EP063: Artificial Intelligence with Dr. Cain Elliott, Filevine’s Ai Futurist

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening, whatever time this podcast finds you. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. We have a great episode today I was at Great Legal Marketing with my friend, Dr. Cain Elliot. And he is the head legal futurist at file vine, and he's creating real artificial intelligence products. And there's a lot of hype out there about AI, but this guy is actually building AI. He's a, you know, rock star computer sciences, computer scientists has a whole team of people, and it's a fantastic conversation. I hope you'll enjoy it. We cover things like you know, what is AI? What, what is it really? What are some great AI tools for personal productivity. He talks about the actual products, they're building for file blind, they just launched a new product, where you can do AI as an immigration attorney, and he built it as a personal passion play. Some of the new things that are coming up over at file vine and file vine, of course, is a case management system. If you don't know, you know, I always like to cover a few personal things when I meet interesting people in the legal realm, things like his hobbies and passions and what podcasts he listens to. And some of his best business books. You know, sit down, relax, or keep going on your run. Or you can go wherever you are, and enjoy my conversation with file plans.

Dr. Cain Elliott. Game just got off stage. Dr. Cain, congratulations. That was awesome.

Dr. Cain Elliot: Thank you. It was a lot of fun. And Jay, say your talk. On the first day right after my arrival, I caught that as well, which was fantastic. So a lot of fun here. Well, thank

you. Thank you. Yeah, it's been a great few days here at GLM, Great Legal Marketing, I guess, to mastermind, and sessions and whatnot. So it's really been great. So, you know, I'd like you to start, you know, at the bottom, and kind of, we'll work our way up in terms of sophistication, complexity, and whatnot, you know, at the very basics, like, what is artificial intelligence,

Dr. Cain Elliot: that's a good place to start. I think for a lot of people, it's very confusing, because you don't, normally we don't talk through those things, people just see AI everywhere. And it sounds like a magical thing, or black box. And so one of the things that's most important to me, for people in the space and those working in the legal profession is to eliminate some of that black box effect in the feeling. I think what that creates, and what I was saying that on stages, for a lot of people that creates a feeling of either this panacea and best thing never happened, or it's an object of terror best to be avoided. Unlike other most things that human beings great, it's just gray somewhere in the middle. And so it's important to remember that artificial intelligence is, for the most part, a set of techniques that people have developed, that are supposed to enable machines to perform more complex cognitive tasks, whether that means extracting certain pieces of data, or whether that means completing phrases. The most common example I give everybody for starting point is everybody that I know has already interacted with AI, even if they don't know it. And the reason they've done that is because one, as you know, in the marketing space, they get that in their feed, and plenty of different places where there's AI, arranging the way they're going to use certain things or algorithms behind that,

as well. Facebook's picking what to show you next using AI. Google's using AI to

Dr. Cain Elliot: where I think the mother lode of search results in this example right now it's Tik Tok is all about using AI all the time to deliver what video is next. And I'm not on tick tock, but I hear it's quite addictive on that basis.

I'm not a tick talker. But I've noticed YouTube has gotten really good. Yes. You know, like in my feed is you know stuff about marketing and AI, and Winnipeg Jets, my hockey team and the Miami Dolphins my football team. Yeah. And I guess they know, based on how long I've watched videos and stuff, what what I want to see next.

Dr. Cain Elliot: And the main, I think the main thing that other people have interacted with before too is everybody's used in autocomplete in their text messages or emails where it starts a response you should get Yeah, like if

you use Gmail, yeah, you start a sentence. Or if you do a Google search, it completes your search. And it shows you a suggestive search. We've actually figured out how to hack that and get our client in the first spot in the second spot for Google suggestive search. Well, that's another webinar. But that's not AI.

Dr. Cain Elliot: No, yeah, but the most important thing about AI for people to understand is it's a set of techniques that are utilized in order to allow machine means to perform tasks where you haven't had to give all the instructions in advance. And that's really the critical difference. Everybody has experienced working with computers and machines have every part of their life where the goal was, how do I tell this machine that otherwise doesn't know what steps need to be taken to perform an action or get a set of information? I mean, and what you're trying to enable with artificial intelligence allow the machine itself to figure out those steps without even giving all the instructions. That's the basic process.

When I'm presenting, I try and explain AI is evolved. And the first time I really, really opened my eyes was when IBM's Deep Blue beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, yes. And then five or six years later, AI won Jeopardy against Ken Jennings and the other Jeopardy champions. Now, it seems like everything's AI and you started touch on that a minute ago? Is it really AI? Or is it just become sexy? To say that you do AI in your market is about?

Dr. Cain Elliot: It's so from what I've seen, there's a lot of nonsense AI out there. One that's just not even AI. I mean, I've seen companies that are selling AI, that's actually just outsource humans typing somewhere, without it really worries me. So when people will say, for example, you know, our AI is best in class. And they say, okay, so if I give you triple the amount of work, and like me get the work product back in the same amount of time, and they say no, then it would extend three to five days longer. That sounds a lot more like human throughput than it does machine throughput. So there's some of that, not a lot in the legal space, at least. But there is some of that there is a lot of it that's just attached height for uses plugins where every program says it has some kind of chat, and you can deep log in with no sense of why that would be valuable or efficacious to us. So we are going through a cycle that's like that I think what's a little bit different is, I don't think it's a cycle, that is going to be a bubble in the same way that like everybody's hype around, let's say cryptocurrency was where no one can find a real purpose or use for it. But everybody wanted to be part of it. This is quite different. Because as I was showing today, on stage, you can look at direct impact on your work and work products and quality and ability to work. And so I think, here, you don't have to with AI, you're not searching for a reason to utilize it. You're searching a lot of people right now are searching for ways of could I avoid it or avoid it touching my life? And I think the answer there is no. But also it's not. There's not a necessity to create use cases. So it's a bit different. Yeah. And we're just getting started. That's the thing. It feels like it's everywhere. And at a high level. But in fact, we're right at the start.

Well, actually, I loved how you you've drilled it down and you said, you know, look, think of it, this is a tool that's going to remove repetitive tasks. It's a great tool for keeping your team up to date on projects, like we'll get into products that you've built. But, you know, what are some of those basics that people should use? Like even chat? GPT? You know, what did I do the other day? I used to read a job description. You know, in the old days, I used to gather five or six job descriptions that I'd find on the internet and then write it up myself, right? I mean, it wrote a darn good job description. Yes, but I gave it good instructions. I guess we could we call it prompts right now. I always try and explain to people like chat GPT uses AI, but it's not AI. It's that there's a whole world of AI, it happens to be one of many products, right? How do you differentiate those things for people. So they understand there's

Dr. Cain Elliot: opening, I would check you could see there's part that's another large language model that Google provides doesn't there's a lot from anthropic, there are a lot of those out there. I think, what's really useful for people to try different things, experiment with what works well in their field, one of the things I said on stage, which I'm a really firm believer in is I personally and just as a matter of what I tell professionally to to our clients, whatever you're going to use, whether it's our tech or someone else's, I am very nervous about any service that's supposedly free. I think if you're giving your data somewhere you would know this best from from the explosion of social media world where we always said to people, you know, if you're not paying for the product, you're the products. I don't think that changes in the AI world. So I always tell our clients that said, whatever it is, make sure you know who the vendor is, can know what their funding model is, or what how they're monetizing. And make sure if you can, if it's possible, pay for what you're using. You'd rather that be the incentive that you have a company rather than aggregating, collecting all your data, especially if you're a law firm, putting your clients data anywhere. This is one of the you know, most important responsibilities you have your clients is to protect their data. And so if you're doing that kind of work, get a model that's paid for pay for the service and know what they're doing with your data and where it's going.

I love that and I'll just rephrase it, how I got it. When he explained On stage, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. Correct. So if you've got like a free AI, LinkedIn, but it's like, there's a bunch of tools out there that hold database logins. And if it's like free, and you get this utility from it, yes. Like you're saying, You're the product. So what it's actually doing is gathering your data,

Dr. Cain Elliot: I would imagine, that's the only reason they would offer it because the compute power required to do these things is a cost. It's expensive. So there's no reason to think that it's being provided to you as a kind of now monetizing it somehow. Yes, it has to be monetized somehow. Yeah,

that's awesome. So what are some of the best AI tools for personal productivity?

Dr. Cain Elliot: If you're in the Google workspaces arena, I think that's going to be very powerful with things you already have, for example, you can watch online about ways to well, let's get very basic everybody has suffered through. And if they haven't, I think they're just not admitting it to someone, but everybody has suffered through you, you just said about a job description. No matter what your area of work is, everyone has suffered through the blank page, probably, I think there's the old phrase of Nietzsche, like when you're staring into the abyss that looks back at you. And that's how a blank page feels to people, right? It's like a blank page is so intimidating for our brains. It's tough to work with. That's why you know, you have paper notes, I like to take basically paper style notes on my tablets and things. Because for whatever reason, that blinking little icon, the startup page on a document isn't 180. So I think if you can use it in places that just get you over that initial hump of blank page, that's a really simple place to start. But one that's very usable,

blank pages for work projects, or for, you know, blogs and creative projects, you

Dr. Cain Elliot: can use it for journaling, which sounds odd, because it's like supposed to be some kind of personal thing, but it helps get you over the initial fear of getting something on the page. And then you say, no, no, none of that is right. That's not how I am. And it's still helpful. So I think things where it helps stop, you know, the kind of writer's block or what I always call the internal self critical voice, where you start writing something then delete it all started again, delete it all started again, everybody starts presentations, they write that way.

Yeah. Always have too many ideas, see too many slides. And my friends, I

Dr. Cain Elliot: don't find myself in that very often. But But I do find that colleagues very much feel that way often. So I think that's really helpful for people. I also think I stressed this on stage, they probably think summarization, technology, get take large amounts of information, put those back into format where you can digest, I don't think that's the answer of the AI doing the work for you. I think what it's doing is giving you a better starting point to say where do I need to focus my attention, energy, all of us, I don't care what field you're in. It's a circumstance of living in 2023. There's too much digital, dead trees everywhere in our lives. If you're not got LinkedIn messages people send us today, texts, got emails, people will call in on that phone.

Just bizarrely, my group sees Whatsapp and Facebook groups chat from everywhere in Belize as text groups. Yeah.

Dr. Cain Elliot: So anywhere you can get summarization that'll get you caught up to speed and where you think you need to focus your attention. That's really helpful. I even love a new tool we're using at the office. So zoom has a built in function. Now. If you have enterprise level zoom, you can have aI summarize the meeting as it goes. Or if you jump in five minutes later, it'll tell you what's already been going on. Really cool. Yeah, small things like that. That really has a big impact.

Yeah, there's so much utility to a lot of these tools. So I don't want to get too far into this conversation, and not talk about the products you're building. Yes. But maybe just start as a baseline, because some of the smaller firms don't even have case management. Yes. And so file vine is case management. But explain what that is very simply. And then explain what demands AI, the AI built onto your product. Yeah, so

Dr. Cain Elliot: we have. So file line. The five line product is a case management platform, which is project management for your law firm. So it puts together a lot of things, tasks for you and your team to track and their deadlines, things you can't miss of slip calendaring, and docketing of items provides a document management system that's there as well. We have a document assembly tool. So for your form documents you're creating all the time, it can help them do that. And so simply

as The case comes in, yeah, there's a whole bunch of documents. And then there's a whole bunch of work that has to be assigned to people. And does it pre assigns like standard operating procedures like yes, you do this, you do this, and then you can customize it.

Dr. Cain Elliot: That's right. And everybody puts that in curates that for their workflow within the organization. And you can utilize that we have. As you mentioned, we have a demands AI tool, which is to help especially you know, on plaintiff side and PII attorneys that need to get demands out of high quality. We help utilize AI and outside service providers. To facilitate that process, so

that basically reads all those case files. Yeah. And it'll write a demand letter. I've seen the examples. It's

Dr. Cain Elliot: fantastic. Yeah, it's it's pretty exciting stuff. And those medical chronology, nickel chronologies, and we've really curated a different set of what we call AI fields, that can process all kinds of documents that you're likely to encounter in your practice, whether that's personal injury practice, or your counsel for corporate counsel practice. And you've got to do that with your contracts. And so we try to curate all of those to help attorneys also get over the issue of, well, I'm not a prompt engineer. And I've always told people, I don't think you want to become a product engineer, I think you want to become an attorney. I didn't believe 10 years ago, when everybody said, oh, all attorneys will become coders. Thank God, that didn't happen. No, no. I wanted to get to voters. And I don't think any attorneys want to become prompt engineers. Right now, despite what there might be in the media of people saying all become prompt engineers and our job. I think you go to a service provider, like us or another to say you guys provide great prompts, so that we're getting better results. Yeah,

I don't look at it that way at all it to me the AI removes the necessity of being a computer programmer, it gives you the benefit of the computer programs, and it's the home. Yeah, I should probably go back. Look, I come from a foreign land. And a lot of people don't believe me, but I'm from Canada, first, and then it's an MCN. And I'm an immigrant, you know, like I had to go through immigration. We got a series of different visas over the years and then applied for green card got the green card. And I worked with a lot of immigration lawyers, and I know your favorite new project. Yes, is an immigration product. And this is your newest product. It's announced, right?

Dr. Cain Elliot: Its announced it's out? Well, that's

the scoop. No, no, no, but

Dr. Cain Elliot: it is it also, but that is a passion project and obsession for us. We have just we have you know, first of all, if you go around the fireline offices, not half the office, when you talk to somebody, immigration is somehow been a part of or impacted their lives really greatly. So I, you know, I talked to our CEO, Ryan Anderson, he said, If you don't think there's anything out there really solving for this, go build it. And so we sat down for eight months to build it. And what we great, what we've done is try to take all those documents that you're giving to your immigration attorney, and extract the information and make sure that it's all matching and valid between the documents and what you end up submitting to the government. And we've also provided this is

for immigration lawyers, not for immigration, not for the

Dr. Cain Elliot: day, because it's like we're facing it's for the attorneys to to get the job done. And the really the reason we're passionate about that is we think especially in immigration law, the most important thing you can be doing is working with the client communicating with them. So finding that service that they know something's in the corner, not figuring out if there are errors and PDFs in between versions. And so that's a place where the computer can be really impactful in our technology can find errors, remove them, improve the quality control on the submissions, and then also, again, allow lawyers to get back to lawyering, instead of saying the main part of my job is figuring out the F budgets. I think PDFs I look, PDFs are the clay tablets of our modern society. But they're, they're actually the really difficult to edit, work with, move things around to get them right. So, Jenny, anyway, we can help take out errors, improve people's lives. And we really believe that getting people to their dream job limit immigration and short getting their families together. We think that's the right kind of work we need to be doing to facilitate justice. So we're very passionate about it and care very deeply. And so yeah, my team spent the last eight months building this really improve that process.

So you did a great job of keeping this really simple for this conversation and on stage today. But you also speak at a lot of the IT conferences and whatnot. So maybe drop a little nugget for someone who's the more a little bit more sophisticated. What are the some of the things you're developing? Or what are some of the more advanced things that you talk about?

Dr. Cain Elliot: I think that the most important thing going on is to make sure that we're building things that are multimodal meaning. First, can we process all kinds of different things that may come into your firm, so that includes between text, audio videos that come in, I was able to apply AI to all of the different types of material that discovered that may come in during a case you're working. I think that that's essential. I think that the other thing is when I say multimodal, I mean also can we take our data and point it at different models where it works best. So we're at the very beginning of this journey. Everybody is and I think the way that different major technical writers are going to distinguish themselves is by excelling in certain domains. There may be some that Excel with medical records, there may be some that Excel with transactional financial documents. And our goal as a provider in a specific vertical is to say, Are we giving you the right through of those different models to make sure every time you give us a piece of information, we're pinpointing it in the right place. Because not everything is an LLM question and a large language model issue. Not everything is just a data science question. But it's a question of getting that composition. Right. So that we're putting the right tech in the right place the right time.

Awesome. Well, you know, just a couple personal questions to wrap up, what are your personal hobbies and passions?

Dr. Cain Elliot: So I am obsessed with reading history all the time. Because when I think about tech and my day job, I think about it in long trajectories of human life. Like when I thought about our Contract Lifecycle Management tool, I was thinking about, or nominal and ancient scenario of the first laws that are written on these play tablets. And can we get past that? Yeah, so I like to think long trajectory I so I love history, I especially love Ancient Near East, reading all the time about that languages of antiquity. So spend a lot of time in history because I think that technologists who don't, are really doing a disservice to their ability to be creative. I really do believe they're lying under the sun, I think that's still valid. And so I think, if you don't understand those long trajectories, or think everything you're doing in tech is just novelty. Um, that just means you haven't read enough about the history of humanity. And it gives better insight into people's thoughts and motivations behind what a great movers, what happens. So, yeah,

iPhone pictures of just a sleeker version of cave drawings, right? Yes. Yeah. What are some of the apps that you use, like for personal productivity, and just for a little bit of fun.

Dr. Cain Elliot: So my team, we run on file line, obviously, with our productivity piece, but we also use discord all the time. And that's how like, we like to chat as a team, which I know most people are familiar with discord will be familiar with their kids using it for gaming chats, but it's actually really great. Net activities role

for chat are different than slack. Also, do you know slack?

Dr. Cain Elliot: Yes, we use Slack in the company to discord just tends to cool kids use discord. It's a little more fun, easier way to broadcast to each other, which we like a lot. Also, Slack is now owned by Salesforce. It's not really my jam. Okay? World, that's great. But it's a little different than my team. And no, I love trying new things. And I always want to see what what somebody's doing that's creative, or interesting, or different ways of organizing stuff, I think, for personal productivity, outside of legal min is a really exciting company, if you've ever seen Min min.ai. They're doing some really interesting stuff of trying to create like your second mine. So I think everybody's used a million different note taking tools over the years. But I think they're doing some really exciting stuff of rethinking what's happening in that space for personal productivity.

So you mentioned this on the stage. And I wanted to ask you, but I'll share it with everybody. You said that when your phone rings, yes, it asks people that you have an app that asks them who they are or their number, if they're not in your contacts. Yeah, what app is that Google

Dr. Cain Elliot: is doing that? It's just a Google Voice app on my Pixel, the Google Pixel. Yes. And the Google AI will pick up and start and say, I don't have this number in there. But I know you're calling duck pain, what would you like to talk about? And then it'll ask me if it wants to should pass through the call, or just send it off to voicemail? Yeah,

that's great. If anybody knows how I can do that on my iPhone, let

Dr. Cain Elliot: me know. You should demand that Apple does

that. I mean, there's got to be an app tray. Well, yeah. And what podcasts Do you listen to? Or then any youtubes? You watch?

Dr. Cain Elliot: I really like following. So different teams very often have their product teams do their release falls level, they're thinking outside waiting any of those in my unit feed of just different stuff that random people are building it places like the kids over notion, anybody's used notion before they've they've got great product release videos where they talk about what they do. Also on think my YouTube is way too many conversations and documentary pieces, again, about the history

that I love feedback, what you liked beads back when it was like that. Yeah.

Dr. Cain Elliot: And so I think I think that's a great place. There's also a lot of the providers right now are doing a really great job of having more, let's say less technical breakdowns for people who are in the field and doing it of trying to communicate what's going on. So I would say, Yeah, at any time in the last 10 years is certainly the best time to get any kind of content you want on AI, but there's just a lot of Have it out there. So it's hard to sift through. So I would say focus on. I don't know if you'd like listening to Geoffrey Hinton, who is a big engineer at Google, and he's worried about doomsday right now with AI. That's what gets you locked in and interested First, listen to some of those. Yeah, you'll hear some ideas and concepts. And he'll talk about something like back propagation. So how was it back propagation? And then go Google that do that rabbit all and enjoy that journey? Because there's plenty of people who want to explain to non technical ways.

Yeah. Do you have any go to business books? Like what do you recommend to the young members of your team or

Dr. Cain Elliot: so on my team, when we read things like that, this will come as no shock based on what I've just said. But we tend to read things that talk about strategy, but not necessarily within a business context. So I think that one of my favorites right now that we're reading is on the strategy of the Roman Empire. And we have as a Team Read, totally different contracts about moving troops and armies and the rest of it. But in terms of execution, I pull things off there lessons that you pick up from these things that don't change over time, right. So we've we've done that and motivating

people and organizing people. Yeah, and doesn't change all that much. We do a lot

Dr. Cain Elliot: of the history of work and labor and how it's changed. I think, like I said, I'm always worried about technology thinking about itself as a domain, or an area of human practice that doesn't have a history. Right? This is one of the things that people get annoyed with tech bros if we can say that, like, we just invented the world today with a new release. Now, no labor and human interactions have a long history. So the history of work is one we read through last year there. There are great anthropologists and sociologists who do that kind of work. And I think those lessons are central. Because even if you think that your domain is really different, it's usually very rarely is it that case, you may have new possibilities and potentialities open up based on what you use. But the fundamental dynamics of humans working together, what moves people motivates them, as them change history hasn't changed their own circumstances. I feel like those are really constant.

That's great. Last question. Where can people find you contact info?

Dr. Cain Elliot: Yes. So very simple. It's so fireline.com and go there and check this off. fireline FIA le vi n.com. I'm on Twitter occasionally, or x or whatever it's supposed to be called now. Cain like killed Abel, Elliot ELLI, OTT. So you can find me on there. And thank you, again, Jay, for having me on. And I also want to say you did a great job here. And I appreciate it too, when you were sharing with everybody about how Google is changing, because I think AI and what kind of impact is going to have a marketing space is going to be massive. And it's a really unknown right now in terms of how it's going to impact. I was telling somebody here just a brief aside, I curated for the better part of eight years of feed on from my Google News Feed of legal and legal tack. And all in order. I've been working for years. And then I start seeing AI generated articles infiltrating this, yeah, with essentially spam of regurgitated content. And I've had to been tweaking that over and over again. And I would say, you know, that's why people need also your expertise to tracking and that kind of domain to make sure they can stay on top of that, because it's going to be a really frothy, wild period and how that changes as well. So everybody's going to need a lot of guidance on it, too.

Yeah, though, there's definitely fake news. And yes, I agree with you. It's irritating when it's regurgitated and useless. And yeah, time consuming and help everybody

Dr. Cain Elliot: navigate was the mean, when it's been diverted to cliques that are full of fake profiles and things. So it's going to be a really fun and vented look. We have the blessing of not living in boring times. This is a good thing.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks again and great to see and catch up.

Dr. Cain Elliot: Likewise. Thanks, Jay.

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