The Generative AI newsletter for legal pros everywhere.

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This is day 17 of 100 (our goal - 100 consecutive days!) and today we will:

1. share why I am not paying for ChatGPT Plus

2. create a post-event learning checklist

3. break down our event learning into an Action Plan

4. share out learning with our supervisor and peers

5. talk news you can lose

Hi there. People keep asking me if I am paying for ChatGPT Plus. No, I am not. I am using the free version.

Why? Because I know most of you would use that too and I want to make sure that what I share in this newsletter is based on the experience you are likely to have.

In upcoming editions, we will be exploring other Chat tools – like Google’s Bard Bing’s Chat, and the ChatGPT Plus version.

In the meantime, for the newcomers to the newsletter and all things generative AI, you can go to https://chat.openai.com/chat to set up your free account.

Revisit prior newsletters to explore, test, and learn all things ChatGPT.

Ok, let's kick this off, shall we?

PROMPTS & USE CASES

Earlier this week some of you were at Legalweek in New York. Others of you joined Terri Mottershead and the Centre for Legal Innovation to talk about what consultants think about ChatGPT/Generative AI.

Far too many of us attend these events and never take the time to invest in ourselves and our organizations by capturing our learnings and insights.

In fact, I will go a step further.

If your organization paid for you to go, there is an obligation to transfer your personal experience into one that benefits the organization. Sort of a return on investment for the $ and time away from the office.

If you are a lawyer, what a great opportunity to create content to share with your clients!

But don’t think of this as a burden or obligation. Rather it is an opportunity to raise your profile and signal to others your credibility and leadership, no matter your role or position.

In fact, sharing your learnings and insights with your supervisor, peers, or clients is a great way to reap a lot of benefits.

Here are some reasons why:

• It can help you gain a deeper understanding of the topics and ideas discussed at the conference (and remember them)

• Sharing your learnings and insights can demonstrate that you're proactive, engaged, and committed to improving your skills and knowledge

• It can help you build stronger relationships with your supervisor, colleagues, and clients and foster a culture of learning and collaboration

• By sharing your learnings and insights, you can maintain and build your professional network

• Sharing your learnings and insights with others can contribute to the learning and growth of your organization as a whole, and help ensure that everyone has access to important information and insights

• And it can raise your credibility and authority within your team and organization!

Let’s show you how to make this easier, using ChatGPT

Step 1:

Review your notes or your memory while still somewhat fresh. Try to answer the following questions as best you can.

Just do a brain dump. No need for complete thoughts or sentences. We will use ChatGPT to take these and transform them into something else.

To help you walk through this, I am going to use an event I recently hosted. The topic was building, buying, and selling law practices (here in the US).

Event Learnings Checklist/Trigger Questions

Q1. What were the main topics covered at the event?

• How to build your first practice as a new lawyer – from practical to strategy planning

• How to prepare to sell your firm – from valuation and transition as a non-owner

• How to buy a law firm – due diligence and financing

Q2. What were the most interesting or surprising insights you gained?

• That buying a law firm is attainable for lawyers who even have student debt. The nature of how these transactions can be structured alleviates the need for a big upfront payment

• Ethically, there are few restrictions on selling a law practice

• Most aging lawyers have no succession plan/options or retirement plan

Q3. Were there any notable speakers or sessions that stood out to you? What did you learn from them?

• Tom Lenfestey who is a CPA, lawyer, and law firm business broker (he is creating a marketplace for firms to be bought and sold – works with buyers/sellers on making a match, doing the deal, and managing most deal transition/integration)

• Carol Elefant who is an energy lawyer by practice but has been a leading voice/advocate for “going solo” for decades. She has written books and 100s of articles/blogs on this topic. Myshingle.com is her home for this topic

Q4. Were there any key trends or developments discussed? How do they impact your industry or work?

• Aging lawyers simply don’t make succession/retirement plans

• The modern legal era has made it quite affordable to start a law practice – Carol shared a budget to start a virtual firm that was under $2000!

• Many existing law practices have not been modernized and represent significant value to a buyer who wants to improve upon things in order to grow the firm

• Deregulation of the legal profession (opening to non-lawyer ownership, allowing outside capital, and loosening unauthorized practice of law restrictions) is gaining momentum. While some states have taken a hard stance against this, more are actively exploring this topic

Q5. Did you have any interesting conversations or make any valuable connections with other attendees? What did you learn from them?

- captured above

Q6. Did you attend any workshops or training sessions? What skills did you develop or improve?

- n/a

Q7. Did you learn any new tools, techniques, or best practices that you can apply to your work?

• Tom shared that the typical way to value a law firm is based on a number of factors but not based on firm revenue, rather the equivalent of SDE – sellers’ discretionary earnings.

• Buying a law firm can be done with an SBA loan

• Professional liability insurance for new lawyers is highly affordable – in the low 100s per year

Q8. Were there any key challenges or obstacles discussed? How can you address them in your work?

• Key challenges is fear and ignorance. Law schools typically are not talking about the role of entrepreneurship or business ownership of law firms. So students are forced into the traditional pathways of “get a job” or “any job.” By sharing more on the business of law and how to build and buy a practice, we are more inclusive and helpful to students

• Tom referenced being a “generational mediator” – that is he often has to help manage the relationship between a Baby Boomer selling lawyer and a GenX or Millennial buyer. Each has its own language and POV on the world and how a firm can be led and managed. It is a delicate balance to avoid offending the selling lawyer while allowing the buying lawyer to feel like they can make the changes they want.

Q9. Did you take any notes or capture any resources (e.g. handouts, presentations) that you can refer back to later?

• There is a video of the entire conversation on LinkedIn. It was a LinkedIn Live event.

Q10. How can you apply what you learned to your work or organization? What are the next steps?

• I am a law professor and I am the one that hosted this event. I plan to transcribe the video as well as cut it into short “key talking point” snippets. I will then use both content types to share with law students, use teaching material in future classes, and share out on social media for the broader legal market to consume.

Step 2:

Now that you have captured your learnings and experiences. Let’s use ChatGPT to turn them into something more easily useful.

Let’s turn them into an Action Plan for ourselves.

▶︎▶︎PROMPT: Checklist to Action Plan

TASK: create an action plan that summarizes my key takeaways and outlines specific steps I can take to apply what I've learned in my work

CONTEXT: I am a law professor so the action plan should focus on informing my teaching, future events, and influence the legal market broadly. I recently attended a conference and have created a checklist and replies to help me capture my learnings and insights.

CHECKLIST & REPLIES: (paste checklist with your answers)

👉 Here is the reply I got back.

You should have a nice, concise, and clear action plan.

Feel free to elaborate on different components of it. Regular readers know I love the command “elaborate on” as it often results in beautiful and deeper replies from ChatGPT

Step 3:

So, we took care of our own action plan. Now let’s share some of our learning and insight with our supervisor – you know the one that authorized paying and time off to go?

If you paid for yourself and you are your own boss, no worries, think of this as a memo to file or as a source for thought leadership content you can use to generate posts and articles.

▶︎▶︎PROMPT

TASK: review my replies to the checklist below and use them to draft a memo that I can send to my law dean. The memo should highlight the most important takeaways and how they can be applied to my organization

CONTEXT: I am a law professor that recently hosted and attend a LinkedIn Live event on the topic of Building, Buying & Selling a Law Practice

CHECKLIST & REPLIES: (paste checklist and your answers)

👉 Here is the reply I got back.

Step 4:

Now we should look to share out something helpful with our colleagues who were unable to attend.

The challenge here is to do it in a way that avoids what could be interpreted as boasting creating a power dynamic. That would be toxic.

So you will see I added a TONE command to the prompt.

▶︎▶︎PROMPT

TASK: review my replies to the checklist below and help me create an action plan for sharing my learnings and provide suggestions and examples for how to share specific content with my peers.

TONE: use a collaborative and friendly tone, be humble, and do not boast

CONTEXT: I recently attended a conference and want to continue sharing my learnings with my peers. I've created a resource for myself based on our earlier discussion, but I'm not sure how to best share the specific content with my colleagues. I am a law professor that recently hosted and attend a LinkedIn Live event on the topic of Building, Buying & Selling a Law Practice

CHECKLIST & REPLIES: (paste checklist and your answers)

👉 Here is the reply I got back.

Hopefully, by translating what I did above into one of your most recent event experiences, you can see how to capture your insights and share them.

Do you need ChatGPT to do this? Absolutely not. Does it help? Indeed.

As always the replies you get back from ChatGPT will be less than perfect. You will need to review, edit, and refine. But it does a great job of getting you 80 to 90% of the way.

Good luck!

And I would love it if you share with me, your peer, any output you create regarding a recent event. Just reply to this email – it comes only to me. Thanks!

News you can use: “Plagiarism is a feature of the AI process.” Ouch!

It appears the fight over what is copyright protected and what isn’t is only growing as the Writer’s Guild of America weighs in.

News you can lose: Microsoft takes on Notion & Google Workspace

Yes, it has AI built in. Why can you lose this? It’s early in this product’s life. Microsoft is unafraid of releasing products that have flaws (remember early Teams?). And unless you are the earliest of adopters, waiting until this stabilizes a bit is a good bet.

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is legal advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not legal advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any legal decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.