part of my role. What that consists of is writing blog posts, attending conferences, speaking at conferences, going on podcasts, and making efforts to help educate others about what Malbek does about the power and benefits of contract lifecycle management software. Quite frankly, a lot of what I had been doing before joining Malbek, e.g. writing posts, writing articles, doing interviews, and speaking on webinars are the same things that Malbek wants me to do. It's a beneficial role because everything that I enjoy doing is things that they want me to be doing anyway.
It's really nice to have that type of role that benefits both parties and helps me continue to pursue my passion without intruding upon it and/or getting in the way of it because earlier in my career, I worked for a few companies where they didn't necessarily buy into the whole legal tech thing. I had to talk about how things should be on the one hand but then on the other hand, working and had to do things a different way. It was mentally very challenging to have to constantly deal with that awkward juxtaposition
You've written a book about the legal tech ecosystem. Maybe define the parameters. When we talk about the legal tech ecosystem, what are we talking about?
The way I look at it is that an ecosystem is composed of different components that are symbiotic with one another. They all impact one another and all benefit one another. That's how I see legal tech. It is an ecosystem of people, tools, processes, and businesses all being symbiotic with one another and helping benefit from one another.
That's what the legal tech ecosystem is aimed at. It is making the case that it is an ecosystem and then showing people why it is an ecosystem. I do that in the book through a variety of means, including through snippets of interviews I've conducted in the past, through examples, through anecdotes, and through my own personal experience. It's helping people understand how all these different things are interconnected to one another and independent of one another. It's important to understand things in context.
The goal of the book is to put legal tech in the context of the broader business of the legal industry through an accessible lens and through one that's not too technical because it's aimed at people who don't have a technical background. If you have one, that's great, but you don't need to have one nor is it required to have one to be able to be in legal tech or understand what it is.
Would you say that the book would be helpful to a broad cross-section of lawyers or even the legal tech curious would be a good reader for your book? Who's the target that you wrote the book for?
It's aimed at a cross-section of lawyers and legal professionals who either are lawyers who want to learn more about legal tech, those who have some curiosity about legal tech, or those who want to see ways in which they can perhaps incorporate legal tech into their practice. It's aimed at a variety of different types of people, but it assumes that you have no background whatsoever in tech, encoding, or anything because it's not that type of book.
There are plenty of books that are more specific and more detailed, and that's fine. I was not trying to put out a book like that. It was really intended to help be your guide to the space because that's how I see myself in many ways. I see myself as a guide to the space. The book is that companion to me. If I want to learn about legal tech, what would I look for in a resource? That's what the book aims to provide to people in a way that is introductory, accessible, but also inspiring.
The way that you framed it in terms of the symbiotic relationship, it does seem like you've created a broader framework that would help people who were not knowledgeable going in to seize a bigger picture of what legal tech is all about. I know for a cross-section of lawyers generally, it can be a pretty intimidating topic to try and get into the space, especially if you don't have that kind of a background. It seems like being able to see the bigger picture and how it fits into that would be helpful.
That's precisely my goal in writing the book. It really was to help people see the bigger picture. I found technology in some ways intimidating myself when I was younger, so I certainly don't want others to experience it as intimidating. I also want people to understand how it fits into the larger picture of the practice of law and delivery of legal services because it's one set of possible tools you can have in your tool belt while working.
That's what the book is aimed to do. It is to show people that you need not be intimidated by technology and need not see technology as any one thing but more as a set of things that possibly could be of help to you. It comes down to seeing how it all fits into the larger picture. That often is dependent upon your area of practice, your comfortability with technology, and also what you're seeking in terms of your working environment.
That's what it's aimed at, to present people with that picture that allows for people to understand the broader view and also understand that the benefits of technology come from those using it and not just from its mere existence of these tools. While these tools do signify some things by their mere existence, real benefits of them come from them being put to use by people.
It seems like there are a lot of people who are intimidated by the idea of legal tech. What do you see that lawyers are doing wrong? What are the missed opportunities for lawyers with legal technology? I know at least anecdotally, it seems like practicing lawyers and maybe law firms are sometimes the slowest to adapt
There are a couple of things. One, given the rise of generative AI, many lawyers surprisingly or unsurprisingly have assumed that all the tech they need is with generative AI, which is not the case because generative AI has limitations as well. More broadly speaking, technology is not a panacea. It's not going to solve all of your problems. You shouldn't assume that it's going to be some magical solution that can solve your problem, which then speaks to the need to identify exactly what your problem is and what's contributing to it being a problem.
Once you've done that due diligence, then you can evaluate potential solutions. What I see happening sometimes with lawyers and other legal professionals is they jump to finding a solution before specifically knowing what the problem is that they're trying to solve. What ends up happening is they have a solution in search of a problem, which can often mean you have expensive shelfware sitting on a shelf, so to speak. That's not really helpful.
It also hurts the adoption of tech because others will look at that and say, "You said this was going to do X, Y, and Z and no one's using it. It was costly. Why should we invest in something else? This didn't work out." That speaks to that problem identification being a critical step. It's not the most glamorous thing, but it's super important so that you have a foundation to build off of rather than jumping immediately to technology.
Lastly, technology is not infallible. It has limitations regardless of what tool you're trying to use. It's important when you're evaluating solutions, when you're at that stage, to identify what the limitations are and if those are acceptable limitations, i.e. they're not going to impact how it will help you with solving whatever problem you are seeking to solve.
I know for me personally, I had my own practice for many years, so I was making all the decisions on what tech I was going to use. That seemed like, to me, to be a very good way of approaching. I've got a bad case of shiny object syndrome. I would always enjoy diving in to learn about legal tech for the sake of learning about it, which is probably still a good idea.
In the end, in terms of persuading lawyers to use the technology that's available, starting with a specific problem or specific challenge in their practice is logically the best way of approaching it. That's what I did. I would learn about specific solutions to address the problems that I was facing and then try to implement those. It was not from a person's perspective who had no formal technology training. That really helped to narrow the intimidation factor or cut down on it because I was only needing to learn about this one little sliver. This was way before the age of generative AI. I found that to be a very useful approach to it myself from a practical standpoint.
It's helpful if you are someone who is skeptical, perhaps a little uncomfortable, or a little afraid of technologies to start small. Focus on a smaller problem, evaluate potential solutions for that smaller problem, and use that to build off of larger endeavors. I also will mention a word that perhaps some lawyers may be uncomfortable with hearing, and that is experimentation. It often can be very helpful to engage in experimenting with tools to understand how they work and see whether you like using them and also, importantly, see whether other users that perhaps will be involved with evaluating and/or using these tools, whether they like using these tools as well.
That kind of experimentation process will help you not only overcome your fear but also help you understand how these tools operate, what perhaps you like about how they operate, and what you don't like about how they operate. That can give you a better sense of what you're looking for in terms of a solution. Certainly, given how rapidly technology advances, continuing to experiment and learn more about potential options can be very helpful and at the same time can help you learn about technology in a way that's not intrusive, not intimidating, and not putting you on the spot because you picked this one solution and you're hoping that it's going to work. Rather, you can try it out and see whether it could potentially work or not.
What do you say though to the lawyers who say, "This all sounds great, Colin, but I've barely identified the problem. I really don't have time to experiment with the solutions or even identify the potential solutions."
I would say a couple of things. Number one is if you feel like you don't have the time, then what you need to do is, for better or worse, you need to make the time. What is likely going to happen is by making the time to experiment a little bit, you'll be saving yourself time in the long run because you'll have learned more about the tools that work for you. You'll save yourself less time evaluating, testing, and all of that. In some cases, making the time works.
Secondly, when I say making the time, you don't necessarily have to make a boatload of time. You can start slowly. Maybe spend 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or that short period during the week trying things out and then learning more. You don't need to rush into this process. It's not something you should rush into. That's what I would say.
In addition, I would say that if you really are interested and are devoted to change and learning more about these technologies, it comes down to, frankly, either you devote yourself to learning a little bit at a time or you're full of it and you don't believe what you're saying in terms of you being open to these things. The bottom line is you have to put yourself out there and if you want to do this, make sure you're prepared to do it.
Frankly, for those who are lucky enough to be in an environment where they're working in a large legal department or a large law firm, perhaps they can turn to someone in a different department to help them either test out things or help them show things because it's more of their job. For example, that may be their legal operations, their IT, or whatever. It doesn't have to all fall on you necessarily, depending on what your working environment looks like.
It's not one of those things, it doesn't seem, that you can say, "We have this problem. Let's bring in a consultant and a consultant will implement the solution. It'll take care of everything." It sounds like what you're suggesting is that whoever it is that's in the position to adopt or advocate for the adoption of legal technology, you've got to have a certain amount of buy-in to adopting a solution, it seems.
You need to be open to learning and not going in with set expectations and understand that there could be any variety of things that could happen. You have to be open to change and adaptation. That's perhaps the most important quality for any lawyer or legal professional to have. It is that willingness to be open to adapting.
The world is very dynamic, much more than it has ever been in history. Our only way to meet the needs of the world now and meet the needs of the clients of the world now is to be open to adaptation, learning, and growing. As humans, learning is not a one-and-done thing. It's a lifelong process. Likewise with working, it's a journey. It's not something that has a definite start and end point to it.
What is your impression of the level of interest in adopting legal tech in the solo small firm setting versus the large firm setting? You can make a general observation that the smaller firms are more nimble and can have a little more flexibility in what they adopt and how they integrate it into their systems versus large firms. You could also probably argue that large firms have more resources and more specialized people who can help train which would make the adoption perhaps a little more smooth. What are you seeing as the attitude among different-sized firms about the adoption of legal tech?
Smaller and medium-sized firms are, in many ways, more enthusiastic in some ways about technology because for them, it's not nice to have. It's imperative for them to continue to be in business and continue to grow revenue because it helps them save time and helps them attract more clients and be more responsive to the needs of clients.
The good news is there are plenty of technologies that can assist small and medium firms as well as big firms. Look at Clio, for example, which is a legal workflow management slash legal matters management platform that can do a lot of different things, including billing and matter management. That has been very beneficial for small and medium-sized firms.
The good news is legal tech is for everyone. There aren't any tools. It's not intended or designed for just larger firms or bigger enterprises. It's intended for any sized firm or legal department. There are a lot of choices out there, which can be both a good and a bad thing in the sense that it's great to have many choices but on the other hand, too many choices feels like you don't have any choice at all because you're so overwhelmed and paralyzed.
That is all the more important to reiterate what I said earlier, which is focusing on what exactly is the problem you're trying to solve. Otherwise, it may fall into the trap of shiny key syndrome where everything looks wonderful and is going to be super beneficial. It may or may not be depending on what exactly you're trying to resolve.
I know with certain lawyers, there's a fear, and I've heard it expressed particularly with generative AI, that, "Legal technology's going to replace my job. It's going to make me less profitable. It's going to take away things that are lawyer roles." What's your answer to that?
My answer is multi-pronged. The first answer is that generative AI is here to augment, not to replace. In many ways, it is here to help you do your job better and help you spend time on more valuable tasks and spend less time on time-consuming, repetitive administrative work. That's number one. I said that about automation as well before generative AI.
Number two is generative AI has limitations. It remains a tool that is really good at data analysis and summarization. That's what it is. How it works is it looks for patterns and data. You provide it with a sentence and it looks for patterns in that sentence, matches it up with its dataset, and figures out, "This is what seems to be happening. This is the pattern, so this is how I should respond." That's how it works. It's limited by the data it has available, so it's not always going to be able to respond to every inquiry the way you would want it to.
In addition, in terms of replacing people or jobs, like any technology, it's here to perhaps change the types of tasks that you do but not to take over everything that you do. I'm going to be completely honest here. If all you're doing is purely administrative work that's a repetitive standardizable routine, technology and generative AI could possibly be helping you with that and could possibly be replacing you with that type of work. For the most part, it's not here to replace anyone or anything, but it's important to keep in mind the benefits and limitations of different types of technologies.
For someone who is interested in learning about legal tech as a general subject and then leading into perhaps how it could benefit their practices, are there any educational sources or even conferences that you would recommend that lawyers like that check out?
There are a couple of different resources I would suggest. Certainly, conferences like the ABA TECHSHOW, ClioCon, which is Clio's conference, and CLOC, which is a huge legal operations conference could be helpful. It really depends on what you're seeking to get out of these conferences. Keep in mind that these are bigger conferences, so a lot of people are going to be there and they're not necessarily there for all the same things.
I would also mention that if you are a firm, Legalweek in New York tends to be a good one that a lot of firms are attracted to. There are a lot of vendors that tend to be focused on law firms at that conference. In addition to other resources, there are a number of different online blogs that are worth reading like Artificial Lawyer. There's my website ColinSLevy.com. There's LawNext from Bob Ambrogi, which is very helpful. Those tend to be good resources. It depends upon what you're looking for, but all those resources I mentioned at conferences are probably good places to start looking if you're looking to learn more about this space overall.
We're still talking about generative AI. I'm wondering if you have specific thoughts on some real-world use cases for it. You've covered some of the things that it can do. We know it can handle summaries and does that very well. What are some things that you could tell lawyers who are curious about it but maybe haven't gotten into the ways that it would potentially help them in their practices?
There are a number of tools that have it incorporated into their systems where it can help with the review of contracts, identifying problematic language, and adjusting revisions to potential language. It can also assist on the legal research side by summarizing case law and drawing out trends and conclusions from those cases. Those are a couple of different use cases that can be helpful.
It also can be very helpful for frankly reviewing things for logical flow or coherence. It also can be particularly helpful with respect to perhaps making sense of a bunch of cases and figuring out whether this case would benefit from other cases to cite, from perhaps more data, or from a different type of approach that you're writing a brief and you're trying to present it before a certain judge. Generative AI and other legal research tools that have generative AI incorporated can help assist with tailoring your specific arguments so that you have a better chance of being successful before a specific judge based on what that judge typically likes to see and hear in a brief or argument.
There are a number of different use cases for generative AI. We're only getting started, but it's worth noting in the examples I mentioned that they all go back to data analysis and drawing trends from data because that is what generative AI is. It's a superpowered data analysis tool. It's building off of prior data analysis tools that have already existed and making those even more powerful. Will we see its abilities continue to expand? Absolutely. We've seen the rise of generative AI and its ability to create imagery, which is only going to improve, and video as well.
Although both of those use cases also have room with them a fair degree of risk in terms of deep fakes, which are videos of people that aren't those people saying things they never said. That can then lend itself to misinformation, which can be problematic. That means that we all need to be a little more skeptical of what we see and hear online. In general, these tools that have generative AI components are incredibly helpful because they're allowing for lawyers to make use of data in ways that were either not possible before or were super time-consuming and were possible but were problematic because of human's inability to do things in a rapid accurate manner.
It's an area that lawyers need to remember, particularly lawyers that practice in court near ethical duties to check and verify all of those things. That seems to be the stories that you hear about generative AI where lawyers get in trouble where they blindly trust it without understanding the limitations behind it. That's where they run into an issue citing a case that doesn't exist because AI has put together data. It's analyzed data in a way that has created a hallucination and the lawyers didn't understand that was a drawback.
Something that should be emphasized more is the fact that we all need to double-check our work, frankly. In addition, generative AI tools, for better or worse, are trained to give you an answer. They're not trained to say, "I don't have enough information," or, "I need more information to be able to do that," which is problematic. There should be more tools trained to tell you, "No," or tell you, "I don't have enough information," or, "No, I can't do that," because a lot of these tools are people pleasers. They give you what you want to see and hear, which may or may not be accurate.
That certainly was the case with the number of lawyers that used ChatGPT and realized it was giving them cases that weren't real, which, quite frankly, is less a function of technology going awry. It wasn't technology going awry at all. Technology did exactly what was asked to do. It was more of the lawyers not frankly being competent to check their own work and assuming that what they were being told was true. That is very odd considering lawyers are notorious for being skeptical, not believing everything they can hear and see.
Except when it advocates the positions favorable to their clients.
That's right. It saves them some time and effort.
You brought up hallucinations. I have a tiny little war story to tell that has to do with ChatGPT. I was talking with one of my colleagues here in the office. He, despite being far younger than I am, had not experimented with ChatGPT. He decided to log in and try it out. He put in some very esoteric concepts. He put my name in and asked what my thoughts were on a specific topic that is not something I write on or speak on.
GPT came up with a very detailed answer to what my platform was on this specific topic. It red-flagged and reinforced those concerns about you can't trust it when it's speaking in a vacuum because apparently, it will make stuff up. It's still doing it. That was an interesting interaction that I had with my colleague who, at my urging, had decided to give it a try. He said, "See what it brought back. It brought back all this stuff that I'm pretty sure you didn't say."
That's the thing. There's always going to be a degree of inaccuracy involved with these tools because it's limited in terms of this universe of data that it has available. That certainly remains something important for people to keep in mind going forward using the tools. They will get better, but it's going to take time.
Thinking about some different aspects of the business of law, we've covered the waterfront on the true lawyering of implementations of generative AI. From a broader perspective on administrative task lists or marketing task lists, it does seem like there are some very broad use cases there with the right prompts. You could get a lot of good feedback from ChatGPT or some other source on marketing, messaging, and things like that if it's able to draw from the big data set to try and bounce or evaluate the messaging that you're feeding into it.
The bottom line with these tools is it's incumbent upon all of us to be aware of their limitations as well as their benefits. Largely, that comes through something I mentioned earlier, which is experimentation.
I want to switch a little bit over to legal startups. I know that's an area that you are really interested in, legal tech startups. Where are you seeing some of the technology going, and what are some companies putting out there and coming up with?
Historically, I've seen legal tech startups focus on contracts, documents, and management and review of those documents and contracts. Now, I'm seeing more companies are focused on more nuanced areas such as patent drafting or review client communication, client transcribing, and litigation analytics. Those companies are really interesting to me because they're making use of the full data capabilities of generative AI, which is exciting.
I'll admit this. Despite not wanting anything to do with litigation or being a litigator, I found litigation analytics in that area of legal tech to be fascinating because these tools are really cool and powerful and, in many ways, reshaping what it means to be a litigator. It's turning litigation into a much more data-driven exercise where it used to be more focused on my X number of years of practice and how things tend to play out whereas now, you have data to back up your strategy and help indicate where you should go in terms of formulating the next steps in a particular litigation matter.
Can you drill down a little more on what you mean in terms of litigation analytics and what we're looking at?
Sure. When I'm talking about litigation analytics, what I'm talking about are a few different things. One is using case law to drive how you should draft perhaps a brief or some other litigation document for use in litigation. These tools can help you make a brief better by providing more specific analysis, providing a better, more supportive case law, and so on.
I'm also seeing tools that can help you provide a sense of the likelihood of a particular case being successful based on prior cases that are related or perhaps very similar to your own case based on prior cases and also based on prior cases going before a specific judge. Lastly, I'm seeing tools that can help you better craft arguments based on whomever your judge is in your case based on what they like, and so on.
There are a number of different areas within litigation analytics that are really cool and fascinating. It uses a very hefty use of data analysis to provide robust reporting and strategy for litigators. Frankly, I've also seen tools that can help with litigation analytics as much as it is analytics more generally, tools that can help you even figure out who might be best to have on a jury. We've certainly seen that in the movies, but it's not anything so nefarious. It's more about researching personality characteristics and other things about different types of jurors that may be helpful in terms of picking out the right jurors to have.
This makes me think that you can view some of these aspects of law practices being an art. The application of big data to this turns it more into a scientific exercise. We may have some difficulty as lawyers letting the computers draft our brief, but that idea of there being a predictive element and how that might apply to advising clients and strategy decision-making in litigation does seem to have the potential to be huge in the industry.
We're getting started with it too. There are a lot of exciting developments and certainly a lot more developments to come.
On the developments to come, is there anything you can speak of that you haven't talked about in the present tense? As something that's being developed, what do you see happening? I know we're in the middle of this huge transition across the board, but if you had to put on your predictor hat, what do you see the impact of legal tech being on law practice ten years from now?
I hate making predictions because I tend to be off and wrong about them, but at the very least, ten years from now, the law of practice can be even more data-driven. More than that, it's going to be perhaps focused less on providing advice to clients and more on helping clients develop and build solutions with them based on tools and data. It's going to be more building and less responding to queries.
Before we go, one thing I do want to ask is where can people find you. You are a resource. You've written books. You speak. I know you're on Twitter. How can people find more information about you and your materials?
I can certainly be found on Twitter and LinkedIn. My Twitter slash X handle is @CLevy_Law. On LinkedIn, look up my name, Colin Levy. You can also check me out at my website, ColinSLevy.com. And if you're interested, my book is The Legal Tech Ecosystem and is sold everywhere on Amazon.
I don't want to ask you to give too much away, but any other books in your future? It seems once you get started with that, it's probably something hard to let go.
I am taking a little break from books at the moment, but could there be potentially another one in the works at some point? Sure. I don't think that that's a distinct possibility, but I'm certainly not working on any at the moment.
I'm going to ask for a follow-up to that. What's your process for writing a book while holding down your day job, as it were? I'm curious.
I started writing in 2020. That was when the world was locked down. That helped a little bit. I also frankly found myself motivated to finally do it. The process started off haphazardly with me putting together various interviews I'd done and thinking, "These could possibly form the basis for a book about introducing people to the world of legal tech."
Through various iterations, I started writing more. Before I knew it, I had this mess of documents of half-written chapters and things and realized, "I need help putting this all together." I found a publisher who helped me put it all together and make sense of it and then helped me sell it through Amazon. That was a process. Overall, it was a three-year labor of love. It was more work and took longer than I expected, but at the same time, it was well worth it. Since I know what I would be getting myself into, would I do it again? I'm good with that.
That's good to hear. Hopefully, we warned you that it's our tradition on our show that we wrap up with a tip or a war story from our guests. There were a lot of tips we've covered, but do you have another as a parting thought for our audience?
Yeah. It's a war story but so much as a little brief lesson I learned early in my career. It is to never underestimate the power of collaboration and open communication. Earlier in my career, I was working for a big company. I was part of a small group developing an in-house document management solution, if you will. It was very rudimentary.
I learned very early on that we thought we knew what we were doing but we didn't. It was because of that combined with us not being as collaborative as we should have been at the time that it ended up being a challenging road. I learned a lot through that experience. Given that it was my first job out of law school, I did okay with all that being said.
Thanks for taking the time to be with us. I certainly appreciate what you bring to the table here and endorse the overall approach of lawyers experimenting with legal tech. I find it a fascinating topic and a lot of fun to spend time on. You can disappear down that rabbit hole pretty quickly if you're not careful, but if you're trying to solve a specific problem, that seems to me to be the right way to approach it. Thanks for spending the time with us.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you. It was a great conversation. I look forward to staying in touch. Thank you again.
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