Day 173: “The Geek in Review” Podcast
Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash
I just discovered this cool podcast, The Geek in Review. (The name alone wins it my vote.) Co-hosts Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer interview knowledge management and technology innovators in the legal profession, often focusing on emerging Generative AI solutions.
The Geek in Review spun off from 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, which covers “the administrative side of today’s large law firm environment.” That includes not only knowledge management but also internet marketing and library science.
Disruption: It’s More than Just AI
I’m psyched to find a good podcast covering innovations in legal tech and “KM” (or “knowledge management,” which I didn’t even know was a thing, like an actual job title as big firms). I’ll listen to this podcast.
But I gotta be honest: My interest in disruption ain’t about AI. It’s no accident that this blog and podcast came out of the big firm environment and focuses on the big firm environment. (Personally I came out of the big firm environment too — and have no desire ever to go back in.)
For those of us working in West Virginia, a small state with a largely rural population, we deal with massive challenges to the most basic legal services delivery. And for those of us practicing immigration law anywhere, we struggle to gain the resources and cultural competency to support an often deeply disoriented client base.
The Entrepreneurship Method
While AI may offer new means of meeting these challenges (I hope it will), we need to think even more creatively here. I’m excited about teaching the Entrepreneurship Model to law students because, in the entrepreneurship model, nothing is off the table (assuming it’s legal and ethical, of course).
Go back to the customer experience: Where’s their “pain point”? Now, in the next 15 minutes, brainstorm as many ways as you can think of to improve that experience. No idea is too crazy, too complex, too simple.
Now refine — what are your three best ideas? Develop a prototype for them. Test them out. Talk to your ideal customers about them: What do they say?
The sky’s the limit with the Entrepreneurship Model. Maybe we need more advanced legal tech. Or maybe the answer is low-tech — taking advantage of the remote work movement to rebuild communities in a way that leverages legal knowledge, maybe.
I don’t know. And I don’t have to know. By unlocking the creativity of the future generation of lawyers, I’m eager to see what ideas emerge.
AI and Access to Justice
The Geek in Review and the AI community don’t totally negelct access to justice, to be clear. One recent episode did a deep dive with the Vanderbilt AI Law Lab, which strives to explore ways that AI can transform legal services delivery and access to justice.
I’m just eager to leverage the creativity of the next generation of professionals. They’re way smarter than me at knowing what the world they’re making will look like. With the tools of the Entrepreneurship Method, you never know what they might innovate.