I know we put on a lot of webinars and CLEs here at Smokeball, and we do it because we know it helps our clients. We pay attention to feedback and create programming based on what we hear from you, and for the last many months the focus has been AI, AI, AI. Understandable!
That was part of why we developed the Archie Fireside Chat series, and made it a three part series for personal injury law, family law, and general civil litigation, which you can still watch if you weren’t able to catch them live. For general information and prompt ideas, click here.
If you caught the civil litigation one with our dear friend
It was my first proper webinar with Smokeball, and it was so much fun that I thought I’d share some Behind The Scenes insights and photos and give you a little snapshot of what webinars here at Smokeball can look like.
Jonathan was our first choice for a subject matter expert in civil litigation. He is a practitioner in southern Illinois and has been out about 15 years, same as me. Even though we have different practice areas, with me having done criminal defense and Jonathan doing civil, we are both nevertheless trial lawyers, and it is always fun to talk to one of our own. Trial lawyers are their own breed. We have our own cadence and rhythm, our dark humor, and fast-paced, sometimes chaotic brains.
We had done a rehearsal the day before, but as always happens when you need it, we had technical issues and weren’t able to get Jonathan to join until halfway through. That meant that we couldn’t rehearse like we had hoped; rather, we went through the run of show and then I took a few minutes of Jonathan’s time to practice some questions and see how our live banter and back and forth worked. As I suspected, game recognizes game, and we quickly settled into a great rapport and rhythm.
The day dawned and I was nervous. I don’t know why, except that I always am. I’ve done dozens of bench and jury trials, spoken before large audiences many times, and even enjoyed semi-regular impromptu speaking on the appropriate occasions, but I was nervous.
I was nervous about:
- talking too fast
- garbling up my words (like when you want to say “have a nice day” and “take care” and your brain comes up with “take a day!”)
- my conversation being robotic and stilted with horrendously stupid transitions
- randomly projectile vomiting in the middle of the show (a persistent fear)
Thankfully, I think I avoided most of that. I spent the morning doing my other work and practicing some transitions in my head. It was June 11, the webinar started at 3pm Central, and I had to be ready to go and logged on at 2:45pm.
But at 2pm in the office, let me give you one guess what most people’s main priority was:
While my colleagues were gathered to catch the opening ceremony and as much of the game as they could, I was freaking out because my Zoom camera wasn’t working all of a sudden, and my hair was frizzy again despite the fact that I had straightened it twice already. (Hooray, office hair tools!)
Here is a photo I sent my best friend, assuring her that I was not losing my mind.
I’m convinced Zoom can sense fear. But thankfully, my colleague Andre got me up and running again in mere moments, without even yelling “MOVE” like Jimmy Fallon’s SNL IT Guy character, and I was operational.
Jonathan was on with the rest of the team, and we got started. I would be sharing my screen during the presentation, so I got it up and loaded in its own tab, and were underway. At 3 sharp, I began. I like to start by welcoming everyone, urging them to adjust their lumbar support chair and warm up their coffee while we wait for folks to join us, and I also like to know where our lawyers and legal staff are watching from. It’s always fun to see a cool spread of states, and sometimes we even get people tuning in from other countries.
I breezed through our light agenda, took care of housekeeping, and we were off to the races. Jonathan and I took some time to chat about Jonathan’s practice, what he does on a day to day basis, and what his workflow looks like. He spoke about how he felt when he first used AI, and first saw legal AI emerge as a serious contender. He described how his practice changed as a result of AI, and all the benefits that he saw unfold in his practice as he implemented its use.
Jonathan also spoke about his concerns, noting hallucinations and the potential for ethical violations and attorney discipline. That’s been on my mind, too, and
I then handed it over to my colleague Eric G. from Legal Configuration. These are some of the many folks who work hard on the back end to learn what attorneys need and then develop the software to produce that. They’ve been working on Archie prompt libraries and demos, playbooks, and so much more to help lawyers get up to speed on how to use the tools that other lawyers are already adopting to streamline their practice and ease some of their administrative burdens. Eric did a fantastic walkthrough of 5 prompts that civil litigators can use in their daily workflows to help with their cases - but always with a careful review by an attorney.
When Eric had shown us his prompts and what using Archie in real time looked like, we fielded questions from the group, and Jonathan was able to get a little more granular as to how he uses AI and some of the things he thinks through. I then did the obligatory mentions of my fun Archie Bingo and the prizes you can win, as well as Beacon Award nominations, which are now closed.
All in all, this was a fantastic experience, mostly because of how Jonathan Kibler is an absolute pro. Jonathan has been a Smokeball user for many years, and our office adores him. He is always professional and gracious, ready to help if we need insights and advice from actual lawyers, and even devotes his time here on Community to help other lawyers use Smokeball to the best of their abilities.
I hope to do more of these, particularly with Jonathan, and you never know … we might be back in a couple months to talk a little more about how ethical rules around AI have developed. Stay tuned! We always have such a blast putting these on for our attorneys and legal professionals, and if there is AI related webinar content you want, or any webinar content at all, let me know in the comments! No promises, but I might know a gal who can help get that up. 😉