CALL held its November Business Meeting on November 14, 2024 on Zoom. President Philip Johnson welcomed the attendees and thanked Lexis for sponsoring our door prize. Vice-President Jill Meyer introduced our speaker, Damien Riehl from vLex. Damien is a lawyer and technologist with experience in complex litigation, digital forensics, and software development. At vLex Group — which includes Fastcase, NextChapter, and Docket Alarm — Damien helps lead the design, development, and expansion of various products, integrating artificial intelligence (AI) to improve legal workflows.
Damien Riehl spoke on legal technology trends and AI. He argued that AI is becoming better at human skills like reading comprehension, predictive reasoning, language understanding and could “smooth out the mismatch” between legal need and available lawyers by performing legal work faster than attorneys can. He opined that flat fee legal billing would become more common as AI allows lawyers to do more work with the same amount of time.
Damien gave several suggestions of legal work that could be done faster and better using AI including summarizing statutes, drafting a complaint based on an interview with a client, drafting a cease-and-desist letter, creating a decision tree for lawyers or clients, and doing real-time impeachment of a witness based on prior statements.
Damien emphasized that the best tools, like v-Lex’s Vincent, will be “grounded in truth” by being trained on legal documents. He said that the role of librarians would be to continue pointing attorneys to where to find the best information. He also noted that v-Lex is not getting into law schools because they cannot afford to provide lower cost academic licenses as a loss leader the way Lexis and Westlaw can.
The meeting continued with committee announcements. Lyonette Louis-Jacques spoke on behalf of the Grants and Chapter Awards Committee to remind members that grants are available year-round and chapter awards will be given in the spring. Lyo referred members to the CALL website or committee chair Mandy Lee for any questions. Carrie Port spoke on behalf of the Continuing Education Committee and the Mentorship & Career Development Committee to announce their upcoming event, “Demystifying Leadership and Volunteering.” The event will be held online on November 20, 2024.
The door prize winners were Joe Mitzenmacher and James Fortsas.
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