Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

Sabastian Niles, President and Chief Legal Officer at Salesforce, shares insights from his impressive journey transitioning from a prestigious law firm to a leadership role in corporate legal strategy. He discusses the importance of self-awareness for aspiring in-house counsel and highlights how Salesforce Legal acts as 'customer zero' by utilizing its own technology. Sabastian also explains the pivotal role of AI guardrails in fostering trust and innovation, ensuring legal becomes an accelerant for business growth rather than a blocker.

Join Anna Guo, a former BigLaw lawyer turned entrepreneur and founder of Legalbenchmarks.ai, as she explores the intriguing world of legal AI tools. Discover her groundbreaking research on measuring the 'delta' between human performance and AI capabilities. Anna discusses how specialized AI often outshines general tools in relevance and coherence for legal tasks. She reveals surprising findings about AI's effectiveness in tasks like contract drafting and highlights when to lean on technology versus human judgment. Get ready to rethink the future of law!

Justin Wales, Head of Legal at Crypto.com and author of The Crypto Legal Handbook, shares his career journey from constitutional law to crypto law, ignited by WikiLeaks and Bitcoin. He reflects on founding one of the first crypto legal practices and emphasizes that lawyers must embrace technology to thrive in this fast-evolving field. The discussion covers the crucial difference between centralized and decentralized finance, and Justin argues that blockchain will support future innovations like AI and IoT. Advice for aspiring crypto lawyers centers on avoiding hyper-specialization.

Avaneesh Marwaha, CEO of Litera and former IP lawyer turned legal tech leader, shares his inspiring journey from practicing law to driving innovation in legal technology. He reveals his desire for a more active role in business decisions and discusses Litera's evolution into a comprehensive legal ecosystem. Avaneesh highlights the integration of AI into tools like Outlook and Word, enhancing productivity for law firms. He also covers the strategic shift from acquisitions to building in-house technology and the importance of partnerships, particularly with Microsoft.

Ben Chiriboga, Chief Growth Officer at Nexl and host of This Legal Life, shares his journey from litigator to legal tech innovator. He highlights how a transformative e-discovery tool opened his eyes to efficiency. The discussion tackles the legal sector's resistance to tech, the need for specialized CRMs, and the role of AI in reshaping the profession. Ben emphasizes adapting skills for tech success and explores how new technologies could redefine legal roles while enhancing the lawyer-client relationship.

Gyi Tsakalakis, President of AttorneySync and digital marketing expert, discusses the transformative impact of AI on legal marketing. He emphasizes the necessity for law firms to diversify their marketing strategies beyond traditional channels like Google. Gyi highlights the importance of maintaining human connections in an age dominated by automation. He advocates for a focus on personalized client interactions and the use of AI for data analysis and content generation, urging attorneys to harness technology while prioritizing empathy in client relationships.

Andrea Muttoni, President of Story Protocol and former Amazon product manager, shares his journey from music producer to blockchain innovator. He discusses how blockchain is revolutionizing intellectual property management, making registration and licensing more accessible for creators. Muttoni introduces the Programmable IP License (PIL) for transparent IP rights and the Poseidon initiative aimed at fairly compensating data creators in AI. This innovative approach to IP challenges traditional copyright and fair use in the age of AI-generated content.

Crypto lawyer Nelson Rosario returns to the show to discuss the evolving landscape of decentralized AI and his role as General Counsel for the the Advanced AI Society (formerly known as the Decentralized AI Society), an association focused on engineering best practices, advocating for policy, fostering community, and enabling capital formation for decentralized AI startups Nelson discusses the changing definition of decentralization, highlighting its origins in early crypto's focus on resilience and censorship resistance, and its current intersection with artificial intelligence. He explains the core reasons driving decentralized AI efforts: the potential for single service providers to control our access to AI models, computing power, and the data that underlies it all. The conversation explores how decentralized AI aims to offer an alternative to large tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and OpenAI, But Nelson also points out the challenges of competing with resource rich organizations and suggests that decentralized AI might complement existing systems by "chopping it up" into distributed components. The discussion also touches upon current players in the decentralized AI space, notably Bitensor and HyperCycle, and highlights the role of decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin and Arweave. Nelson concludes by reflecting on the potentially profound societal impact of AI, likening it to other "tectonic technological revolutions" in human history. Drawing from the "Butlerian Jihad" concept in Frank Herbert's Dune, he cautions against blindly trusting AI and underscores the need for humans to remain intentional in their use of technology to prevent a decline in critical thinking and creativity. Key Takeaways: Decentralization in AI aims to prevent single points of control over models, compute, and data, promoting censorship resistance. Decentralized AI faces challenges in competing with large, centralized tech companies due to their immense resources, but can serve as a complementary set of systems. DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) is crucial for the robust existence of decentralized AI applications. Industry associations like the Advanced AI Society play a vital role in setting standards, advocating for policy, building community, and attracting capital for decentralized AI projects. AI represents a transformative technological shift, and intentional human engagement is critical to navigate its societal implications.

In this episode, Dave Siegfried discusses the company he heads, Official AI -- a company focused on helping its customers create and verify authentic AI content. Siegfried, a "recovering accountant" with a background in tech and media licensing, discusses his journey from co-founding Audiosocket, a music licensing platform, to addressing challenges in generative AI. The conversation highlights the evolution of intellectual property protection in the digital age. Siegfried explains how Official AI empowers individuals and brands to create AI-generated images and videos with consent, credit, and compensation for the use of their name, image, likeness, and voice. He details Official AI's "vault technology," which creates a "blueprint" of a person's likeness from a small set of images, enabling authorized creation of synthetic media. The discussion also delves into provenance technology and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) open-source standard, which Official AI leverages to track content origin and changes, ensuring authenticity. Siegfried touches on the challenges of verifying content on social media platforms and the future role of blockchain technology in creating immutable records of consent. The episode concludes with insights into Official AI's business model, customer base (including athletes and historic estates), and future roadmap. Key Takeaways: Generative AI presents significant challenges and opportunities for intellectual property rights, particularly concerning name, image, likeness, and voice. Official AI aims to proactively address these challenges by providing a platform for consent-based AI content creation. Provenance technology, including C2PA, is crucial for verifying the authenticity and authorized use of AI-generated content. The legal landscape surrounding AI and publicity rights is rapidly evolving, requiring adaptable technological solutions. Things We Talk About in this Episode Official AI Website: Visit theofficial.ai to learn more about their platform and services. Contact Dave Siegfried: Dave can be reached at dave@theofficial.ai. Content Authenticity Initiative (C2PA): Explore the open-source standard for content provenance and authenticity at c2pa.org. Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI

This episode is a conversation with Spellbook co-founder Scott Stevenson about intersection of technology and creativity. Spellbook is a AI contract co-pilot for transactional lawyers that plugs into Microsoft Word. Despite founding a legal technology company, Scott is not a lawyer but is computer engineer by training. As a kid Scott was into video games and in fourth grade he talked his parents into getting him a computer because he wanted to figure out how to create them. By middle school he was building websites and eventually landed an internship at Electronic Arts. Scott is also interested in electronic music and he launched his first start up, Mune, with a music professor, to create a whole new musical instrument that combined the power of digital music with an acoustic instrument. It was during his time at Mune that Scott started to think about building a legal tech company. After he got his first legal bill he figured there might be a more efficient and less expensive way to do legal work. So he and lawyer buddy founded Rally, a document automation and templating engine for law firms which later begat Spellbook, but he funny thing about Spellbook, it was originally conceived as a marketing idea to generate leads for Rally. Things We Talk About in This Episode Mune (Scott's Digital Instrument Startup) Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI