Transcript:

Intro: Hello, and welcome to Tech Law Talks, a podcast brought to you by Reed Smith's Emerging Technologies Group. In each episode of this podcast, we will discuss cutting-edge issues on technology, data, and the law. We will provide practical observations on a wide variety of technology and data topics to give you quick and actionable tips to address the issues you are dealing with every day. 

Marcin: Welcome to Tech Law Talks and our series on AI. Today, we are introducing the Reed Smith AI Glossary. My name is Marcin Krieger, and I'm an attorney in the Reed Smith Pittsburgh office. 

Richard: And I am Richard Robbins. I am Reed Smith's Director of Applied AI based in the Chicago office. My role is to help us as a firm make effective and responsible use of AI at scale internally. 

Marcin: So what is the AI Glossary? The Glossary is really meant to break down big ideas and terms behind AI into really easy-to-understand definitions so that legal professionals and attorneys can have informed conversations and really conduct their work efficiently without getting buried in tech jargon. Now, Rich, why do you think an AI glossary is important? 

Richard: So, I mean, there are lots of glossaries about, you know, sort of AI and things floating around. I think what's important about this one is it's written by and for lawyers. And I think that too many people are afraid to ask questions for fear that they may be exposed as not understanding things they think everyone else in the room understands. Too often, many are just afraid to ask. So we hope that the glossary can provide comfort to the lawyers who use it. And, you know, I think to give them a firm footing. I also think that it's, you know, really important that people do have a fundamental understanding of some key concepts, because if you don't, that will lead to flawed decisions, flawed policy, or choices can just miscommunicate with people in connection with you, with your work. So if we can have a firm grounding, establish some intuition, I think that we'll be in a better spot. Marcin, how would you see that? 

Marcin: First of all, absolutely, I totally agree with you. I think that it goes even beyond that and really gets to the core of the model rules. When you look at the various ethics opinions that have come out in the last year about the use of AI, and you look at our ethical obligations and basic competence under Rule 1.1, we see that ethics opinions that were published by the ABA and by various state ethics boards say that there's a duty on lawyers to exercise the legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness, and preparation necessary for the representation. And when it comes to AI, you have to achieve that competence through some level of self-study. This isn't about becoming experts about AI, but to be able to competently represent a client in the use of generative AI, you have to have an understanding of the capabilities and the limitations, and a reasonable understanding about the tools and how the tech works. To put another way, you don't have to become an expert, but you have to at least be able to be in the room and have that conversation. So, for example, in my practice, in litigation and specifically in electronic discovery, we've been using artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning and various AI products previous to generative AI for well over a decade. And as we move towards generative AI, this technology works differently and it acts differently. And how the technology works is going to dictate how we do things like negotiate ESI protocols, how we issue protective orders, and also how we might craft protective orders and confidentiality agreements. So being able to identify how these types of orders restrict or permit the use of generative AI technology is really important. And you don't want to get yourself into a situation where you may inadvertently agree to allow the other side, the receiving party of your client's data, to do something that may not comply with the client's own expectations of confidentiality. Similarly, when you are receiving data from a producing party, you want to make sure that the way that you apply technology to that data complies with whatever restrictions may have been put in to any kind of protective order or confidentiality agreement. 

Richard: Let me jump in and ask you something about that. So you've been down this path before, right? This is not the first time professionally you've seen new technology coming into play that people have to wrestle with. And as you were going through the prior use of machine learning and things that inform your work, how have you landed? You know, how often did you get into a confusing situation because people just didn't have a common understanding of key concepts where maybe a glossary like this would have helped or did you use things like that before? 

Marcin: Absolutely. And it comes, it's cyclic. It comes in waves. Anytime there's been a major advancement in technology, there is that learning curve where attorneys have to not just learn the terminology, but also trust and understand how the technology works. Even now, technology that was new 10 years ago still continues to need to be described and defined even outside of the context of AI things like just removing email threads almost every ESI order that we work with requires us to explain and define what that process looks like when we talk about traditional technology assisted review to this day our agreements have to explain and describe to a certain level how technology-assisted review works. But 10 years ago, it required significant investment of time negotiating, explaining, educating, not just opposing counsel, but our clients. 

Richard: I was going to ask about that, right? Because. It would seem to me that, you know, especially at the front end, as this technology evolves, it's really easy for us to talk past each other or to use words and not have a common understanding, right? 

Marcin: Exactly, exactly. And now with generative AI, we have exponentially more terminology. There's so many layers to the way that this technology works that even a fairly skilled attorney like myself, when I first started learning about generative AI technology, I was completely overwhelmed. And most attorneys don't have the time or the technical understanding to go out into the internet and find that information. A glossary like this is probably one of the best ways that an attorney can introduce themselves to the terminology or have a reference where if they see a term that they are unfamiliar with, quickly go take a look at what does that term mean? What's the implication here? Get that two sentence description so that they can say, okay, I get what's going on here or put the brakes on and say, hey, I need to bring in one of my tech experts at this point. 

Richard: Yeah, I think that's really important. And this kind of goes back to this notion that this glossary was prepared, you know, at least initially, right, for, you know, from the litigator's lens, litigator's perspective. But it's really useful well beyond that. And, you know, I mean, I think the biggest need is to take the mystery out of the jargon, to help people, you know, build their intuition, to ask good questions. And you touched on something where you said, well, I've got a, I don't need to be a technical expert on a given topic, but I need a tight. Accessible description that lets me get the essence of it. So, I mean, a couple of my, you know, favorite examples from the glossary are, you know, in the last year or so, we've heard a lot of people talking about RAG systems and they fling that phrase around, you know, retrieval augmented generation. And, you know, you could sit there and say to someone, yeah, use that label, but what is it? Well, we describe that in three tight sentences. Agentic AI, two sentences. 

Marcin: And that's a real hot topic for 2025 is agentic AI. 

Richard: Yep. 

Marcin: And nobody knows what it is. So I focus a lot on litigation and in particular electronic discovery. So I have a very tight lens on how we use technology and where we use it. But in your role, you deal with attorneys in every practice group and also professionally outside of the law firm. You deal with professionals and technologists. In your experience, how do you see something like this AI glossary helping the people that you work with and what kind of experience levels you get exposed to? 

Richard: Yeah, absolutely. So I keep coming back to this phrase, this notion of saying it's about helping people develop an intuition for when and how to use things appropriately, what to be concerned about. So a glossary can help to demystify things. These concepts so that you can then carry on whatever it is that you're doing. And so I know that's rather vague and abstract, but I mean, at the end of the day, if you can get something down to a couple of quick sentences and the key essence of it, and that light bulb comes on and people go, ah, now I kind of understand what we're talking about, that will help them guide their conversations about what they should be concerned about or not concerned about. And so, you know, that glossary gives you a starting point. It can help you to ask good questions. It can set alarm bells off when people are saying things that are, you know, perhaps very far off, those key notions. And you have, you know, you have the ability to, you know, I think know when you're out of your depth a little bit, but to know enough to at least start to chart that course. Because right now people are just waving their hands. And that, I think, results in a tendency to say, oh, I can't rely on my own intuition, my own thinking. I have to run away and hide. And I think the glossary makes all this information more accessible so that you can start to interact with the technology and the issues and things around it. 

Marcin: Yeah, I agree. And I also think that having those two to three sentence hits on what these terms are, I think also will help attorneys know how to ask the right questions. Like you said, know when to get that help, but also know how to ask for it. Because I think that most attorneys know when they need to get help, but they struggle with how to articulate that request for it. 

Richard: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that, you know, often we can bring things back to concepts that people are already comfortable with. So I'll spend a lot of time talking to people about sort of generative AI, and their concerns really have nothing to do with the fact that it's generative AI. It just happens to be something that's hosted in the cloud. And we've had conversations about how to deal with information that's hosted in the cloud or not, and we're comfortable having those. But yet, when we get to generative AI, they go, oh, wait, it's a whole new range of issues. I'm like, no, actually, it's not. You've thought about these things before. We can attack these things again. Now, again, the glossary, the point of the glossary is not to teach all this stuff, but it's about to help you get your bearings straight, to get you oriented. And from there, you can have the journey. 

Marcin: So in order to get onto that journey, we have to let everybody know where they can actually get a copy of the glossary. So the Reed Smith AI Glossary can be found at the website e-discoveryapp.com, or any attorney can go to the Play Store or the Apple Store and download the E-Discovery App, which is a free app that contains a variety of resources. And right on the landing page of the app there's a link for glossaries and within there you'll see a downloadable link that'll give you a PDF version of the AI Glossary which again any attorney can get for free and have available and of course it is a live document which means that we will make updates to it and revisions to it as the technology evolves and as how we present information changes in the coming years. 

Richard: At that price, I'll take six. 

Marcin: Thank you, Rich. Thanks for your time. 

Richard: Thank you. 

Outro: Tech Law Talks is a Reed Smith production. Our producers are Ali McCardell and Shannon Ryan. For more information about Reed Smith's emerging technologies practice, please email techlawtalks@reedsmith.com. You can find our podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, reedsmith.com, and our social media accounts. 

Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers. 

All rights reserved.

Transcript is auto-generated.