IGHS28 - Cat Casey's Involvement in the New York Bar AI Task Force

Jim Merrifield (00:01.194)
Hello and welcome to the InfoGov hot seat. I'm your host Jim Merrifield and with me today is Cat Casey, also known as the TECHNOCAT at Reveal. Welcome Cat

Cat Casey (00:10.453)
I'm right here, you can sort of see it. Yeah, hi, thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this all week.

Jim Merrifield (00:16.298)
Yeah, this is great. Hey, that's awesome. I know I'm glad you took a little time out of your day to let us get to know you a little better and what you have going on. I know you're a busy, busy person in this industry. So we're looking forward to digging into that some more in the conversation. So let's kick this off. Can you tell us a brief introduction of your role and how long you've been with Reveal and one fun fact about yourself?

Cat Casey (00:32.533)
Really.

Cat Casey (00:42.421)
For sure. Well, I'm going to start with the fun fact because evidently everyone dodges that and I'm a cat that's allergic to cats. So I don't know if it's an unfun fact or a fun fact. Anyways, so yeah, I'm a dog person, but so my name is Cat Casey. I'm the chief growth officer for Reveal. We're an AI company for eDiscovery. So AI to connect the dots and evidence faster. And

Jim Merrifield (00:52.842)
Oh wow.

Cat Casey (01:05.045)
My role is basically I'm out there, I'm the AI evangelist. I speak at probably 50 conferences a year. I've got the TechnoCat podcast. I write prolifically about all things AI and how lawyers can embrace it because our robot overlords are here. And if we play our cards right, we will be the robot overlords not run by the robot overlords.

Jim Merrifield (01:25.706)
Yeah, for sure. Now you're all over the place doing so much. I don't know how you sleep to be honest with you. So that's true. That's true, for sure. So can you share some insights into, you spoke about AI, obviously. I know you're a bunch of conferences and you write quite a bit on AI and the landscape. Are there any notable trends that you're seeing in the space today?

Cat Casey (01:32.181)
I'm dead.

Cat Casey (01:49.205)
Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest trend I've been talking about AI since, I don't know, De Silva more, which was 2008 or nine. So I've been talking about it for almost 20 years and the appetite to use AI has fundamentally shifted since the introduction of ChatGPT and generative AI. Basically once there was a South Park episode and Cartman was giggling and saying, I want my ChatGPT lawyers who were previously very resistant suddenly became much more open.

basically sort of ChatGPT democratized AI in the sense that you didn't have to be a statistician or no lambda calculus to use AI. And so as people started using it in their personal lives, or more likely their kids started using it, the barrier and the fear and the foreignness around AI started falling away in the last 18 months. It went from when I would talk about AI, people would be like eyes glazing, like, oh, go away cat, to like,

interested and even now people are leading with the conversation. You almost have to tell people like pump the brakes a little bit. Let's make sure we're using the AI right and that you're not going to get a hallucination. And that shift is crazy. Like 18 years of talking about AI as my main thesis and the last 18 months is more change than the prior 18 years. It's mind blowing.

Jim Merrifield (03:06.922)
Yeah, it is. And it seems like you're right. There seems like there's a divide between AI, people that are embracing AI and people that are kind of afraid of AI.

Cat Casey (03:15.829)
Well, it's no lawyer went to law school to do lambda calculus and relational databases. I studied existential philosophy and now I'm talking about AI, but a lot of us are very type A. We have achieved various levels of success and infogov our roles and most people want to keep doing what they're good at, not try things they aren't good at. And so when it's very foreign to what you've been doing for folks, there's almost a barrier.

It's like, if you only know how to roller skate and you try to do rollerblading and you kind of fall down, you might go back to roller skating. So part of it is teaching people that you're not failing if the tech doesn't work exactly how you expect it the first time. Part of the process is iteration, trial and error, learning how to talk to AI. The way you talk to ChatGPT is not the way you do a Boolean search. It's not the way you type into Google. So you need to learn new skills and be comfortable with.

It being a learning process where you're not going to be perfect day one, but you'll improve over time. And you know, it, you can't stop this AI revolution. All you can do is get on board and you'll either get on board and be at the front of the boat, helping to guide it and have a really cool, successful career. Or you're going to be playing catch up, you know, swimming in the wake of the boat, trying to hop back on.

Jim Merrifield (04:36.202)
Yeah, I think you're exactly right. You make some very valid points. So speaking of lawyers, I know that you recently got asked to be on the New York Bar AI Task Force and you were telling me that that team and yourself produced a paper. Talk about that a little bit.

Cat Casey (04:54.741)
Yeah, so I am thrilled to be on the New York AI Task Force as a non -New Yorker, non -practicing attorney. And we actually pulled together this AI report for the entire New York State Bar on my section was the risks and rewards around generative AI. What's the cool stuff? What's the worst case scenario? Is Skynet coming? Do we need to be very scared? And then we offered some practical guidance, like how do you embrace this technology? How do you protect privacy and your legal obligations? And.

We submitted that last week and it was actually approved by the New York State Bar as guidance they're gonna give to all of their members. And we actually have some regulators that have been looking at it as they build forward looking AI policy. And so it's kind of cool to be part of building something instead of, I mean, as we were talking right beforehand, we all go to the conferences, we all talk about it, then we all go back to our office and keep talking about it. So it was kind of fun to be part of doing something.

Jim Merrifield (05:48.042)
Yeah, absolutely. Now where can you, I think you mentioned it, where can you actually get a copy of that paper?

Cat Casey (05:53.141)
So it's on, if you Google the New York AI Task Force, you can get a link there. I'll send you a link to the PDF if you want to add that in the comments section whenever this goes live. And it's a downloadable PDF. It's 90 pages of great reading, if you ask me. But it's also pretty intuitive. It's not too deep in legalese. Like even if you're not a practicing attorney, it's just good ways of thinking about what does this new landscape mean for us as people in business, as...

people in legal as lawyers as whatever the case may be.

Jim Merrifield (06:23.786)
Yeah, I think it's great. And 90 pages isn't bad. And then probably with ChatGPT, you could probably dumb that down to like five pages, right? And get the Cliff Notes. So, you know, that's awesome.

Cat Casey (06:32.789)
Make sure it doesn't hallucinate. You might want to assume the original, but...

Jim Merrifield (06:37.578)
Yeah, that's a good point now speaking of writing I know you also co -authored a book around AI

Cat Casey (06:44.117)
I did. I did. Yesterday was a big week. Actually, we launched a book. I did it with Olga Mack and MbaMemme and Humira We're the editors. We launched it at Harvard Law School at their Innovation in Law Technology Symposium. It's called Legal Operation in an Age of AI and Data. It's actually my third book with this publisher. I also did AI for Legal Professionals, kind of building the future of law and the legal technology handbook in the last year with them. So.

been a busy beaver on all things AI, evidently.

Jim Merrifield (07:15.722)
Yeah, you've been very busy. Yeah, so a book, you're on a task force, and I know you also, right, you're headed to a couple conferences and some of the events and presentations. So what do you have coming up in the near future?

Cat Casey (07:23.093)
Yeah.

Cat Casey (07:27.573)
So next or tomorrow I'm heading over to the master's conference and then I'll be in Dallas on Thursday for an AI pop -up. But the next big thing is actually I'm the keynote for ILTAs new Evolve conference on their third day. It's a really amazing, I think, generative AI panel. It's not one -on -one. It's not what are the words? It's not here's what it's scary. It's a little bit deeper. How do you start actually start using the technology? And so that'll be a 9 a .m. on Wednesday in Charlotte for the ILTA Evolve conference. That's.

I think think April 28th to May 1st.

Jim Merrifield (08:00.778)
Cool. That's awesome. I have to launch this podcast before then so people know that you're going to be there. I'm sure everybody knows that you're going to be there. So that's great. Yeah, the ILTA Evolve Conference. That's a new one, right? That's the first one this year.

Cat Casey (08:04.053)
I know.

Cat Casey (08:12.341)
Yeah, yeah, they're really focusing on the intersection of, you know, cyber, Infogov legal and AI in particular, because a lot of the conferences will touch on AI, but because it's only one or two of the sessions out of 20, or whatever the case may be, none of them go really deep. And so this is a lot more intentional focus on AI and what it means for professionals across the infogov legal tech and legal space.

Jim Merrifield (08:38.058)
Yeah, that seems really exciting. I can't wait to talk to you after that, you know, go to that conference. I'm sure it'll be amazing. So I know we talked a lot about a lot a lot here. Cat, is any final thoughts that you'd like to leave with the audience?

Cat Casey (08:51.733)
You know, I think the final thought is, um, the AI is here. So start learning about it. Uh, find your dork. I always volunteer to be the dork. Um, find the people that are writing and talking about it. We can read, read through all of the, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of articles and stuff and kind of pointing the direction of interesting stuff. Um, but now really is the time to leapfrog folks that don't embrace technology. Um, we're all learning in real time together, six months, 12 months from now, you might be a little too late to the game. So.

Act fast, be curious.

Jim Merrifield (09:23.978)
I love that advice and you know thanks for today putting we actually put AI on the hot seat today. The IG hot seat AI was on the hot seat and thank you Cat for for joining us today and everyone for listening. If you'd like to be a guest here on the hot seat like Cat all you have to do is go to the website infogovhotseat.com view our latest episodes and also sign up for you know if you'd like to be a guest and thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day.

Cat Casey (09:29.397)
I love it.