Vable’s Matthew Dickinson on Current Awareness in the Age of GenAI

Blue Sky: ⁠⁠@geeklawblog.com⁠⁠ ⁠⁠@marlgeb⁠⁠
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript

Greg Lambert (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Greg Lambert with The Geek in Review and I’m here with Nicky Shaver from Legal Technology Hub and you’re going to talk to us about another mid-law event coming up.

Nikki Shaver (00:10)
That’s right Greg. So we at Legal Tech Hub have kicked off our series of events especially for smaller and mid-sized firms with between 25 and 200 lawyers. We know that firms in that band often get overlooked for events and content that’s really geared towards them. We also know that they stand to gain the most from generative AI and efforts to automate and increase productivity because it can be a real game changer for them.

It’s a force multiplier for firms of that nature. In fact, one of the attendees at our New York event recently said that they consider the cost of buying into a broad generative AI tool as the cost of making each of their lawyers twice as good. LTH has a series of six events catering especially for firms of this size. Each event is held in a different city with a full day of CLE accredited educational content on how to do more with less,

how to build a growth strategy that takes into account generative AI. We’ve partnered with some of the most interesting vendors for mid-size firms who present speed demos during the events so that firms can see the technology that’s out there and learn what some of their competitors are using and what they may be interested in using themselves. We’ve just wrapped up our events in Chicago and New York and luckily you haven’t missed out yet. So our next events are in Washington DC,

on September 3rd, in Boston on October 15th, Miami on October 29th, and Atlanta on November 18th. We’ve kept the price of admission really low, so it’s a great deal. Visit the LegalTechHub website, LegalTechnologyHub.com, and click on the Events dropdown to go to the LTH Events page where you can register for your preferred event. And a special offer, Greg, for Geek in Review listeners. The first five people

who reach out to Geek in Review with a comment saying, LTH event, will get a free ticket to attend the event in their preferred city.

Greg Lambert (02:07)
Awesome, so everyone pause and shoot Nikki an email on that and go to one of these events. All right, thank you, Nikki.

Nikki Shaver (02:14)
Thanks, Greg.

Marlene Gebauer (02:22)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gabauer.

Greg Lambert (02:29)
And I’m an exhausted Greg Lambert. I just.

Marlene Gebauer (02:31)
Ha ha ha ha

Greg got in at

five in the morning this morning from a delayed flight and he is still here. Well done.

Greg Lambert (02:41)
Yeah, yeah, the

I think I got the for as bad as the weather’s been in Texas. I’m not going to complain. So all right. Well, today we are delighted to have Matthew Dickinson, who’s the founder and CEO of Vable on the show. I know we’ve been talking for a while and setting this up, so it’s good to have you on the Geek in Review.

Marlene Gebauer (02:47)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Matthew Dickinson (03:02)
Well, thank you, Greg. Very nice to see you, Marlene. Thank you both so much for having me. It’s a great honor to be on this podcast and I have to I’m a great fan and I think you guys are doing a great job.

Marlene Gebauer (03:12)
Well,

we are so happy to have you on. So, Matthew, you you’ve been in the legal information space for a while now. What’s changed the most? how are firms thinking about current awareness and news monitoring in the time of Gen. AI? You know, how do you see that evolving?

Matthew Dickinson (03:30)
That’s a great kickoff question. I think, first probably go back and think about what current awareness has been for the last many years before Gen.ai then think about where it is going and how it’s evolving and how our mindset is changing. until recently, current awareness has predominantly been about crawling lists of articles manually or using some logic, boolean queries, filters.

and then sending the articles often by email to groups of recipients. And this has been a challenge, of course, to administrators, the information specialists, the librarians, due to lack of technology, resources, people, to really completely sort of customize the output for individuals’ needs and interests. luckily, until recently, expectations were not that high in that regard. So imagine

really supporting hundreds if not thousands of lawyers in multiple offices and even understanding their individual needs and trying to deliver a very precise individual service to them. It’s very challenging. And some of the ways to try and resolve this has been sort of thinking about self-service for lawyers. But the problem with that is often the tools, again, before Gen. AI,

relying upon Boolean searching and challenges and trying to create a really intuitive service for lawyers that doesn’t involve complex Boolean queries has been challenging in itself. this goes back to sort of, know, the expectations have been much lower than what they are now. At Vable, adopted a sort of hybrid approach to try and resolve this and provided a platform which we call InfoPro.

for administrators and information specialists which has a lot of functionality and reporting built into it. So that the administrators with of course quite a bit of training and support and thinking about best practice they can build topics and alerts of high relevance for the lawyers. And then we have another platform called MyVable which is a really simple experience for the lawyers. They can discover things.

in a library, things that, you know, topics and alerts and they can subscribe to them, but trying to make keep it as intuitive as possible. But in most cases, lawyers are just receiving current awareness into their inboxes. And even with Vable suppose, they still receive probably too much information. They have this problem about FOMO. They want it all. They don’t want to miss out on things. But this doesn’t help them when it comes to limited amount of time.

And you know summary of that. I think we’ve done a quite a good job in recent years supporting librarians providing them with the tools to do a great job, but now all of that has changed and this is really an answer to your question about how we should think about it and It’s it’s about expectations that have changed dramatically Lawyers no one no longer sort of want to receive this of articles

into their inbox. They don’t want to have to read them to determine what is of relevance and then to work out what to do with that information. All this can now be done by Gen.ai and they don’t want articles just to be delivered to them. So I think that’s really an essence, the change and how we should think.

Greg Lambert (06:44)
Is it the dream of learning through osmosis that you’ll send the information, can just touch it and then magically it just enters my brain? Because that’s kind of what it feels like. get so much overload over the years.

Matthew Dickinson (07:00)
Yeah, I mean that’s the thing. There has been such an overload and you know we’ve done, think compared to what it was, I think there’s been a lot of value provided but I suppose you know thinking about some real world examples, mean sort of what we’re now looking at and sort of trying to solve the problem is you know instead of a lawyer receiving a news alert and so they’re in box on data breaches, so here’s 10 articles, it’s now it’s all about

Okay, one of your top clients has just been involved in a data breach. Great. And here’s the summary. Here’s the potential implications. And let’s go even further and actually here’s who else in the firm should know about this. And this is all sort of connecting it in. It’s not just here’s a awareness solution in isolation. It is fully integrated in with other systems. So, and then you get the real relevance and the context.

Marlene Gebauer (07:49)
you feel there’s going to be like a number of workflows? mean, you mentioned that, you know, you, have sort of the researcher workflow, but then you also have a more intuitive attorney workflow in terms of, of delivery. Do you foresee, you know, one or the other becoming more important? Do you see other types of workflows that, you know, are going to be happening over the next few years?

Matthew Dickinson (08:15)
Well, yeah, I I think thinking of yourself, you know, in next five years, I think that’s an awfully long time away. And for me, I’m sort of thinking what where we’re headed in the next six months. But sort of, you know, thinking about sort of workloads, I I think we’re really sort of moving world in which, I mean, it’s just even thinking about legal research, where it is becoming much more proactive.

Marlene Gebauer (08:25)
year. ⁓

Matthew Dickinson (08:39)
much more predictive and much more integrated. so thinking about those sort of points, mean, sort of it’s no longer lawyer sitting there and well, know, perceiving an alert or being told about things at nine o’clock in the morning, the system will be much more proactive and alerting them at the right time. And it’s not just going to be giving them a list of articles, but it’s going to be more predictive. And one of the big challenges we’re working on is sort of thinking about that horizon scanning solution.

and you these are things which human beings can do, but if we can help and supercharge that and so thinking about the predictivity of being much more predictive and giving me the insights, whether I am a lawyer, whether I am somebody in BD, the various different it’s the integration part is very, very important as well. So, and when we talk about integration, it’s about content coming in.

Marlene Gebauer (09:23)
Mm-hmm.

Matthew Dickinson (09:28)
what data points are we integrating into? And we talked a little bit earlier about integrating with CRM systems other sort of databases. Vable, we’re just one of the data points as well in that sort of respect. And then it’s about the delivery. Where are we going to integrate into other systems? Where are we going to deliver the content? So I may be working in teams. I may be working in the CRM. What type of role have I got in the organization? Where do I want to receive the information? And how is that information going to…

help me make better decisions or actually allow me to take action on something.

Greg Lambert (10:01)
Yeah. Well, speaking of that, because traditionally, you know, the information as Marlene was saying moving from point A to point from, created to being distributed, was one thing, but there’s also, you know, it’s not just the delivery now that we’re expecting.

like you said that it’s not just a list of articles that the attorney is going to read, but rather the information is going to come already built in with the insights. traditionally it’s been the information professionals, the librarians, the KM folks that are tagged with managing all of that. So how do you see Vable kind of assisting and getting

from the data to more of an actual insights and helping the intermediaries between the information and the actual items getting to the people that it needs to get to.

Matthew Dickinson (10:46)
you

Yeah, that’s a really good question. mean, I think just making that big distinction again about sort of and the actual insights. so current awareness has been for long time to something’s delivered. We now expect it to become much more actionable insights, actionable content. And so we can sort of move beyond it being passive information.

One of the terms we use is think about insight activation. This is happens when content actually becomes or changes behavior, not just fills inbox. So thinking about how Vable or firms can bridge the gap and move from content that’s delivered to actionable content. Well, GenAI can power a lot of this, course. And certainly at Vable, we’re bringing in a lot of GenAI.

to help faster smarter linking of disparate data. We’re so connecting with a lot of data points, a lot of publishers, et cetera, bring that data all into one database. And even generating those insights, I’d like to think sort of first draft insights, because we don’t want to replace humans in this respect. really important is, and I can’t stress this enough, that the real value I think comes from

how firms use AI.

to support expertise and decision making, not to replace it. And I think this is very important. And I think those firms that will thrive will be the ones that stop treating sort of KM teams as back office functions, et cetera, but more so starting to treat them as frontline intelligence.

Marlene Gebauer (12:30)
Well, I think you teed me up for my next question. Thank you, Matthew. So, you know, I want to switch it up a little bit. Like, what are the firms doing? So, you you’ve worked with firms of all sizes. So what do you find are some of the best practices that you’ve seen for ensuring news actually supports practice development or client engagement and how? And I’m curious if it’s different for…

different size firms or different types of firms, boutique firms versus multifunction firms? Or are you not kind of seeing sort of that creative type of use and we’re still kind of sending headlines, newsletters, types of things?

Matthew Dickinson (13:11)
Yeah, I think very good question. I think that to a large extent, yes, we are at the moment. mean, we’re not sort of stuck in that mindset, but there is a transition that needs to take place. I think that ultimately, the key decision-makers and law firms, that they’re aware and are driving change, but it takes time. It’s not going to happen overnight. And technical solutions need to be developed. We’re working.

being about lot of these changes they talked about slightly earlier. And the solutions then need to be adopted by law firms, and there will be impact workflows and ways of working. the good news is that the lawyers, the end users, they now have high expectations about what is possible. Their eyes have been opened. And this means that we don’t have spent a lot of time trying to educate or convince them about this. But I think for large firms, for small firms,

for the time being, and there’s an evolutionary phase, and we’re still relying to a large extent on headlines and newsletters. But that’s not to say there are some very good best practices which have been used, certainly, mean, practice development, yes, and in supporting client engagement. one sort of product that comes to mind about driving client engagement with the use of headlines and newsletters

is a product we have which is called Vable Connect. It’s a separate Vable platform which is used by some law firms for managing sources and creating and delivering bespoke digest newsletters to their clients. This allows BD teams to create personalized current awareness for each user in a client organization. This is to a large extent much more valuable than those end users than what they’ve been receiving before.

It includes branded email alerts, branded dashboards. And this in itself has become a valuable tool for supporting client engagement. And in some ways, it’s kind of like considering it as current awareness as a service. So headlines and summaries, being very much relied upon. There is a transition. But there are some ways in which people are now thinking about how to use content to…

do things in better ways, certainly when it comes to client engagement.

Marlene Gebauer (15:27)
was curious, you seeing anybody use automation or something, saying, okay, here’s some information, and drafting an email to a client saying, okay, here’s the information, and passing that along, or automatically including it into some content that you’re gonna be sharing with your department or something like that.

Matthew Dickinson (15:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, let me how it works is being able to curate content. here’s a receive something in the news today. Here it is sparks up an idea. I’m going to use that to then spin that out to a client with my own commentary, the reasons why it’s important. So sort of things which in due course, want AI to be doing. But it’s where at the moment, the ideas are coming from what lawyers are doing at the moment, which is using content to have a reason to get in touch with that client to then spark

conversation.

Greg Lambert (16:19)
you, and I’m seeing this a lot because of the

Gen. AI, see the OpenAI New York Times lawsuit, the data gathering, and you’re seeing a lot of information going behind paywalls or restricted in certain ways where the access is not as easy as it used to be. And so for a company like Vable that lives off of the flow of information,

How challenging is it today versus maybe a few years ago about making sure that you’re able to get to the resources you need in order to get the content and information out to your customers?

Matthew Dickinson (17:05)
Yeah, it’s really good question. mean things have definitely changed a lot and certainly big publishers are more wary about how their content is being used. Our tactic in this respect is we’re building very strong relationships with all the major legal publishers and so it goes back to trust. sort of us ensuring that we’re doing the right thing and being very transparent about that. relationships, building connectors with Lexis, with

They’re all the big publishers and sort of making sure that they know how their content is being used. And ultimately we’re benefiting and driving benefit to the clients. But it’s, one of the things we’re also very conscious of is having that sort of rights intelligence layer built in to our platform. Where does this content come from? What can I do with it? Can I run GenAI over it? What license do I have for it? And making sure that as comp-

completely transparent throughout the organization for the clients. So when we are, we’ve got some clients who take a data feed and so we’re feeding content to an API into their own system so they can work on that and making sure all articles are tagged up in the right way. And being very transparent with our clients, so they are confident and they think, they know they’re not going to be breaching anything and they’re using content ethically and in the right way.

then for the publishers say, well, Vable is a trusted source. They know that we’re to be doing things the right way. And some of the evolution of this is to sort build these sort of publisher portals to give publishers much more visibility over how their content is being used.

Greg Lambert (18:35)
Yeah, I’m curious on that because you’re seeing a lot, even like well-known reporters or thought leaders in the industry, creating their own newsletters. I we used to do blogs, right? And now we’re doing kind of these platforms. again, it might be restricted to get to these.

are you finding it challenging as new ways to distribute information out, is that hampering your ability to quickly get good information?

Matthew Dickinson (19:07)
No, not at all. there’s so much information out there. A lot of it for us is actually responding to the needs of law firms. And to a large extent, these wonderful information specialists, cetera, people on the front line, they understand where the content is, what they want to do with it. What we do is we make sure it can come in. We make sure the barriers are brought down and the content is brought into the platform, wherever the content is.

produced by smaller organisations, individual publishers, blogs and providing a first class news aggregation platform that can be trusted and indeed get to the point where people want their content in there.

Marlene Gebauer (19:49)
I want to take this a little further just in regards to AI. mean, you’re talking a little bit about trust and trust with the different publishers. But AI is changing how firms consume and generate their content. So how is Vable thinking about ethical boundaries in relation to AI around alerting, summarization, or any type of filtering?

Matthew Dickinson (20:12)
Yeah, ethical boundaries. mean, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about this. It is so important. you know, I’ve talked about trust, I think really there’s probably four pillars which are important here. So when you think about ethical current awareness, trust. you know, this is about when receiving current awareness generated within Vable, lawyers need to know that

Information is reliable. It’s Safe to act on. If they don’t trust the source summary or filter, they’ll disengage and that undermines the whole purpose of the current awareness. And this sort of this is connected to the second one, is really important, which is about transparency. I sort of touched on this. And at Vable, we strive for complete transparency. It’s important for lawyers to know how the content was created.

how it filtered, how it was ranked, and including whether AI was used. And I think that there used to be a complete transparency in this respect. It builds confidence and allows lawyers to assess the credibility of the content. would be a summary that is clearly labeled as AI generated with the option to view the original source.

So those are two, trust and transparency. Accuracy is another very important pillar. And this sort of covers, in a way, the sort of trade-off between automation and editorial insight. So for internal alerts going to lawyers, there is a possibility that there’s a lower quality requirement threshold. They don’t necessarily have to be 100 % and perfect.

And so a lot of alerts can be automated based on some logic, Boolean queries. Maybe they need to be the threshold of 80 % accuracy. But on the other hand, if alerts are going to the senior partners or to clients, then threshold is going to be much, much higher, possibly 100%. And this is where editorial oversight is really critical. Inaccurate alerts or misleading summaries can create legal, reputational client risk, et cetera. Vable,

Dealing with this, provide client admins a full set of review and curation features. We say it’s really important and allows for human review before full sending. The fourth pillar is inclusion. And we always try and avoid these echo chambers and that sort of thing. And I think it’s important that ensuring that content generated reflects a diversity of sources, jurisdictions, and perspectives.

not just the usual suspects. And I think that’s another strength of which is our sort of news aggregation capabilities. And we talked about ensuring all the published content, what content do they want and giving complete control to clients to have a broad spectrum of sources all the major legal publishers and all the public content as well. So I think when it comes to sort of thinking about sort of the ethical boundaries and things.

using those four pillars to drive a lot of our innovation and decision making.

Greg Lambert (23:11)
Well, as the CEO of the company and especially as technology in the way that information is consumed now, it’s constantly evolving. So we talked a lot about AI and how that’s

built in, over the past few years we’ve moved much more into cloud computing. We are able to really kind of be anywhere and have access to almost anything. So what kind of challenges are you facing with how you evolve at Vable to just build the information, but

kind of improve the information along the way and leverage technology to do that. what’s been some of the things that’s caught your attention or you think is on the horizon for you to advance with on the technology side?

Matthew Dickinson (24:05)
Well, mean, there’s so much, mean, it’s so much is evolving and changing. And that’s a big, big challenge for an organisation like us. You know, we could start a project which is a nine month, 12 month project and sort of halfway through, there’s another incredible innovation breakthrough. I always think it’s sort of that sort of thinking about.

Greg Lambert (24:23)
two weeks in.

Marlene Gebauer (24:24)
Alright.

Matthew Dickinson (24:30)
And we could have spent a lot of time two years ago and everything’s turned on its head. so to a large extent, we’ve waited a little bit until AI has become much more accessible and it’s evolved hugely in recent times. so, and we’ve very difficult to answer the questions about some of the key things, but it’s, we’ve got a plan over the next six months to start bringing a lot of these

these things I’ve been talking about earlier start on that road for making it much more personalized for the end user and start getting more prediction coming into the platform.

Greg Lambert (25:05)
Do you also see things like using the AI to create different formats? it can, say for example, you’ve got something and then you can create a visual for it or you can create an audio file that it’s like that. Are you looking at it other ways?

Matthew Dickinson (25:19)
Yeah, I mean, yeah.

Well, yeah, I mean, I’m experimenting the whole time and thinking about this and one of the one of the projects I’ve turned my mind to is about horizon scanning. For instance, you know, there’s a lot of data out there and how to actually bring the data into nicely organized tables and formatting the data in particular way to make it understandable. So collecting data and you know, these these are things which are

a little bit more sort of, you know, personal projects of mine. And as we all experiment using AI, even, you know, in our day to day work, there’s a lot of interesting use cases coming out. But certainly from, you know, from a business perspective, I think, you know, our core is to focus on less of the visual and audio, but sticking very much to the core problem at hand, which is helping lawyers

make really good decisions with as little effort as possible.

Greg Lambert (26:16)
So if I want my newsletter to be in the voice of Harry Potter, that’s not available yet.

Marlene Gebauer (26:22)
You have to do that yourself.

Matthew Dickinson (26:24)
This is the thing, Greg, I think we need to come on and have a few of these sort of brainstorming sessions. I want you to find out what’s on your mind here. And, you know, maybe, maybe.

Marlene Gebauer (26:28)
Hahaha.

Greg Lambert (26:33)
Yeah, read this in the voice of Morgan Freeman for me.

Marlene Gebauer (26:34)
Matt, that’s nice. That’s nice.

Authoritative. Very good. Trustworthy. I did want to follow up with that, Matthew. So what about like the area of predictability? Cause that’s always been kind of a dicey area. Like for a long time, I think vendors stayed away from that because, you know, lawyers were kind of uncomfortable with.

sort of that, that element that they wanted to have control over that themselves in terms of, how they presented that to clients. But it seems like it’s, it’s gaining more, acceptance in terms of, okay, here’s, here’s information and is how we think it’s going to impact, a client or an environment or an industry or, or something. And, and maybe suggestions as to what to do is, is that an area?

of exploration.

Matthew Dickinson (27:27)
Yeah, no, certainly. I predictability, but it goes back to it’s mustn’t treated as the oracle. Really, and it’s there to supercharge us to super. And so I use AI a lot just to get the ideas going, get the basics, get a broad spectrum, if that’s possible, of ideas. But, you know, ultimately, the lawyers have to take what they’re given and make something of it, make their own judgment. And the question is,

Is it better for them to start with nothing, just a set of 50 articles or whatever it is? Or is it better and easier for them to start off with something actually half-baked? Or maybe 10 things half-baked and then they can make judgments. And that’s really is, are they in a much stronger position if they’re taken halfway up the mountain? But they’ve got to do the final bit and that’s we must not delegate. And this is the thing, and I think this is where the concern…

which you’re referring to comes from is the risk, the worry of turning everything over to AI. No, let’s use these tools to empower us in our day-to-day but we have to be the ones who are going to take responsibility for the output and the communication with the clients.

Marlene Gebauer (28:40)
You know, sort of keeping the human in the loop.

Matthew Dickinson (28:42)
But it has to be. And that takes

us away from that sort of, ⁓ AI is taking our jobs and what’s going to happen to everything else. We have to remain in the loop. We have to. can’t delegate everything.

Marlene Gebauer (28:52)
Right,

right, we’ve already.

Greg Lambert (28:54)
Well, you hear him say AI

is taking my job, but they’re also saying I want AI to do my job.

Marlene Gebauer (29:01)
We don’t know what we want.

We want to have it all. ⁓ But certainly, Matthew, to your point, we’ve seen people just sort of rely on it in terms of submitting documents to court. And we see how that goes. So is really no different. You have to be able to judge for yourself.

Matthew Dickinson (29:18)
Yeah, yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (29:20)
What is something? go ahead.

Greg Lambert (29:21)
Actually,

wait a minute Marlene, I want to jump in because that made me think of something because we hear a lot about legal research and the problem with using AI and AI hallucinations. think the MyPillows guys’ lawyers got caught again and fined this week $3,000 each for submitting fake cases.

Marlene Gebauer (29:25)
Alright.

Greg Lambert (29:46)
On your side, however, you’re also seeing things like ⁓ experts going up and creating kind of fake research studies or relying upon AI and it’s creating all this other things. So, back to your authority and validation and one of your pillars there.

Matthew Dickinson (29:59)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (30:05)
are you running into any problems where some of the information you may be gathering be faulty because people are building things using AI and producing it as like their own information? Deepfakes. ⁓

Matthew Dickinson (30:21)
Yeah, yeah. Double.

Marlene Gebauer (30:21)
Like deep, fake information. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah.

Matthew Dickinson (30:25)
Yeah, yeah. No, you know, these are definitely big concerns, you know, in every industry and so, you know, so much fake stuff is out there. And the way we try and overcome that is, again, it’s about the control over the input, the control over the content. you know, so there’s no black box going on here. Each one of our clients, they have 200

2000 key sources, what are the verified sources? So I suppose avoiding these fake reports and research things coming in is a great way to do that and it’s slightly limiting in a way because we’re not saying we’ve got the whole world in there and it’s it’s that but it’s much more controlled and this goes back to trust Being able to trust the system. These are the sources we pay for these the other sources government regulatory whatever it may be that we trust and if we are

limiting any output based upon the input. It won’t be perfect, but my goodness me it’s going to be pretty good.

Marlene Gebauer (31:27)
What is something you wish people understood better about the space you work in? you know, we’ve talked about a lot over the past, you know, half hour or so, but you know, is it, is it the value of curated information, the reality of building tools for law firms? Like something that, you know, you know, but doesn’t seem to be kind of common knowledge and would be really helpful. if, people sort of knew and understood better.

Matthew Dickinson (31:53)
I don’t know. I just think people understand things much better than I do probably about much many things. I I think about this question, one thing I do try and ensure and then just goes back to sort of Vable and the people I work with, for instance, and it is a challenge working in the sector, in this industry.

Marlene Gebauer (31:55)
So many things. Just pick one.

Matthew Dickinson (32:16)
So trying to ensure all the Vablers, by which I mean the of Vabler employees and advisors, that they understand, they don’t already, how unique law firms are. And, you know, how this uniqueness, how it affects everything about building technology for them. so it’s different in many other sort of sectors, but it’s an absolute joy to be in this sector, but it is definitely a challenge in some respects. Law firms, they’re not just like any

professional services firms. They operate in high trust, high stakes environments and the margin for error is incredibly small. you know, and this is when we sort of thinking about these sort of ethical boundaries and that sort of thing. We have to get things totally right. And so, you know, the content we deliver isn’t just being read, it’s actually being relied upon is to give legal advice to prepare a partner for a client call or even spot a reputational risk.

This to a large extent, raises the bar hugely in terms of accuracy, et cetera. this goes back to actually even thinking about a law firm itself. It’s not just one single group. Each practice area has its own culture, partners, value, autonomy, et cetera. So the success for us is to ensure that we are about building smart features. And so we’re earning the trust.

from lawyers, from thinking about how lawyers work and not about what we wish they did, not really probably answering your question, but I think that it’s something which is really important for me as a leader of Avaible to ensure that we’re all thinking about the audience and what makes law firms unique. And then we can be more successful in helping them solve their problems.

Marlene Gebauer (33:54)
I’d love that answer actually, that basically you and the folks at Vable are sort taking the time to sort of understand the client and why that is so important to be able to deliver a product and services that will be helpful for them.

Greg Lambert (34:11)
I thought it was awfully kind of you to say that the legal industry was unique and not challenging. Well, speaking of challenging, we’ve talked a lot about the future, but we ask all of our guests our crystal ball questions. So we’re going to ask you to pull out your crystal ball. And when we started this, we we used to say the next two to five years.

Marlene Gebauer (34:13)
We are snowflakes. We are snowflakes.

Greg Lambert (34:34)
I think it’s now like the next two to five weeks. ⁓ But peering into the future, what is it that you see for your slice of the industry that’s going to be one of the biggest challenges or changes that you are going to have to adjust to and the market may have to adjust to?

Marlene Gebauer (34:36)
Six months. Weeks.

Matthew Dickinson (34:53)
Well, I I think we’ve sort of you know covered covered a lot of it of it in in in the above but you know, I Promise when you I get asked this or crystal ball question. I I have a tendency of Thinking about going down the doom and gloom Route about how AI is taking over the world blah-de-blah ⁓ and putting us all out of a job

Greg Lambert (35:12)
You can only

repeat what the crystal ball is showing you.

Matthew Dickinson (35:16)
Well, know,

Marlene Gebauer (35:17)
That’s right.

No judgment here.

Matthew Dickinson (35:18)
it’s not going to be an appropriate way to finish this fantastic half hour, etc. So, you know, I do do really think that we’re in very exciting times. And I think that the opportunities are huge for individuals. So not just thinking about our clients things, but all of us, the opportunities are endless. It’s incredibly exciting. There’s a lot of changes on the horizon that are going to impact our lives.

In ways that we can imagine but I also think in ways that we cannot yet imagine this is sort of thinking, know Six months is as far as we can really look in terms of how things are going to change But I you know, goes back to you know, I think we’re all going to be supercharged myself I’m able to do things. I’ve never was never able to do a year ago and turn out Information. I’m really happy with what ideas

that I was never able to do 12 months ago. think in a way we’re all going to end up with our own, in the past we had our PAs or executive assistants, I think we’re going to end up with our personalized current awareness bot, which knows us, knows what we want in terms of information, provides us with a flawless service, proactive and insightful. And we can give them names and that sort of thing, I don’t know.

But it’s very difficult and the crystal ball, mean, you what’s around the corner, I don’t know. But I think it is something positive and the only caveat to all of that is, as I said earlier, we do need to stay in charge. No delegation of the important things, that creativity or things which are important to us in how we go from A to B.

Greg Lambert (37:03)
Good. Well, that was not the dark answer that you were queuing up. All right. Well, Matthew Dickinson, CEO and founder at Vable. I want to thank you very much for coming on, taking the time to talk to us. This has been very insightful. Thank you.

Matthew Dickinson (37:21)
and likewise. Well, thank you both very much indeed. It’s been a lot of fun.

Marlene Gebauer (37:21)
Thank you.

And of course, thanks to all of you, our listeners, for taking the time to listen to the Geek and Review podcast. If you enjoyed the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you, so reach out to us on LinkedIn and Blue Sky.

Greg Lambert (37:37)
And Matthew, we’ll put links on the show notes, but is there any particular place that you want to point listeners to to learn more about Vable or to reach out to you directly?

Matthew Dickinson (37:49)
I mean, Vable.com, do go there, some great information, lots of valuable resources there. And I’m also, you can find me on LinkedIn. But no, love to hear from anybody who wants to have further conversations about some of these topics. So thank you all.

Marlene Gebauer (38:07)
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry. And thanks everyone.

Greg Lambert (38:11)
Thanks, Jerry.

All right, bye-bye.

Marlene Gebauer (38:14)
Bye bye.