In Episode 14 of The AAAi Podcast, hosts Bridget Mary McCormack and Zach Abramowitz are joined by Jennifer Leonard, founder of Creative Lawyers and a thought leader at the intersection of legal education, public service, and law firm innovation. Leonard shares why true transformation in legal services isn’t just about adopting new tools—it's about fundamentally rethinking systems, roles, and responsibilities. Her insights span the challenges of legal education, the ethical demands of AI, and how lawyers can become designers of better legal systems.
Key Takeaways
1. Traditional Education Can’t Keep Up—But Podcasting Can
Leonard taught an AI-focused class at Penn Carey Law with Bridget and quickly found the curriculum outdated before it even launched. The rapid evolution of AI technology demands new formats for legal education. Podcasting, Leonard suggests, offers a flexible and immediate way to share up-to-date insights with a wide audience—something traditional syllabi can’t match.
2. The Legal Team of the Future is a Human-AI Partnership
Leonard envisions tomorrow’s legal teams as a combination of experienced lawyers, junior professionals, and AI tools working in tandem. This collaborative model doesn't just increase efficiency—it enhances learning and decision-making across all levels of experience, creating a more dynamic and adaptive practice environment.
3. Using AI Isn’t Optional—It’s an Ethical Obligation
As AI becomes more integrated into professional services, Leonard makes a compelling case that engaging with these tools isn’t about trend-following—it’s about competence. Lawyers have a duty to provide the best outcomes for their clients, and ignoring the potential of AI may soon mean falling short of that ethical standard.
Final Thoughts: A Systems Approach to Legal Innovation
Leonard challenges the legal community to shift from simply preserving the status quo to actively designing better systems. Her work shows that tradition and innovation aren’t opposites—they’re collaborators. By embracing systems thinking and continuous learning, lawyers can become more than practitioners—they can be builders of a more effective and ethical legal future.
Transcript
Zach Abramowitz: I'm personally really excited about this podcast because it's with my co-host in law.
Bridget McCormack: Yes I'm less excited because I'm a little worried that you two hit it off and then you have your own podcast, and it gets weird and competitive. And I wanted to do a bit where I came in and found you podcasting together. But it's always a risk.
Zach Abramowitz: So, you record two podcasts?
Bridget McCormack: Yes
Zach Abramowitz: I record two podcasts. Jen records I think at least two podcasts. Wait, let's find out a little bit more about you for folks who may not be aware of you yet. Jen, tell us about yourself. Tell us what you're doing with legal AI. Tell us about your podcast tell us everything.
Jennifer Leonard: First of all, thank you so much for having me, and it's such a pleasure to be in the company of my podcaster in law. Is that what we, you have coined this?
Zach Abramowitz: It was co-host in law, but I like podcaster in law better.
Jennifer Leonard: Okay. Okay. The veil has dropped between the podcasts. It's like a very special episode. So, my name is Jen. I am the founder of a company called Creative Lawyers. We really focus on helping our clients who range from law firms to corporate in-house counsel, to teams like the American Arbitration Association.
Think about the changing dynamics in the legal profession and how to apply frameworks that have been used in other industries. Frameworks like design thinking and systems thinking into our own industry and help drive change in a way that's healthy and supportive and humane for the people in our organizations.
Zach Abramowitz: Before you got into AI, you were a lawyer, like lawyer's lawyer. Tell us a bit about that.
Jennifer Leonard: I was, not for very long, but I was a lawyer's lawyer many years ago. I was a litigation associate in a law firm in Philadelphia. Before that, I clerked for our state Supreme court. And then I went to work for the City of Philadelphia's law department where I was chief of staff for five years. And then I was recruited to return to my alma mater Penn Law. To build the first center on professionalism, which really taught law students a lot of the skills that I think the three of us would agree, make you really effective in practice, but are never taught in law school. Things like building relationships and leading teams and leveraging technology to create more efficient outcomes for your clients.
And in that process I was teaching classes about law firm business models, and this was post Great Recession. And every guest said this is the moment when the whole profession's going to change. And every year they said that, and it didn't seem like the whole profession was about to change. And I got really interested in why that's the case.
If we're not serving most people in small businesses, if corporate clients are frustrated. And so our dean wanted to launch an innovation center at Penn to think about all of those things and learn from the other schools across campus about how they have transformed their own industries. And that's where I got to meet Bridget and others working on similar issues and then really got into innovation and thinking about those things and wanted to do it in a bigger way in my own way.
Zach Abramowitz: in your own way, and it strikes me that you're deeply involved in Philadelphia. At multiple levels in the law firm community at the academic level working for the city.
Jennifer Leonard: Yes
Zach Abramowitz: Is that by design or did it just work out that way?
Jennifer Leonard: Yes, no we're inextricably intertwined. I'm never leaving Philadelphia and Philadelphia's never leaving me.
Bridget McCormack: But your clients are all over the world.
Jennifer Leonard: Totally.
Bridget McCormack: You're on the road a lot.
Jennifer Leonard: I actually have almost no clients in Philadelphia. It's rare that I'm actually at home to do something. And I was talking with somebody this morning who was saying that she’s trying to transform her company into a way that she could stay more local because she’s travelling all the time. So I can sympathize with that. I was born and bred in Philly and I'm married to a Philly boy, so we're not leaving the city. But I frequently am not there anymore because I'm all over the place. Talking to people like you who are also all over the place.
Zach Abramowitz: We all, as I said before, we all do a lot of podcasting in addition to just getting your name out there and being a recognized brand and a recognized face, and I'm sure you probably have a lot of people coming over to you at Legal Week saying, I see you all the time. And so there's that element of it. But what are some of the other benefits from your perspective? To having not one, but two podcasts.
Jennifer Leonard: Yes. This is one thing that Bridget and I have really come together around is the idea that. In a world before the last few years, the way that we were sharing information with one another was very unscalable. So in education you had the sage on the stage model, and Bridget and I were co-teaching a class at Penn Law actually on AI. And Bridget would fly in every week from Detroit. And we would have 16 students who are amazing and eager and engaged, but there's 16 of them. And so I think podcasting is a great medium for being able to keep people up to speed on a topic that moves as quickly as AI does in a way where we're literally meeting people all over the globe who've heard some of our conversations.
And I think that we're moving into a direction where those old models are just not going to be able to keep pace. Or be structured in a way that lets people learn what they need to learn in the moment, in whatever duration that is, whatever format that is. You remember us trying to come up with our syllabus for the first year We taught AI together. It was like March and we weren't teaching until September. And we were like, what can we possibly put in a syllabus right
Bridget McCormack: There's there, it would be irresponsible to build a syllabus in March about AI.
Jennifer Leonard: Totally. And I had not worked with Bridget as long at that point, and I thought. This person is going to think I'm so flaky because every time we get together to plan this syllabus, the end result is we can't plan this syllabus. And we really couldn't until August because the class was starting in September. And I just don't think that's a world where we're able to educate people in the way that they need to be educated. So podcasting I think is a great way to at least start having conversations that are just in time for people.
Bridget McCormack: We both have worked in law schools for a long time, so we both think a lot about the ways in which American legal education has some enormous barriers to figuring out how to approach this moment. Having to teach on a semester schedule, you have something really important to teach. You can't teach it until next September, right? Then you have to teach it in 14 weeks and it has to be either three credits or four credits. And it has to meet three times a week.
Zach Abramowitz: You have to find doctrinal, precedent cases that are somehow relevant. So, you can call it a law school course.
Bridget McCormack: it's usually in a classroom and, I actually feel badly for law school administrators right now because I think that the handcuffs that they have on them are really going to prevent them from taking advantage of what I think is a really disruptive moment. Where, and other schools are able to take advantage of this.
Zach Abramowitz: Sometimes I feel like the administrators may put the handcuffs on themselves. Because you and I share an alma mater and won't specifically name anyone, but I did try to take a course. I took a course in accounting and I felt that like really very useful. It was called Accounting for Lawyers. So I went to the dean and said there's this course taught in the business school on financial statements. I'd like to deepen my understanding of this and take that course. So can I get sign off on it? He said that's not relevant to you as like a lawyer. And I said, you have a course right now being taught called Shakespeare and the Law? And he said and the law
Okay. So can we call it financial statements and the law? But I want to get to a point about that because you talk so often about fixing legal's operating system. Now you talk about it within the context of dispute resolution. But it seems to me one of the major parts of our operating system are the academies. That teach law.
Bridget McCormack: Yes,
Zach Abramowitz: There's a lot that can be done there too, right? Isn't that part of the no doubt. The broken operating system.
Bridget McCormack: No doubt. Although I do think the structural barriers are really significant. One of the reasons Jen and I are developing educational materials together and distributing it through PLI and directly on websites is because we think the moment needs it. We actually think, like you can't wait for the law school to come up with a course after the task force and the committee meeting and the hearing and the blah, blah, blah. Then it's on
Jennifer Leonard: the voting
Bridget McCormack: oh the voting. It's just not practical. So I do think the structural barriers are significant. There are some deans who are way ahead of the curve. And I think there's an opportunity for law schools that are maybe not in the T 14 to really leapfrog their way into being relevant. Because employers are going to care about whether their law students have, the modern, skills and education to succeed in a totally different legal market. So Andy Perman at Suffolk is spending every free minute he can on thinking about how to. Give his law students the kind of education they need to succeed in a really rapidly changing legal world and some others but it’s hard.
Jennifer Leonard: It’s really hard and the structural barriers that Bridget’s talking about. So I've met with so many people who are practitioners, alums, they know what people should be learning in law school, but to be inside of law schools and really appreciate that if you don't have voting rights on the curriculum. You have very little ability to change it. So I would have conversations in my role on the administrative side where I'm hearing everything, but I don't have any voting rights. And in many American law schools, the doctrinal faculty have voting rights. But the legal writing skills faculty don't, or the professional development people or the research librarians don't.
Zach Abramowitz: The cast system.
Bridget McCormack: There's more hierarchy on a law school faculty than any ancient society. Like literally.
Jennifer Leonard: And it tends to box out the people who are most closely connected with practice from actually having any power over changing things. I think there's a million ways that you can make it better, but the structures and the barriers are really intense. And imagine picking any law school and trying to create what we were able to create quickly online through PLI, it would just be a headache, right? Yeah. You just would not really get started or make much traction.
Zach Abramowitz: So I want, I want to come back to the PLI partnership in full detail, but I have to pick up on a note because you said, training students and knowing what their employers need. And it occurs to me that the entire model of law schools and really of universities is to train people to work for employers. And what we might be seeing happening in real time is that the idea of going to work for an employer might itself be legacy. It might be actually outdated. And what we might start to see more is not just law schools that teach students, Hey, listen, the employers out there are really thinking about, new skills that you need and we're giving those skills to you. What about a law school that teaches students you have a law degree? Go out and get work, go out and do work, and go out and start a firm maybe coming out of school very quickly. Maybe there's a different path to that. And we talked earlier about the real winners in AI being entrepreneurial attorneys.
We maybe need to see, start thinking about that. And you and I are big fans of Y Combinator and one of the interesting things is that when Paul Graham talked about founding Y Combinator. He actually talked about it as a new model for university that, he and his wife who started YC together, were going to be like, the professors and the students were going to come for a term and they were going to teach them everything they knew about startups and empower them to go forward. And it's not called a university, but let's be honest today. Putting YC alum on LinkedIn is like writing Harvard Business School. It's like writing Yale Law School or Stanford, engineering or, computer science. It's really like a great stamp of approval and it did empower people to go off and be great entrepreneurs.
So I think that, there's so much that seems, ingrained in the sort of legacy, academic model. To me, once people figure out how to create what might be the law school of the future, I think it's one of, I've said this to you before, it's the single biggest opportunity out there. It’s just how to do it, what that go-to market looks like. Who knows? But maybe it's not called to law school. I don't know.
Bridget McCormack: I think it might not be called the law school. It might be like some post law school, like Y Combinator for law graduates like training Academy or something. But I do think that there's more opportunity in people rethinking how we educate lawyers right now than ever before. I even think like the regulatory structure might be a little bit more flexible in the coming years. So yes, we should keep thinking about that.
Zach Abramowitz: Jen, you and Bridget recently put out. A very highly produced video partnership with PLI from the American Arbitration Association, but a strategy for law firms. We were talking about this before about fixing the operating system means empowering the profession. Talk to us about this course. And where people can get it and the significance of it.
Jennifer Leonard: We, my team which is my partner, Mariel and I, we were working a lot with law firms and doing a lot of AI literacy presentations, which I think are still really essential right now. The follow up conversation at the dinners afterward and the cocktail reception are can you come in and help us build a roadmap for how we might do this? And at the same time, I'm of course working with Bridget on many different things and watching her actually execute in real time a roadmap for AI integration in her organization. And we had been having these conversations about lack of scalability. How can we reach more people? And we thought, why don't we come together and we at Creative lawyers can learn about what Bridget and her team are doing, and then create an online opportunity where law firm leaders who don't have access to somebody to come in and help guide their strategy, can learn about the roadmap, and then take adaptable worksheets and exercises that they can use to customize for their firm, because there's just only so much bandwidth that we have to go present. So we had the chance to come together and learn from Bridget's amazing teams. I spent about a month with all of them, 12 of them maybe, learning exactly what they had been going through for the last two years, and then unpacking all of that and repackaging it into a sequenced curriculum that anybody can access online. Michael Joseloff has taught me it’s the AAAIcourse.org It's six modules. It's very efficient. It's about 30 minutes per module, and that gives you the content that you need to understand. But the really important work is the work that you do in your firm environment with your teams to take that information and use the activities that we've embedded into the program to think about how it applies in your firm. So it's to the earlier point of legal education, this is a learner-centric model. This is not us giving you just content and then assessing you on the content. It's trying to meet people where they are and where they need to be and give them the tools to do what Bridget and her team are doing.
Zach Abramowitz: Yes, and we talked about this with Michael earlier, that the AAA, its roots are really as a highly evangelical company, not in the religious sense. They were religiously evangelical about dispute resolution, and they were a very loud organization. They were very media savvy. They did everything they could to put dispute resolution in front of mind for the entire business community. They were very effective at doing it. And then there is a sort of period pre Bridget at the AAA where the AAA might have been a little bit quieter, but I think that this is part of that real shift and to not just our podcast and the other podcast that you're doing, but this education piece is a big part of trying to like help advance the cause of AI and legal because it obviously has an impact then on the AAA.
Bridget McCormack: Yes, Jen and I get asked to do a lot of presentations together, and Jen usually does the level setting on the technology and she is able to talk about it in a non-threatening way. And then she does the structure around a lot of what I was doing. And I, at the AAA we've been as, busy just running really fast to figure out a lot of what this is going to look like for our 100-year-old business. And without Jen and her team, coming in and actually like dissecting it and then putting it back together in structured modules. I would not have been able to deliver that in that kind of format. But we are constantly asked from law firms that we present to can you come just come sit with our team for a little while and help us do that? And I'm like, I have this other full-time job. I can't do that.
Zach Abramowitz: Yeah. No but it's so interesting 'cause the AAAs. AI journey is, I think, creating a really strong blueprint for other organizations to look at it. And I've talked before about Domino's is a tech company masquerading as a pizza company, right? They've made that massive change, which is why over the last 25 years they've seen the kind of like growth that, that you look at you, if I showed you a graph of their stock, you'd think I was showing you like Facebook or Nvidia, like they've grown significantly. It was because they adopted all the technology and the data practices that they did, very early on.
Bridget McCormack: I do love their dashboard. I love to know how my pizza's getting made
Zach Abramowitz: and but I think that they taught other organizations. They, they really did give a blueprint for, wow, okay. They can be successful. And it wasn't who you would've expected. And the AAA has really done that very effectively. We don't task force this task force and subcommittee this to death. Don't overthink this. Get moving. We talked with Ryan before about action, leading to information. So, it's incredible that you have that blueprint and that law firms can use this because I think law firms traditionally didn't necessarily have the best rollout plans for new stuff and might have been guilty of the task committee mentality.
Jennifer Leonard: Yes, and I think to the earlier point of the conversation about legal education and the Y Combinator point, we had also been separately working with Sharon Crane and her team at PLI on innovation work. It just seemed all three organizations, AAA, PLI, and Creative Lawyers were really of the same mindset around change and as unsettling as all of the change happening around us can be, I think it creates all these opportunities that I honestly don't think 10 years ago the market would've been receptive to something like this, that maybe it would've even occurred to us to come together around a collaborative project like this. And one of my hopes is that. A. people start to be more accepting of things like that. We move a little bit away from the traditional brands, and that has to be the only way you can possibly be educated, but also people can stand up new projects across organizations where there's complimentary skill sets and expertise to create something totally new and impactful.
And I've just been very excited over the last couple years. Obviously because of the AI moment that is driving a lot of this, but also on the heels of Covid and people being more fluid in the way that they work and frankly for junior lawyers, the skill disruption that happened during that period also offers new opportunities for other courses that we could collaborate around in the future.
Zach Abramowitz: And it's so interesting that you mentioned Covid, because I think there was chat, GPT and AI were bound to have significant adoption no matter what because they're incredible products. However, I think the fact that the AI revolution immediately followed Covid is part of the reason we saw such massive adoption because when people were working during Covid, they were working alone and they didn't always have the easy ability to ask questions and wait, hold on a second. How do we do this? It was a lonely experience. Now, lawyer work. Has always been a very lonely experience. Go to a practice floor of a law firm. It's not an open work concept. They're so quiet. It's very quiet. So quiet. Yeah. It's very quiet. It's very reserved. You could sit in a law firm for, a week without going home, which I've done and not talk to a single other person. It's very solitary and I think that part of what's what people loved about AI is like.
And I finally have someone to talk to and I have someone to think this through and help me with this. And where has this been? And I think had people been in the office when that happened, it might not have taken off quite in the same way that it did. And I think the other sort of part that you talked about is the ability to upskill. When I think about like why lawyers find AI so useful. It's because so much of their job, like a senior partner, is to push work down to associates. The problem is associates aren't always great at doing that work and knowing what it is they're supposed to do. And now if a lawyer wants an immediate answer back, doesn't want to wait for that associate, they've got a pretty good way to do it. And they have the confidence now of saying, Hey, I'm going to push this work down to a junior associate and they better be able to teach themselves. You know what it is they need to do? They can have this conversation with ChatGPT and upskill them. So not for the output, but for to help upskill me as an attorney. Oh, I don't know how to draft a disclosure schedule. You should be able to learn now.
Bridget McCormack: But is the market going to bear all those associates doing all that work anymore now that ChatGPT can do it?
Zach Abramowitz: So I think that there's a little bit of a yes and no to that.
Winston Weinberg from Harvey was just talking about this on Kleiner Perkins podcast and he was saying that ChatGPT is not eliminating jobs right now. It is eliminating tasks. And he says now at the point where it's eliminating 70% of tasks that lawyers do then to a certain extent it is, yes eliminating a job. But I think that my, my instinct is that the Jevons paradox will hold here and there'll be more work for lawyers to ever do. There's going to be more work for lawyers.
Bridget McCormack: But don’t know what it's going to look like overflow work. That is that, that made that model work the leverage
Zach Abramowitz: My sense is that there will be more work, but I just don't know what it is.
Jennifer Leonard: Yes I share Bridget's concern. I really do worry about the junior ranks of the profession for the reasons that Bridget's pointing out. Also, you've heard this forever. The junior levels of law firm lawyering. All of that training is subsidized by corporate clients who never liked subsidizing it in the first place, but they didn't have tools really to do much about it. And now you've got this democratization of all these tools. And I saw this week, I mean it was not a very scientific study, but it was of in-house counsel and it's 90% of in-house counsel are currently playing with Gen AI and trying to figure out how it helps them reshape their outside counsel spend. They're not interested in reshaping that high level strategic counseling they get. They're really interested in that overflow bucket and reshaping that. And if you have law schools that are so slow to change. And that contraction happens in those early years. I share your belief that ultimately senior lawyers will send to more junior lawyers work and have them orchestrate the AIs to perform that work. And we've talked about whether there's crossover, a cross practice groups where you're no longer just a litigation associate or just a tax associate, but can do it all. But I think it requires some stewardship at that connection point between education and practice, that I don't have a lot of confidences being developed.
Zach Abramowitz: So I've given thought about this as well and my instinct is that the firms that are going to get this right are going to rethink the leverage model altogether, and they're going to function a little bit more like teaching hospitals and they're going to make it clear to clients not that you're subsidizing this, but that the single best work product will come when there is a grizzled veteran scar tissue laden attorney senior who is working with a naive but fresh eyed junior attorney. And AI in the room all at once, that is going to be maybe not forever, but maybe that sort of next phase, that's what the best firms are going to look like. Where it's no I know you don't know as much as I do and that's exactly why I want you here helping me with this. I'm not going to push down junk work to you.
So I think that's going to be a big change. And I don't know that every firm is going to go in that direction and maybe new firms start to head there. Thats one iteration of that. So it kind of goes to the point I was saying before yes, I don't know if lawyers are going to draft and redline more agreements that, is doing more of what we do now. But I do think there is a version of a successful law firm that in many ways feels a lot like the firms of today. But I can tell you, and I think a lot of lawyers feel this way I don't feel like I got great training.
Bridget McCormack: Oh, we say that all the time.
Zach Abramowitz: If great training meant like being up at 2:00 AM in the morning, like breaking into tears over the fact that I couldn't read someone's ridiculous hand markup. And if that was like training me to be tough, then I guess it was good training. If it was training me to not to work long hours, but not substantive,
Bridget McCormack: I don't think we should shed many tears if the model that's been in practice for a long time, goes by the wayside. And there's some other model. I know everybody went through it and we had nothing else. So we all thought,
Zach Abramowitz: this is how we train lawyers the last 30 years. It's not has been, it's not like this has been the model like for like once upon a time there were real apprenticeships, like
Bridget McCormack: that's right.
Zach Abramowitz: But I do think there's obviously holes. How are you thinking about this and like telling firms and how are you getting them even to the point where. Beyond just the AI literacy that they like start taking seriously. What are we going to do when that happens?
Jennifer Leonard: Yeah they are taking it seriously in my experience. They might be self-selecting because if we're coming in to work with them, they obviously think that this is important. But we do firm-wide surveys. We do bookend surveys when we work with a firm at the beginning and the end, and we ask them things like, how frequently are you hearing from your clients about Gen AI? And we're able to see even over the last 16 months or so, a jump in the percentage of attorneys. Who are being questioned by their clients about Gen AI and that is the thing that will move the needle for them. We, to your point about the models, we literally in the presentation that Bridget and I do, we have a slide that has that triangle of the traditional leverage labor model, and then when we click, it turns into smaller triangles.
Because I agree with you, I think the future is a more experienced lawyer, a less experienced lawyer, and an AI working in a little triad together to figure things out. My sense is that the firms right now that I find really interesting and think will win, at least in the short term, are more mid-sized firms where the lawyers are more deeply connected with one another. Culturally, in a lot of these places, they have practiced together for a really long time. They're not your laterals from big global brands who are just going to move around every couple of years. And they're not as highly leveraged. So when they hire people, they're making real investments in the idea that they will someday become partners.
And they tend to be working with clients with whom they have really deep relationships and maybe are also not as advanced in terms of pushing for Gen AI. So they have a lot of attributes that I think historically have put them at a disadvantage that now I think become an advantage for the ones that are being thoughtful about it, to deepen those relationships, to continue trying to upskill their associates and make their associates feel more confident that they want them involved for the long term. A lot of my former students work in big law and I don't think many of them have that confidence that their law firm cares whether they're there, that's the model, right? They're not supposed to be there over time. Yes, and I'll give you one anecdote from Covid that shows how disrupted everything became and this terrible training model. I was working with a former student and she called me because she was at a big law firm, had never actually been there because she graduated into Covid and she got an email in the middle of the night from a partner with an attachment of a PDF of a type of document she did not recognize. And it just said, please handle at three in the morning. And she said, I don't know what I'm supposed to handle. I don't know who this person is emailing me. So she mailed in her laptop to her one firm and got a laptop from another firm and like $10,000 more a year to move over there. That's the kind of training model that we had.
Except before I could walk down the hallway and say to Zach, who had worked with this partner what are they talking about? Yes. But it goes to your point of being lonely. Like at that time there was no ChatGPT, so maybe ChatGPT could have helped her at that time. The culture really matters, and it's hard to define what culture is, but now that I get to visit all these different firms, you can feel it in the room when there's a good culture.
Zach Abramowitz: By the way, just to have to tell the story that like what I was mostly doing when I was going to a more senior attorney who had worked with that partner was I can't read their handwriting. I know you've worked with them a lot. What does that say? And yes, , there was so much talk about, how are we like going to possibly train attorneys if they're not in the office and not take a step back and say
Bridget McCormack: Were we nailing it?
Zach Abramowitz: Were we nailing it before?
Jennifer Leonard: it was such a good model. It's really tragic that it's going away, and I remember being this like nervous associate trying to do all the right things, and my evaluations every year were all about the billable hour. Like you need to get your billables up, you have to meet target now. I felt lucky because I got to work on a lot of smaller matters that allowed me to have more substantive experience. But my colleagues would be on huge doc reviews where they could just bill all day long. So they were getting better evaluations and now they understand the model more. That's because they were doing their function in the model. But I would love to see a day where your value as a lawyer is separated from how many hours you're billing a year and you're more valued for your substantive contribution and talent and skill as a lawyer. I also think there's just huge wellbeing benefits. And keeping people in the profession more who leave because that's just not a lifestyle that they want.
Zach Abramowitz: Yes. Would you, if you were to give a snapshot of where lawyers are in terms of AI today versus six months ago, are you seeing a major delta?
Jennifer Leonard: Yes. I am I said to Bridget, I think over the holiday break, lawyers spent a lot of time with ChatGPT because the questions we get at the end of presentations now are much more sophisticated than they were in the fall. Much less skeptical. Much more resigned.
Bridget McCormack: Everyone seems resigned, finally resigned there. Definitely there's, I feel like there was like, for a year and a half that everyone was like and I was, we, our presentation was mostly no, seriously, guys. That was our presentation. And that's not it anymore.
Zach Abramowitz: There's this recent Law 360 survey.
Bridget McCormack: We have the slide
Zach Abramowitz: That shows that the more you use AI, the more you like it. And the shocking thing was. Lawyers don't seem to look at billable hours as being threatened by AI. We'll see how that plays out. But it does feel, and that's my sort of snapshot as well, that within the last, like you said, three months. Where there's been a really significant uptick. Last year there was this Bain survey that came out that said that the expectations of lawyers in October, 2023 of AI were very high in February, 2024 that had the most significant negative delta of any industry. I think we've moved beyond that now and we are seeing genuine real adoption. I'm not sure that all of lawyers have figured out just how powerful it is, but I think they
Bridget McCormack: or how to use it
Zach Abramowitz: Or how to use it. I think there's still, can the reason I say that is the survey also showed that most lawyers think it's really good for like administrative tasks. I feel like you're missing the fact that it is good for the most complicated stuff that you do. Not the least.
Jennifer Leonard: I totally agree with you and I, it's like vibe coding, it's like vibe presenting or something. Like last summer I felt like we were in the trough of disillusionment, like the spring in our work. People were really still hungry for it. And then by the summer.There was so much crankiness about Gen AI and like it's not as good as it is, but I think at that point, just to underscore what you're saying, Zach, like lawyers, were going to the thing that they do every day as lawyers and they're like, draft me a lease. And then they would spit it out and be like, see, clause G is not what I would've put in it.
Instead of zooming out and being like, this thing can help you think through new revenue streams. We did a workshop with a law firm where we were using a hypothetical RFP and a frontier model, so there's no proprietary information and at the tables, this one group of lawyers like realized that there was this whole other service offering for this type of client that they served all the time. By asking Claude to basically take the perspective of a GC and share something outside the bounds of the RFP that they might not be communicating but are thinking about. And they're like, oh we could also offer that. And we have the slide and I guess like it's the point where I have to mention Ethan Mollack, because we have to do that in every presentation we do. But he says the big thorny questions are the ones that cause more stress and are more important than the narrow applications. But it feels like that's starting to get through to people.
Zach Abramowitz: So you mentioned this summer, and I'm going to make a hard prediction and I'm careful with my predictions. This is one we're going to hear the same exact thing.
Bridget McCormack: That we did last summer?
Zach Abramowitz: Yes. There's going to be, because we've heard it now, two summers in a row. If you recall the summer of 2023, we heard the ChatGPT traffic is all down. SimilarWeb had this statistic and then what happened? People went back to school, people went back to work, and actually it picked up, then again, last summer, the Wall Street Journal published a big article Chris Mims one of their key writers is the AI revolution losing steam? It becomes a narrative every single summer, and I think we're going to get it this year. And I will simultaneously predict that by the fall, those narratives have also faded. I think there is just AI it's not for summers. That's what we're finding out.
Jennifer Leonard: Do you think it's because it requires an investment of energy and in the summer we're just like over the investment of energy and I just can't think about this anymore. So I'm going to be frank.
Zach Abramowitz: I think that most people do the majority of their work in the year between January and the end of June.
And then I think people pick up again, lawyers in particular, the summer,
Bridget McCormack: they like downturn.
Zach Abramowitz: I think we're all trained from very early ages that the summer is
Bridget McCormack: We are on an academic calendar
Zach Abramowitz: Yeah we live on an academic calendar. And I think that's effectively what happens. I'm still using ChatGPT all summer long, but I understand the world, might not be. And so I think we're going to see that exact same thing again this year. But, and I think it'll, again. Be nonsense, but I agree, but it does come up and I think right now my sense is that, there's been a breakthrough and I think we're going to only see the adoption go up from here.
Jennifer Leonard: I think the other thing that we're starting to see with clients that we work with is they are taking the right approach now of how might my competitor and my opposing counsel be using this? And that was not something that we were hearing a lot at the beginning of our work. It was just this is how the firm has done it forever. This is never going to change.
Zach Abramowitz: is Cravath using it?
Jennifer Leonard: I always joke in presentations and I say to the firm what do you think? The number one question we get from firm clients is, and it takes four questions, but they always get it. What are other firms doing with this technology? And until there's a leader, we all want to be fast followers, we're not going to do anything about it. But there seems to be this realization now. Oh, okay, if everybody's starting to take this seriously, that means that I am opposing a lawyer who's using this really advanced technology. And that puts me at a disadvantage not only from a business standpoint, but eventually from an ethical standpoint.
We have that example that I still love of the plaintiff side lawyer who was negotiating in a wrongful death case and they were between six and $700,000 and they went to trial and the plaintiff side lawyer used ChatGPT to unearth this interview with a defense expert that they wouldn't have otherwise found that directly contradicted his evidence at trial and they won seven and a half million dollars for their clients.
Zach Abramowitz: Wow.
Jennifer Leonard: And those are the kinds of stories I think are going to help lawyers see. Like it will be unethical not to use, I can't be, not the game. that you're seeing
Zach Abramowitz: Yeah. And you're seeing, the big investments so far in, in legal AI, like we talk about like the Harvey's and the Legora and that whole crew. But the biggest investment has been into plaintiff's attorney tech, like lower entry Evenup, Eve, Lawpros, supio, there's a bunch and it's interesting. I feel like defense hasn't caught up yet, and that's probably what's coming next because lawyers are deeply competitive and they may not want to use a tool that makes them more efficient. But they certainly don't like if the other side is using it, then we're using it too.
Jennifer Leonard: One other interesting thing that we're seeing in our work and I'm curious to see how this accelerates adoption is clients are now having ChatGPT give feedback on work product of their firm attorneys when the firms are not allowed to use ChatGPT. And so now they're trying to respond to criticism of their own work by an AI and that's accelerating. Interest internally of we need to know what ChatGPT is going to say about our brief before we send it to our clients.
Zach Abramowitz: Listen, this has been so much fun and we could probably geek out here for hours. We'll have to have you on my pod.
Jennifer Leonard: Totally. Go on yours.
Zach Abramowitz: Yeah,
Jennifer Leonard: we can take up the rest of the year or at least till summer when people
Zach Abramowitz: we can't do it in front of Bridget.
Jennifer Leonard: No, obviously not. We'll text offline
Zach Abramowitz: There you go. Anyway, Jen, thank you so much. And one more time. Where can people find this new PLI. Course AAAIcourse.org
Jennifer Leonard: Correct. That's right. Thank you.
Zach Abramowitz: Thanks for tuning into today's episode of the AAAI Podcast. Please consider leaving us a rating and review on your favorite podcasting platform, and don't forget to follow and subscribe so that you never miss an episode.