Brief Reflections on AALL 2023

<blows dust off of this thing>

Hey hey hey!

I recently attended the AALL annual meeting for the first time since 2015 and the first time as a non-exhibiting vendor (or about to go work for one) since 2010. I’m not gonna lie – I was sort of terrified, but I had such a energizing and educational time.

Since short form social media is a bit of a mess right now, I opted to take notes instead of live tweeting/tooting/whatever we call threads posts with the goal of later blogging. And somehow I managed to follow through on that so here we are.

Instead of a session by session breakdown, and in the interest of time and with respect for your attention span/lack of desire to read 25,000 words, I thought I’d highlight some broad themes and ideas sparked from events across the conference. I’ll probably later, after some absorption time, do some session by session breakdowns. And, because this is me, there will be some personal reflections where I talk about feelings and emotions.

Librarians are Legal Technology Experts

Legal tech started in libraries and with legal research. No, seriously. One of my hottest takes is that legal tech started in the 19th century when Shepard’s Citations and the West Key Number system were invented and legal knowledge went from being merely recorded and stored to analyzed. It’s a shame that so many people are sleeping on the powerful experts they have on staff and should be consulting in legal tech acquisition decisions. This is especially true now more than ever with LLMs/Generative AI tying knowledge management to workflow in a much more intense way than ever before.

I’ve always been really attached to the title of “librarian” even though I know so many people associate it with books and knowledge warehouses. There’s actually been several fights about whether to change the name of the Special Library Association and AALL and rebrand to something more ‘hip’. Personally, my opinion has has always been to keep the name and “if you don’t get all the amazing things that librarians are capable of in the 21st century, that sounds like a ‘You Problem.'”

But also I have an attitude problem.

Jean O’Grady brought this issue up in a session and I’m starting to come around to the idea of losing the librarian title. One of the perspectives I bring to the table is that digital transformations that are being attempted in law happened in many ways a decade or so ago in libraries. We’re all (lawyers, librarians, paralegals, etc) knowledge workers. So maybe our job and department titles should reflect our expertise and the fact that we’re all part of the same workflow and legal knowledge expert continuum, especially if it’s closing doors to opportunities and appropriate compensation and power.

One last thing – something I found very interesting in discussions of tools and products at AALL versus other legal tech conferences, is that the librarian audience was much more concerned about the user expectations and how a tool works rather than the ease of use and adoption metrics. More basically, librarians ask what and how, and legal tech asks why (use cases) and when (implementation needs). Not that legal tech never asks about the former or that the latter isn’t super important, but maybe…just maybe….librarians are better bullshit detectors.

Legal Research Tech is Suddenly Cool

Don’t get it twisted: Legal research tech has always been cool.

But I’ve always felt like legal research technology has been vastly underappreciated by the legal tech chattering classes. I honestly thinks this starts with the lack of respect the LRW curriculum and educators get in law schools, but that’s another rant for another day. Much like the static image of librarians, I think a lot of people hear “legal research” and think “finding cases and statutes” and not – again, I have another continuum – a process of finding resources, performing analytics, and now using artificial intelligence to generate new knowledge sources or analysis.

I think this change in attitude is helped by the fact that some of the most exciting uses of LLMs have been created by legal research focused companies such as vLex and Casetext. People are starting realize that the core materials needed to do LLM/GenerativeAI work will rely heavily on the raw material contained in legal research tools. Also there are stupid amounts of money and FOMO flying around.

Lawyers REALLY ARE Scared of Change

An ongoing meme in the legal tech world to explain the lack of adoption is “lawyers are scared of change.” I’ve believed it in my gut and based on <waves hands in general direction of everything> that seems to be true, but I’ve never felt 100% great about repeating it. It just seemed so….blankety.

Well guess what, buttercups, it’s true.

The keynote at the PLLIP Summit (the pre-conference organized by the AALL special interest section for law firm and corporate librarians) was Dr. Larry Richard. He is a psychologist specializing in “lawyer brains.” Lawyers are outliers on SEVEN psychological traits – most professions are outliers on one or two on average, if that – and these particular traits lead to an aversion to change, such as:

• high autonomy
• high abstract reasoning
• low resilience (thin skinned, catastophizing when thinking of making a mistake
• high urgency
• high skepticism
• low sociability

And one I seemed to not write down.

He discussed ways to build resilience and reframe thought patterns on an individual level, but I’m not sure how to fix an entire profession.

Obligatory LLM/ChatGPT/Generative AI Update

Obviously everyone is super interested in this topic and it seemed to make its way into just about every session, regardless of planned topic.

As I noted during one of the sessions, we can take the old joke about Big Data and Teen Age Sex – “Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it…” and sub in LLM/Generative AI.

I went to a vendor panel with reps from TR, Lexis, Bloomberg, and vLex moderated by Susan Nevlow Mart. On the bright side, there was an agreement across vendors that all of this is very new and they’re trying to find effective and safe use cases (especially when the general public is involved) instead of just pumping out tools willy nilly. On the down side, across most if not all vendors there was an idea that the function of these tools – no matter what the use case – is going to be a bit of a black box.

The Access to Justice possibilities were brought up frequently. It’s not that I don’t think that increasing the speed and effectiveness of lawyers performing pro bono work isn’t an A2J use case for these tools, is just that I don’t think it’s a very good one.

I don’t want to diminish the work of those doing pro bono and it’s great that LLMs may increase efficiency but I want to see tools that empower citizens to help themselves instead of waiting for a lawyer to perform act of charity. I expect push back but (1) I’m not suggesting a citizen review a complex M&A agreement. A lot of basic people law needs ain’t rocket science. (2) I don’t know what people imagine when they think of someone who needs legal help but is unable to procure legal services but…they’re not necessarily stupid or even uneducated. If given the proper tools and guidance I think you’d be surprised what a lay person could do.

If any legal research company with an LLM tool in development would like someone to work on their product team to help with a public facing tool, I’m your huckleberry.

I Done Tole Y’all

You know how most people lay in bed and think of some awkward encounter from their past and cringe? Yeah, I do that but most of the time I end up concluding, “No, I was right.”

I am a goddamn delight, I know.

But this conference really reinforced a lot of the things that I have been saying for years. And if you think I’m not petty enough to say “I told you so” well then you must be new here. But let’s unpack it:

When I talk about open and free law, I try to make at least three arguments: (1) the A2J argument, that if the legal profession is not going to help the majority of people with legal needs, they should at least be able to access the knowledge and information to help themselves. (2) The “this is a democracy, dammit” argument that says citizens in an ostensibly free country should be able to read and access the law that governs them. (3) law and legal data owned by the government is needed as raw material for legaltech and innovation.

I know the first two are a little too touchy feeling for some of y’all but the third? That’s money. Y’all like money and doing business stuff. Damian Riehl from Fastcase/vLex showed in a presentation how they could provide so much more analysis using their old AI/new AI based tools, but it would cost 2 billion dollars to free this information from the government. It is absolutely Go Time to get this data released and available for creative people to use to create new legal tech tools.

Related, I went to a session on Master of Legal Studies programs. As most of the students in those programs DO NOT have access to commercial legal research databases and won’t in their HR/compliance jobs, instructors are scrambling to find open tools they can use.

(I will say I was wrong about MLS programs being cash grabs – I see their value now.)

The MLS educators would also love to more Open Educational Resources for these programs and it would be great to see more collaboration in creating them. CALI’s eLangdell would be happy to host, I’m sure.

Finally, Some Random Tidbits

The keynote speaker was Charles Vogl, who spoke about forming communities. It deserves a post in and of itself, but want to note especially as there’s so many “Community Managers” in legal tech, the difference between true community – a group of people with mutual concern for each other – and what most companies call community – a list of people that they blast information to.

Georgia State and BakerHostettler are collaborating on a legal tech curriculum. I really liked their competency model and it’s making rethink how I want to do my legal technology MOOC that I’ve been noodling on. It’s a good addition to the other lawyer competency models/shapes and I’m personally referring to it as “The Ice Cream Cone Shaped Lawyer.” Feel free to use that.

Someone – possibly GSU? – holds a pre-classes tech bootcamp for law students where they bring students up to speed on basic microsoft office and other baseline technology that they’ll need in the practice of law but that no one ever really gets around to formally teaching undergrads. I thought that was a good idea.

Final Wrap Up

Through the years, no matter what position I had professionally, I tried to still be a hype-woman for librarians and libraries. This conference reaffirmed that decision. If you are a legal knowledge tech vendor, you really need to attend AALL Annual/PLLIP Summit. I think you’d learn a lot.