
In this year-end episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert are joined by legal tech experts Niki Black, Principal Legal Insight Strategist at AffiniPay, and Sarah Glassmeyer, Director of Data Curation at Legal Technology Hub, to recap the top stories of 2024. From the evolution of generative AI in legal tech to groundbreaking acquisitions, the conversation delves into the successes and challenges that shaped the year in the legal industry.
The discussion kicks off with a look at AI’s growing role in legal research and practice management. Greg recalls the controversial Stanford report that questioned the reliability of AI tools marketed as hallucination-free. The guests explore the importance of unbiased evaluations, the complexity of defining legal research, and the rapid pace of AI development that often outpaces regulatory and academic studies. Sarah highlights the need for peer-reviewed analysis to guide the effective use of these tools, while Niki emphasizes the user-friendly interfaces that generative AI brings to legal software.
Marlene shifts the conversation toward the challenges of integrating AI into law firms’ existing frameworks. The hosts and guests discuss the hesitancy of document management systems to adopt generative AI due to trust and security concerns. Niki and Sarah examine how firms are adapting to AI by organizing data more effectively and addressing client expectations. They also reflect on the potential of AI to bridge access-to-justice gaps, with tools that empower self-represented litigants and underserved communities.
The episode takes a closer look at notable mergers and acquisitions in 2024, such as Bloomberg’s acquisition of Dashboard Legal and Thomson Reuters’ purchase of SafeSign Technologies. Sarah raises concerns about the consolidation of the legal tech market, warning of diminished innovation and competition. Niki observes how cloud-based technologies have facilitated these integrations, making it easier for companies to offer comprehensive solutions that touch multiple aspects of legal practice.
Wrapping up, the group forecasts trends for 2025, including regulatory developments around AI and shifting priorities within law firms regarding tech adoption. While some predictions are cautious, like Sarah’s concern over the impact of external political factors on the tech workforce, others remain optimistic about the growing sophistication of legal tech. The episode concludes with reflections on how the industry can better prepare junior lawyers and law students to navigate an increasingly AI-driven landscape.
Join Marlene, Greg, Niki, and Sarah for this insightful look back at 2024 and an exciting glimpse into the year ahead. As always, we thank our listeners for tuning in, and we encourage you to share this episode with colleagues and connect with us on LinkedIn or Blue Sky!
Listen on mobile platforms: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
TRANSCRIPT
Marlene Gebauer (00:06)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gabauer.
Greg Lambert (00:13)
And I’m Greg Lambert and this week we’re going to do something a little special. We’re going to look back on 2024 and share some of our top stories in the legal industry, legal tech, legal innovation, legal creativity, all of it, right Marlene?
Marlene Gebauer (00:29)
Exactly. mean, it is the season and, you know, who knows where this conversation will end up. We have so many topics that we could potentially cover. We have two very special guests with us to bring their perspective as well. Niki Black is a longtime friend of ours. She is the principal legal insight strategist at AffiniPay, as well as a prolific writer and reporter on all things legal tech. Niki, it is really great to have you on The Geek in Review.
And another great friend and colleague, Sarah Glassmeyer, who is the Director of Data Curation at Legal Technology Hub. Sarah, we’re really glad to have you back on the show.
Sarah G. (01:04)
Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Greg Lambert (01:06)
Right, well there was a lot of buzz going around this year and while I will say not all of it was about artificial intelligence, I would say a heavy bit of it was about AI, so we’ll probably focus on that. Yeah, just a little bit. So the way we’re gonna attack this is we’re gonna do this round robin style, so I’m gonna have everyone pick.
Marlene Gebauer (01:20)
We were probably part of that. Just a little bit.
Greg Lambert (01:30)
their top story and and go with that so I’m gonna I’m gonna take the the co-host privilege and go first and so back in May at the end of May everyone may remember that Stanford University put out a report that did a benchmarking survey on the way that
legal research tools worked with AI and they had quite a bit of, yeah, was a little stir, got a little bit of talk around the press, including us, and they were showing that a lot of the AI tools that were saying that they were hallucination-free in their marketing materials wasn’t exactly
Marlene Gebauer (02:02)
That was a stir. A little bit.
Greg Lambert (02:18)
backing that up with the tools themselves. So I know that there was a range from something like 15 to 30 % error rates, that hallucinations were coming back. And then this is one of those areas where I had to kind of remove myself, or remove the message from the messenger because the message was that the marketing
the tools and what the marketing was saying wasn’t actually matching up with what the products were producing Unfortunately, the messengers were a little Untrustworthy I would say because of the fact that They were using the wrong tools They were not given access to the most recent tools, which which they did note
but I think there was a lot going on. And not only that, but the initial report, which had tools that weren’t really legal research tools, all of a sudden, within three days, they were actually able to come out with a second report, an updated report, that used the right tools. I’ll just toss this out to the rest of you as well to contribute on.
As I was saying before we jumped in, I found myself in the weird position of actually defending Westlaw and Lexis and saying, practical law is not a legal research tool. can’t say it’s terrible at legal research when that’s not what it’s set up to do. Sarah, I know you had some comments at the time. Can you burrow into that part of the brain and recall what was going on?
Sarah G. (03:52)
No, yeah, I mean, that’s the thing that
was so, again, yeah, once again, like, I am clearly never been a big Thomson Reuters defender, but like, I have to say, like, that was so weird that they were trying to run it as a, you run it using practical law. Well, of course it didn’t come back right, but like, I mean, broadly though, I think it’s so important, you know, like, the Stanford, that was a Stanford experiment, but the Stanford audio version of this did not, was not great, and it didn’t really help.
Marlene Gebauer (04:15)
Hey, what’s?
Sarah G. (04:19)
move the profession forward, did not help move technology forward. But I really do think there are needs for several unbiased third party evaluations of of gen AI. Because that’s the thing, we’ve been promised a lot of stuff from the vendors. People, you kind of at conferences are getting a little bit of side talk from people who are using these things in practice and it’s now starting to say like, yeah, I like this one or I don’t like this one or this one’s really terrible. like,
coming from an academic, former academic, I would like to see some like peer reviewed actual scientific studies of these products so we can say this is the right way to use these tools. Cause also that’s the other thing, like we’re still trying to figure out how to use these the best way. like if somebody’s testing them so early, it’s kind of hard, but you know, and having looked at this for other projects as well, like trying to do evaluations of gen AI legal research tools is even just like.
Talking to some other librarians about this like how do we even define legal research? You could like when you do legal research How do you define what the right answer is like there’s like a whole bunch of work? need to kind of do before we even test these because like sometimes the right answer is There is no answer because there is not a case on point or you know difference between like this case actually You know support your argument, but you know, maybe the facts. There’s another case that’s slightly better facts I mean, it’s so like a nebulous hard thing to nail down
Niki (05:21)
you
Sarah G. (05:42)
It’ll be interesting to see in the future if we get more studies and how they are reviewed by the react to by the public and you just keep iterating and try to find the best way to say like, this is a good tool, this is not. But yeah, I mean, it also kind of goes back to one of the things I always have a problem with in law is that we don’t even know like what good lawyer it is. It’s hard to define that. Like how do you define like what good work product is? Like, so like we’re trying to say the, yeah.
Niki (06:01)
you
Marlene Gebauer (06:05)
It’s so personal though, right? It’s
very personal as to what they can use in terms of what is going to make a good argument. Because it’s really kind of in their brain as to, like, they’re seeing something that’s like, how am going to create this based on what I’m seeing? So it’s hard to make that determination.
Sarah G. (06:15)
Yeah, yeah.
Niki (06:22)
I also think one of the biggest challenges with generative AI across the board is, it’s even though
And one thing I’ll talk about later is sort of my, my big focus is development slowed out of necessity. Even though that happened, it’s still moving at a much more rapid pace in terms of development than any other technology that preceded it. totally understand, Sarah, you wanting there to be studies that will let you know what’s a good tool and what’s a bad tool. But I almost, it reminds me of, I feel like they’re going to, by the time they come out, they’re going to be moot because the tool they’re talking about is going to be, have changed. And it reminds me of like years ago when.
when New York issued an ethics opinion on LinkedIn and the category of whether lawyers could put under specialization, that was a category of field available, their practice areas. so New York, you know, the question came in, they took it to the committee, the committee reviewed it, took them a couple of months to come to an answer, drafted an opinion. They released the opinion like two weeks after LinkedIn, I think responding in part to lawyers complaining, removed specialization. So this opinion was so narrow,
that to link to this one category and LinkedIn had removed it. And so it was moot. This opinion was completely moot when it was released and it really didn’t apply to anything. And so I think that we’re sort of in that same boat with generative AI, whether it’s wanting research papers, whether it’s wanting recommendations, these tools are changing so quickly that by the time someone actually uses it and analyzes it and writes, even if they do it quickly, an analysis or a recommendation, it may no longer be relevant. So it’s an interesting time for sure.
Greg Lambert (07:52)
Well, it kind of reminds me, this is not the first time that the PR materials on a legal research tool don’t match the reality of using the tools. mean, natural language searching hasn’t worked in 20 years. so it’s just that, I mean, that came out in 2002, 2003, and…
And that was kind of the, remember we weren’t going to, we were gonna be able to do more search engine style searching and you could use just regular sentences and it would know the semantics of each of those. never could get it to work very properly. So I always went back to Boolean. So this is not like a new thing where,
using natural language, which is what basically you’re trying to do with these prompting, hasn’t necessarily worked. Now, what is new is, and I think the vendors do need to be taken to task for this, is that if you’re wordsmithing your PR materials so that it’s, well…
because it didn’t come back with a citation for that, technically that’s not a hallucination, even though it completely made up this section of the answer. But because it didn’t have a citation to it, you should know that, you you should question that. I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, so.
Marlene Gebauer (09:11)
Yeah. I mean, if you’re splitting, if you’re splitting hairs like that, like there’s a problem already. So, and
I feel like there’s a lot of over-promising and under-delivering that that’s going on. And that, that cause, you know, that, causes a problem in the industry because, and with clients or their clients, attorneys, because they think that, you know, it’s supposed to be delivering something. And if you’re going through these pilots and they’re like, this is not doing what
that was promised, that turns a number of people
Sarah G. (09:44)
I say, that’s
like the weird wrinkle about generative AI and like client expectations because, know, like document automation, no one outside of whoever had to do that knew about it, but like normal people know about generative AI. You know, there’s commercials for it now during the Super Bowl and during, yeah, exactly. the Olympics, like every other commercial break was about using generative AI in some ways. And so, you know, it’s kind of like how,
Marlene Gebauer (09:59)
My parents know about it.
Sarah G. (10:08)
I always kind think it’s a lot more like the Web 2.0 revolution or mobile revolution, how everyone’s like, you need an app. And I think now it’s like, the client side is like, do you have generative AI? Are you using that in some way? Because they, from watching the Olympics and seeing those commercials, think it’s the greatest, newest tool that, of course, everyone’s using it without realizing, no, especially in something like legal world, how it’s a different barrier to use.
Marlene Gebauer (10:33)
So big
questions like, okay, you’re using it or like, what is, let’s define use. Let’s define what that means and how are you using it? That I think is a very interesting question that remains to be answered by a lot of different firms. And I don’t know, Niki, you’re talking about sort of general AI trends and that might kind of fall into that category. It’s like.
Sarah G. (10:38)
Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (10:54)
using, experimenting, seeing?
Niki (10:59)
Well, in due course, it’s going to be integrated into all the platforms every firm is using anyway, and it’s happening quickly. And so I think that that’s a part of the equation there that and expecting people to understand what they’re using. People have been using anyone who uses legal research tools has been using AI for about four years now and they don’t know it. You know, these tools have already had AI built in on the back end. then generative AI rolled out and everybody’s starting to roll that out across the board, not just in legal research, but into all the
tools that law firms use. so all lawyers and legal professionals are going to be using generative AI, whether they realize it or not. And one of the things that I’m most interested in is the ways that it’s being added on top of software and what that’s going to look like moving forward. I don’t know if we want to talk about that now or not. All right. OK. I wasn’t sure if you were handing it off to me or not. So the thing that I think is super interesting, sort of looking at the big picture, is
Greg Lambert (11:45)
Yeah, let’s jump in. You’re up.
Marlene Gebauer (11:46)
Yeah, us too.
Niki (11:54)
how generative AI is becoming. This is sort of the…
news that came out of a trend that I noticed that my legal tech journalist friends and I talked about coming out of the conferences is generative AI is becoming the interface for a lot of legal software. So you absolutely see that with legal research software, right? instead of and a lot of software can sometimes be, although it shouldn’t be, sometimes it’s clunky, sometimes running these reports that lawyers need is complicated and knowing like how to run the report and which data to use can be challenging. And so when generative AI
becomes the interface, it creates this user-friendly interface, regardless of how it’s set up, that makes it so much easier for the user to access the data that’s available to them through the particular software that they’re using. In the case of legal research, it’s all of the treatises and the case law and the law and regulations and the entire database of legal information upon which those services draw. But if you’re talking about practice management,
document management, legal billing software, what those software tools are pulling on is the law firm’s actual data that the firm owns. And when you can use trusted tools that can isolate your law firm’s data in a protected and secure environment, and then you can use Generative AI, whether it’s in the form of a chat bot or whether it’s in the form of essentially drop-down menus is what it looks like on the back end. But you limit the ways that they interact, so you create the
in the back end so they get the results they’re really looking for. Either way, they’re able to use and leverage their law firm’s data to really gain incredibly valuable information. And a lot of this is in the process of being developed. But to gain valuable information about their law firm’s financial data and financial insights to help them predict billing and start transitioning to alternative fee billing or flat fee billing as the market starts to shift and AI may begin to impact the billable hour for another day.
Greg Lambert (13:46)
Yeah
Niki (13:49)
to start really
Marlene Gebauer (13:49)
We love that debate.
Niki (13:52)
seeing this user-friendly interface of generative AI, making the legal software so much more accessible and the law firm’s data so much more accessible. So instead of sticking your head into someone’s office, hey, remember that case where we did this or that memo that we drafted, but I just can’t remember the name or the issue? You can ask generative AI and it’s going to provide a much better response than the person down the hall whose memory can be just as faulty as your own.
Greg Lambert (14:17)
One of the things, I was at the KM&I conference and Laurent Weisel and I presented on what the document management systems are doing with AI. And I was really surprised at how tentative the DMS companies were about trying to implement.
AI, especially generative AI tools. Now, they’ve been doing extractive AI for a long time now, for four, five, six years. But the generative AI, I think, spooks them a little bit because the iManage’s manages, the NetDocs, docs, all of those that handle that sensitive data, that’s their number one job is to put
your data in a safe, secure, organized process where you can pull information as you need, but not worry about if someone’s getting into something they shouldn’t be, if that data’s getting leaked outside. So their number one priority is keeping your trust. And when you introduce the generative AI into the equation,
you introduce a lot of cool things, but you don’t introduce a lot of trust. And I think they were very reluctant to do things with that. I think we’re still looking at a lot of the extractive AI to pull information that you’re talking about with financials.
with kind of workflow, who’s doing what. And then there may be a slight layer on top that’s generative, but I think that’s something we’re probably gonna see going more into the future as we kind of figure that out. And we can stop worrying about is the company training on our data? Is our data in a secure location? Is it encrypted?
to, from, and at rest. All of those questions have to be answered because for that level to happen, you have to trust that your data is secure. And that’s something I don’t think we have right now.
Niki (16:17)
Well, that’s a really…
You know, that’s a really good point. And that’s why earlier I’d reference how it almost feels like development has across the board kind of stalled in the legal industry and outside of the legal industry. I’ve seen some headlines that talk about this is just happening across the board. And that’s because you can roll out those quick, easy wins, right, which is what everybody did. Summarizing documents. And sometimes even that can be challenging to do it accurately in the legal Changing the tone of text or helping draft very simple documents or create document templates.
That’s
one thing, but to actually draw from a law firm’s data and provide accurate, complex analysis that’s useful, that becomes a challenge because of all the things you’re talking about. When you are a company that’s trusted, you wanna make sure that your output’s trusted and you don’t do something that’s gonna make your customers question that trust. And then it does become challenging to make sure that you are leveraging their data appropriately, that you’re protecting it even from like the Chinese walls within
Marlene Gebauer (17:14)
Ethical walls. Ethical
Niki (17:15)
Yeah,
Marlene Gebauer (17:16)
walls.
Niki (17:16)
you know, have they changed that? Have they changed that? Okay. Yeah, I’m going, drawn back on my law firm days. Yeah, you know, I’m drawing back on like my law firm days and that’s what we called it. It’s not an area that I…
Greg Lambert (17:16)
I you were going to go to TikTok.
Sarah G. (17:18)
Yeah, that’s it.
Marlene Gebauer (17:23)
Hahaha
Sarah G. (17:23)
Yeah!
Niki (17:29)
traverse too often, you know, so that you’re not inadvertently giving information to one lawyer that isn’t supposed to know it because those walls are in place. And so there’s all sorts of issues you need to consider and to be able to develop the software in a way that you address all of those can be challenging. And that’s why I think you’re seeing things stalled a little because everyone wants to do it right, or at least they should be approaching it with that type of caution for sure.
Marlene Gebauer (17:53)
Yeah, I’m…
Greg Lambert (17:53)
Sarah?
Sarah, you’re…
Sarah G. (17:54)
Yeah, it also
just the, you know, one of the drums we’ve been beating for years is that you need to have your data well organized for these tools. You should have been having to do it anyway now, but now there’s like a real use case. And so there is a lot of, you know, as Alex Smith says, IA before AI. there’s, that’s I think another reason that some things have stalled is because it’s just like, we don’t have anything tagged the way it should be to actually have it. Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (18:02)
work.
It’s like our data’s a mess. It’s not gonna work.
Greg Lambert (18:18)
I’m surprised, know, Sarah, I think this plays into it because there was a phrase that was used a lot, probably April through June, maybe even before that. But, you know, it was going to be data lakes that basically we were going to throw everything into this lake and, you know, somehow or another the AI was going to sort it out for us. I just haven’t heard that phrase used.
in the circles I’m running with in the past few months.
Sarah G. (18:46)
No. Although apparently that’s what Henchmen
does that. So, you know, with one of, you know, that they go in and just like fix your stuff for you. Gosh, that’s actually, well, we’ll see the KM people say about that.
Greg Lambert (18:56)
Yeah, well, yeah, and
I think it’s the same thing like an Alex Smith would say, is talking about it is easy, but getting it done is not easy at all. So I think we’re at that point, and I think, Niki that probably is one of the points that you’re making is the easy stuff is out of the way. Now we’ve really got to prove our worth and…
It’s going to cost a lot more time, money and effort to get to this next level that hopefully we hit in next year.
Marlene Gebauer (19:29)
I’m curious, both of you, terms of what your thoughts or what you’re hearing regarding, again, the beneficial use cases, the ROI on this. We know that people have been experimenting, firms have been experimenting, organizations have been experimenting, but do you see a movement towards legal organizations
focusing down on here are ways that we can justify this enormous spend.
Sarah G. (19:57)
I mean, from what I’m hearing, it’s like on the Big Law world, it’s still a lot of testing, still trying to do apples to apples comparisons between the two, still running POCs, still trying to figure out like exactly what is the best thing to then go all in on. They’re having multiple subscriptions right now. I mean, I don’t think that’s sustainable at all because that will kind bleed into what I’m going to talk about, but yeah. yeah.
Greg Lambert (20:19)
I can tell you it’s expensive.
It ain’t cheap and the end result is supposed to be efficiency, which is a weird thing for the billable hour, right?
Marlene Gebauer (20:30)
Yes.
Sarah G. (20:31)
Yeah.
I mean, I just want you to kind of quote, I it was saying, like, my favorite kind of these tools right now are the ones that are all back office focused. You know, the ones that are doing the time charts for you and or their narratives, because that’s one thing that’s hard to get lawyers to do anyway. And it also just immediately creates more income. and also it doesn’t require like the lawyery sort of thinking that it’s the the stuff that you don’t really want to do anyway.
Greg Lambert (20:57)
Niki, what are you hearing on on the ROI of AI?
Niki (21:01)
Well, I think that it’s a lot like when there’s tech adoption across the board. You see the solo and small firms.
Being able to innovate faster because they’re smaller, they’re like a smaller ship that can pivot quickly, right? Then you have the large firms with in-house IT and people that are in charge of making these purchasing decisions and making these recommendations. So they have people in-house that that’s their function to try and figure that out. They tend to be the two sides of the industry where you see tools being adopted and then firms in the middle that outsource their IT or have a small IT staff tend to be the slowest historically.
I think AI is changing that a little bit. think across the board, there’s interest in the potential. know Solos that I speak to in very small firms are finding tremendous value because it absolutely, right out of the box, you will, provides them with the ability to streamline their workflows, streamline document creation, have a second person on their shoulder to just bounce ideas off of, which is something that Solos will struggle with. They can be pretty isolated. So they’re absolutely, from day one, even with like
using chat GPT ethically without putting confidential information, have really been able to benefit from that. I’m also seeing it bridge access to justice in some really interesting ways pretty quickly out of the box. lawyers that provide services to underserved communities are able to use it to streamline their work enlarge their client base. So that sort of bridges access to justice and also then seeing legal aid organizations using it as intake on their site.
of things. So there’s all sorts of ways that it’s really helping on that side. And then I think large firms, like you said, it just takes them longer to figure out what they need and figure out how they’re going to justify the spend up the ladder, right? And so that takes time. But I think they’re going to start investing pretty heavily. And then even in the mid-market, you do see a significant interest, but
that billable hour push and pull is where you do see some of the challenges and that’s going to prevent some adoption. But the other place where I really think you’re going to see it, and then I’ll get off my band off my soap soap. I’ll stop talking. Yeah. Soap box is.
Greg Lambert (23:01)
So box.
Marlene Gebauer (23:01)
Soapbox.
We’re here to help.
Niki (23:09)
There are some interesting places where I think that it’s actually going to be required by sophisticated legal clients to use it, and that’s going to move the bar. law firms that provide services for insurance companies and then legal teams that use outside counsel. So the purchasers in those cases, the insurance companies and the legal teams of legal services, absolutely understand how generative AI can streamline the legal services that are being provided to them. And they have the sophistication and the buying power to try to force their attorneys to use them or to
prefer attorneys and firms that actually use these tools. So that’s gonna move the bar a little bit too. So it’s gonna be interesting to see how that happens, but it definitely is, I think, the smaller end of the market where you’re seeing a ton of use case and movement versus the top end.
Marlene Gebauer (23:49)
I will
confirm that because it’s like I was just at TLTF and there was a whole track about small and mid-sized firms and also B2B, B2C type of technologies. So there is definitely an interest in investing on that side of things.
Sarah G. (24:03)
And that’s one thing, it’s kind of a little bit of a side quest, but just kind of build on what Niki was saying about A2J stuff. This is one of the things that I, you know, I look at demos of legal tech products all the time. And the number of ones that, especially now with the generative AI that would have such impact for self-represented litigants, but they would never be allowed or it’ll be a long time because of UPL threats.
Marlene Gebauer (24:09)
We like quests.
Sarah G. (24:29)
to get in the hands of people that could actually use it and could actually benefit. So there was ones that like, you know, like claims explorer from Thomson Reuters. And I saw another one yesterday. You basically just kind of like put in your cause of action or like put in like the brief or the, know, the lawyer, lawyer -ly of me, the thing that was filed with the court. can’t think Like a plate, that’s the word I’m looking for. And it like basically turns out.
Greg Lambert (24:45)
Fact pattern. The complaint.
Marlene Gebauer (24:47)
The pleading, the the answer.
Sarah G. (24:54)
everything you need to file. And obviously, like, there’s always the, you have to review it and double check it. But like, I can foresee in a few years, once we get these tools a little bit more refined, a little bit more, you know, able to do this, that this could really be a game changer for A2J and for people who would never go to a lawyer anyway. And it just like, all the, like the hurdles that have to go over for that to ever happen is just a little bit disheartening sometimes. there’s like,
Greg Lambert (25:19)
I want to say
Sarah G. (25:20)
It’s out there. The possibilities are out there. But yeah, we just have to brace it.
Marlene Gebauer (25:23)
People are exploring it, yeah.
Greg Lambert (25:24)
Yeah, I wanna say one more thing on this topic, then Sarah, I’m gonna push it to you about the acquisitions and consolidations. But one of the things I think that these tools are doing on the A2J front doesn’t necessarily even reach the justice part. You hear constantly stories of people that negotiate better contracts that, know,
rental agreements, using these tools that give them the words that they need in order to present their case to their landlords or to someone that they’re having a dispute with before it even gets to the court systems. The other thing that I’m seeing that lawyers are using, and I’ve heard this story multiple times, and he…
Here in Texas, one of the worst things in the state are the HOAs. I’ve heard a number of lawyers that have people within their HOA, like give them kind of a fact pattern. And the lawyers, instead of writing a letter, they’ll basically draft something to give back to them. But I know a lot of them are using these AI tools to…
Marlene Gebauer (26:18)
Yeah
Sarah G. (26:19)
yeah.
Greg Lambert (26:38)
just kind of take the fact pattern, draft a response, give it back to the person and say, here, go back to them and use these arguments. And I’ve heard, again, these are all stories, but it seems to be success after success of dealing with organizations or legal issues that don’t rise to that court level yet.
So I think there’s a lot of success in that area that we’ll continue to see. So Sarah, let’s talk about mergers, acquisitions, and consolidation in the legal industry.
Sarah G. (27:11)
Yeah, so when you asked me to do this and think about big stories of the year, I was kind of like, ugh, what happened? Because it seemed like 2023 was such a huge year. And I realized just before I said that I was going to do this as my topic, same thing with acquisitions. There wasn’t anything like the Case Text Thomson Reuters acquisition, which I still can’t believe the amount of money that went for. I thought it was 65 million, then I saw the zero, and I was like, my god. But there are still a lot of acquisitions. And this is one of those things that
I don’t know why I up being interested in it, but I think it’s funny because I’m so not about making money. So not about the gamemanship that you see and people always wanting to do this to make money, which I find is a weird reason to get out of bed in the morning. But some of the interesting acquisitions we’ve seen this year, the big one is like about Dashboard Legal being purchased by Bloomberg, which was Bloomberg, as we were saying before, not like a Latera. Like Latera…
buys something every six months. they’re kind of on a, they’re not a big spree, know, and Bloomberg really does it. They bought BNA, but they really haven’t been on a big acquisitions thing. And BNA was another, about years ago, that was another content creator kind of tool. Whereas Dashboard Legal, which is a really neat tool, I really was happy for them when they were purchased that.
Greg Lambert (28:05)
least.
Marlene Gebauer (28:14)
That was years ago, yeah.
Sarah G. (28:25)
but it’s a workflow tool. It’s all like out of emails, basically just kind of Trello boards, but in email and it’s the way of just kind of managing your workflow amongst teams and lawyers. so there’s a couple of things I thought was interesting about that. One, it is kind of combining the research and getting that fed into the lawyerly workflow. And I was really excited to see Dashboard Legal have a big kind of display as part of the Bloomberg display at AALL. Cause that’s again, another one of the drums I always beat is that law librarians and other
information professionals are so vitally important in this day and age. know, it’s not that, know, libraries are far from dead. If anything, librarians are like the skills that you really need in this kind of day and age. So I was really excited to see like the research to workflow being connected more. And also just, yeah, I mean, just as we saying, like that, you Bloomberg just builds stuff more. They don’t, they just don’t buy stuff. But some other interesting ones, I thought.
Hedgeman and Lexis, we were saying, Hedgeman kind of straight contracting, but that also kind of the lawyerly work into the research and the content underlying it. I know the DocuSign and Lexian, that I thought was really interesting because part of my job is I now kind of track acquisitions. And it’s one of those things I kind of did as a hobby before my current job. Just because you know, I like to have fun. I know I have a chart you may have seen.
Greg Lambert (29:38)
I know there’s a spreadsheet out there somewhere that shows a timeline.
Sarah G. (29:45)
But that was, I was looking at, it’s not Crunchbase, but it’s another, I’m not trying to not say the name, I just can’t remember names anymore. But I was looking at them as to a research service that track acquisitions. And as part of their demo to me, they were showing like, here’s DocuSign. And they’ve like, you can see they filed all these patents for document automation tools. I was like, well, that’s interesting. And this is like months and months and months ago. And then all of sudden it came out that they bought Lexion. I was like, well, that all kind of makes sense now. But DocuSign being like,
the backbone to all of these contracting tools that they are now kind of getting the documentation and that kind of thing. It was interesting to see how these tools are, like what the companies are thinking strategically in their acquisitions how that’s all going to fit together. But also again, because it’s me, there is a terrible side to all of this. Like we saw it in legal research where we ended up with just, we initially had dozens and dozens of legal publishers and we basically ended up with.
Thomson and Lexis and how that really was not great for the consumer. And also not great for the products. mean, I think it was things that like everyone has a product that they love that Thomson bought and it just isn’t great anymore. And I think.
Marlene Gebauer (30:48)
True.
Greg Lambert (30:49)
well that.
Yeah, well they used to
say and is that you know, Thomson Reuters is where things go to die, right? So, you if you get acquired, basically, you know, no one hears from you again. So hopefully it’s not that way anymore. But I think I know of a few tools that got bought up and then shut down.
Marlene Gebauer (30:54)
Everyone has that story.
Sarah G. (30:56)
Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (31:01)
Yeah.
Sarah G. (31:13)
But just like
the working through corporate hierarchies is just, it’s one thing when you’re in someone’s living room trying to develop a tool really quickly and you can make these changes and you’re really closely in touch with your customer base because you’re building as you are selling until like you are now like five salespeople removed from ever actually talking to a customer and seeing like what they need and getting the product people actually. And I know like some product people do still get into the firms and get into the various organizations that talk to their end users, but.
It’s definitely a different world when you’re a scrappy startup versus being a large being a cog, a large corporation. I feel like, again, there’s so much money right now being poured into legal tech companies. I mean, nothing like the $650 million of last year, but it’s still a lot of money. And it’s coming from Silicon Valley people who, you know, they’re not like…
they’re expecting profits. And I’d kind of wonder like, when it’s not like bootstrapped or just kind of even people that understand the legal industry, what that’s going to do to these products and the churn and the enshitification if I may say that, that Cory Doctorow brought up, know. Yeah, it’s gonna be a weird time.
Marlene Gebauer (32:23)
What I find particularly interesting is like some of these acquisitions, they’re acquiring things, tools that are sort of outside their scope. So they’re doing new things. And that’s sort of causing a blend across these different providers. And I think it’s a bit of a challenge for firms and organizations like.
What is it? What does it do? Who owns that? Who’s responsible for it? Because first it’s a research tool, suddenly it’s a drafting tool. okay, traditionally different groups have been responsible for those things. And how do you divide that responsibility? So that’s something that I find interesting just from an internal perspective.
Greg Lambert (33:07)
Niki, you seeing anything in the mid-market or solo on acquisitions that’s affecting that area?
Niki (33:15)
Well, mean, across the board, I mean, you absolutely saw that leading up to where we are now with like practice management, right? Anytime you see, it starts to feel like whack-a-mole in a certain category, you know there’s gonna be acquisitions. I mean, that’s just the nature of the business. And it’s been interesting to see that happen in the cloud. I remember when my case used to be with, owned by a folio, we’re now owned by Finipay along with some of the other companies, CasePeer, Dockerwise, and Lapey.
I remember somebody at AppFolio who would come from Citrix saying they remember this happening in the premises software space. As soon as you start to see a category fill up with so many different companies, there’s going to be acquisitions. And you just see that across the board in legal, where the certain categories, there are mergers and acquisitions across the board. And now AI is kind of controlling a lot of that. And I don’t think it’s necessarily
solo or small even, it’s just sort of happening across the entire industry. But I think one thing that’s happening and some of it’s because we’re all moving, everything’s moved into the cloud at this point, the cloud makes it a lot more easier for tools to integrate and work with each other in a way that you couldn’t do with premises based. Premises based, especially with larger firms, everything was just siloed. Every function was siloed into a different type of software. And it was really hard to get them to talk to each other. And every time you had to, you know, upgrade your system every year, you had to have IT
IT
specialists who would come in and deal with all the conflicts, but with the cloud it’s much easier. so I think that this trend of companies seemingly acquiring things that seem a little bit outside of their scope but that their products touch, it’s just because it is easier for these people are trying to control an entire aspect of software, know, an entire category of software. So they become the go-to place for potential customers to come to and they can make that all work really easily together because they can integrate these tools so much more easily in the
cloud. So I think that’s part of what’s driving these trends that we’re seeing with that as well.
Greg Lambert (35:09)
Plus there was the acquisition that wasn’t an acquisition and that was vLex and Harvey.
Marlene Gebauer (35:13)
yes,
Sarah G. (35:14)
That
was
Marlene Gebauer (35:15)
still rumors about that, so who knows?
Greg Lambert (35:20)
There’s one that I want to just touch on and that is, and I think this is going to be very prevalent in 2025, was Thomson Reuters purchase of SafeSign Technologies, which you hear SafeSign Technologies like, what the hell is that? But this is a company that builds large language models that are built on your proprietary data.
No one, I don’t think, has more data in the legal industry than Thomson Reuters. And so it’s going to be very interesting to see what the folks there do to build these custom LLMs, which they’re admitting they’re doing. think Joel Hron out of Switzerland, of the TR vice presidents, went on record to say that that’s what
what they’re doing is they’re looking at building individual large language models that are very specific on their proprietary data. So it’s going be interesting, I think, to see what happens with that.
Sarah G. (36:22)
goes back to the Harvey vLex thing that, you know, there’s only so far that these companies are going to be able to go without getting at these big pools of legal data. And basically it’s vLex, Lexis, or Thomson who has it. Because that was, you one of the things that I was kind of thinking as a theme for this year is that we are kind of like the, there were so many things that we thought, if only we had this, we could do the X. If we had X, we could do Y. And we now have X, but like Y is still not happening. And one of them was
trying to get at some of this legal data like case law. And so, you know, the Harvard case law access project is now, you know, gotten out of its timeframe that anyone can use that data, but people really aren’t. know, the entirety of American case law is right there.
Marlene Gebauer (37:02)
It’s surprising, right? I mean,
what a great resource. And it’s like, you’re absolutely right. I’m like, why aren’t people, why aren’t, you know, startups doing this?
Sarah G. (37:09)
And the same thing with like
Niki (37:09)
I thought there was just a headline.
Sarah G. (37:11)
docketing information that, thank God.
Niki (37:11)
Wasn’t there just a headline about that? Where OpenAI partnered with them? Am I making this up? Let me look it up.
Sarah G. (37:18)
They did all
the Harvard Library’s other data. So like book data. Yeah. Not, yeah. But there’s also, you know, like the Free Law Project. Cause that’s the thing, like, again, you know, docket data is a huge, hard thing to get at. And I believe, you know, Mike Listener at Court Listener and Free Law Project has like their, their mirror of Pacer. That’s not Pacer, but you know, has a lot of docket information that would be a rich data source to train some products. And because it’s got all the briefs, it’s got all the motions, it’s got stuff in there.
Niki (37:22)
okay, okay. That’s what it was. All right.
Sarah G. (37:47)
But people just haven’t taken advantage of it. Instead they’re just like, well, we’ll just buy vLex you know? It’s just…
Greg Lambert (37:53)
Now I
know that what’s the one out of out of Hawaii? Goodness, trying to think now. one of the, Paxton, Paxton, they license their content from Fastcase. And so that, yeah. And now, you know, I’m totally.
Sarah G. (38:01)
Paxton, are they in Hawaii? Okay, I they were in Hawaii. I thought they were just in California.
Marlene Gebauer (38:03)
Yeah, yeah,
Sarah G. (38:10)
I thought they were free. okay.
Marlene Gebauer (38:10)
They did. They did.
Greg Lambert (38:15)
Guessing here. So take it take it just for that. But you know and the the guy that owns X announced that they have all of the the cases and So I’m wondering who who did they license that from?
Sarah G. (38:30)
My eyes rolled so far back in my head when I read that,
Marlene Gebauer (38:32)
Hahaha
Sarah G. (38:33)
I
think I pulled a muscle. No, yeah. do wonder where he got that or what that was. I mean, there’s still like just random cases floating around on Google, but yeah, who knows? But that could be a whole show, just almost like an elementary school, like deconstructing that sentence and pointing out everything that was wrong with it.
Greg Lambert (38:43)
Yeah. Yep.
Niki (38:44)
you
Greg Lambert (38:48)
What?
Niki (38:49)
Bye.
My favorite commenter in that was Joe Patrice on Above the Law said that he said, well, of course that’s going to be great because Grok is like a concussed rooster using a Ouija board. And I thought that was just so funny. Like it was such a great description. He makes me laugh. But yeah, like what a hot mess that’s going to be. I don’t know what Elon thinks he’s talking about, but.
Greg Lambert (38:58)
yeah.
Sarah G. (39:04)
you
Yeah.
Yeah.
Greg Lambert (39:15)
Yeah, well maybe that’s one of the things that the efficiency in government, what is it, DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency is going to do is like, well just think how much money we’d save if we didn’t have have judges make decisions. All right, Marlene, what are the academics doing?
Sarah G. (39:21)
Doe just…
Marlene Gebauer (39:29)
Yeah.
Sarah G. (39:29)
Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (39:34)
Well, mean, there’s academics and there’s also training for juniors in general. And that has been both topics in the news. So law schools have definitely jumped on the AI skills training bandwagon as they should. And it’s interesting because I just feel like there’s different parts to sort of this training and education.
Greg Lambert (39:40)
yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (39:58)
question. One is in the law schools, how are they preparing them? Are they giving them general good practice types education? do they have the opportunity to work with some of these tools to just get a feel for how to do it? Because I know people come in as juniors and we have to start training them. like, how to use it and for what?
And this is something that I’ve seen in the news. This is something I spoke about at Legal Innovators California that how are they supposed to use it? What are they allowed to use? What are they not allowed to use it for? You have sort of that blank slate issue with some of these tools where, and I think they’ve gotten better with this, with some of the new releases that they’ve put out where there’s more of a sort of workflow or tiles or something that people can kind of click on and say, yeah, I want to do this.
and they do it. But a lot of this is like, well, this is great, but I don’t know what to do with it. So I think it’s really imperative on organizations to have not just general,
training about AI, but really specific training that’s going to work well for them based on what it does. And I think some of the, I know some of the providers that have been on our show and that have been speaking, that have been in the news, they’re adjusting. So they are trying
Customize the type of training that they’re offering and they’re working with firms to do that I believe it was was a good win that we had on that when we were talking about that in depth in terms of what they were doing in terms of their program and It’s it’s a challenge because that’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. I also feel like So much has been talked about in terms of security and that I think impacts these folks, too
And I think there’s constantly news, this struggle about can we use client data? When can we use client data? And I know firms are at different levels of acceptance on that. And I think that plays into this question of how do we educate our juniors, our students as to.
what to expect, like what you should be doing, what you shouldn’t be doing, who do you need to talk to to find out, what you need to talk to. And the last thing what’s gonna happen to them once off?
lot of work they were doing is now not going to be there anymore. So we have to figure out a new way to sort of get them up to speed, or maybe they just have different types of skills that they’re going to be responsible for. Again, I think some of the education providers are looking at this and they’re saying, hey, can we develop personas to train these folks on how things should be done? And they’ve been on the show as well.
Greg Lambert (42:20)
Yeah.
Yeah,
Marlene Gebauer (42:45)
You know, wanted to, before you start, I just want to say like, I am so happy that I am with a group of people who lose their words on occasion. I feel like I’m with my, I’m just, I’m with my people. So it’s like, thank you.
Sarah G. (42:52)
my god.
Greg Lambert (42:54)
Yes, yes, yes.
Niki (42:56)
Ha
ha.
Greg Lambert (42:56)
It’s why we have Google Docs up so that we can be reminded what the questions are. There’s two phrases that I think if I never hear again, I’ll be okay with. And that is, and I’m guilty of saying both of them. So the first one is the…
Sarah G. (42:56)
Yeah.
Niki (43:06)
you
Greg Lambert (43:18)
Lawyers will not be replaced by AI, but lawyers who use AI will replace lawyers that don’t. If I can never hear that one again, I’ll be okay. But the other one, and this one I think plays into what you were talking about, Marlene, and that is, well, AI will enable the associates to go deeper into the legal concepts and bring more value to…
Marlene Gebauer (43:41)
It’s gonna free up people
to do more, you know, more higher value work. It’s like, really, is that what it’s gonna do?
Greg Lambert (43:42)
to do more, higher value work. Yeah,
Sarah G. (43:43)
Yeah.
Greg Lambert (43:49)
yeah, so sorry, that’s probably not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. So it’ll be interesting because it’s got to affect how, because we don’t know how to train associates. We’ve been terrible at it for 30 years, maybe longer.
And we’ve had this nostalgia of, well, they learn by sitting in the chair in front of the partner’s desk and being able to look at, have these conversations. like, I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’ve never seen, rarely have I seen that. Yeah, exactly. Figure it out your damn self. Go Google it and then come back to me.
Marlene Gebauer (44:28)
Most of the time you hear that nobody’s available to help. You know, it’s like everybody’s too busy, so
Niki (44:29)
you
Sarah G. (44:35)
Yeah.
Niki (44:37)
But my concern is law schools aren’t really incentivized to do this. I think they have to. I think that if they take on the responsibility of preparing students for practicing law in ways that they never have before, through internships, through just teaching about running law firms, which is something that they haven’t, and just how to use AI, I don’t think they’re incentivized to do it. And that’s where I think we run into these issues of
whether it’s even worth it to go to law school at this point. I you need lawyers, but there’s nothing for these young, I really fear there’s not gonna be a lot for them to do coming out of law school. And I don’t know what that’s gonna look like if law schools don’t, all of them get their acts together and come up with some centralized plan of what a curriculum looks like on a national level. And I can’t see that happening to you, so I don’t know how this plays out.
Greg Lambert (45:23)
It’s not gonna, no, no.
Sarah G. (45:24)
Well, couple of things there that just ping me. So one, what I’ve found interesting in the past few years is when now law schools are teaching legal technology, even before like even AI, the people who are teaching the legal technology, it’s the librarians or adjuncts. I think that law schools are like, law is a very hierarchical profession, but law schools are super stratified and hierarchical. And the fact that they are not including
full time or full faculty as teaching this kind of shows what they consider to be important. And then also, what was the second point I had? forgetting words. just, I mean, just some of the ways like how we are gonna train. I know what it was. just the national curriculum. So a few years ago, I kind of looked, the ABA really only mandates not much. And it’s basically just like the 13 bar classes. And like you have…
Marlene Gebauer (45:59)
I love it!
Sarah G. (46:17)
that you can fill. it’s not even, you know, they’re expanding something you can do virtually or, you know, distance learning. Like, I think it’s now six hours, which is still not a lot, or maybe 12. But, I mean, schools have always had the freedom to create new courses. They really only have to do, like, maybe half of the 120 hours or half of the 90 hours for ABA regulations. The rest, they could just go hog wild, and they just have it.
It’s even now, even like contract drafting classes are just now starting to happen or business of law classes are really teaching you because like so many law students go into the small and solos and they’re not teaching you all the basics of running a firm. Everything’s still geared that you’re either gonna be a federal court clerk or in big law. And that’s only like a very small minority of actual students.
Marlene Gebauer (47:04)
sun
it’s
Sarah G. (47:05)
That’s another thing, just burn it all down, start over the whole legal education system is just not working in any way.
Greg Lambert (47:09)
There we go.
Marlene Gebauer (47:10)
I want to jump on the points that you guys are raising. Maybe it’s
not so much teaching them how to use gen AI, but how to develop these business skills. That’s maybe what needs to be more of a focus.
Sarah G. (47:21)
Yeah.
I mean, when you consider the percentage of law faculty that either went to Harvard or Yale, it’s just like, it’s just a funnel pipeline problem, yeah. They don’t know. How are they gonna teach it? They have never been in a real law firm or a smaller law firm or seen law practice at that level.
Greg Lambert (47:24)
Well, and
you
Yeah.
Well, I think they’ve got some time to adjust because just this month, the Thomson Reuters, I think, came out with a survey that showed only 2 % of new hires in law firms or the legal industry are being required to have some type of knowledge of how to use AI tools. So you get, I think you’ve got a little bit of a honeymoon period, but you know, it’s, yeah, well, I mean,
Marlene Gebauer (48:04)
That’s dangerous. That’s real dangerous.
Greg Lambert (48:09)
When are we ever proactive, right? We’re always reactive.
Marlene Gebauer (48:11)
I just think of it from
a security perspective. It’s like, if… That’s just dangerous.
Greg Lambert (48:15)
What could go wrong? What could go wrong? I don’t understand.
all right, wrap this up. I’m gonna hit you guys with something. What do you think might be a big story for 2025 going forward? Sarah?
Sarah G. (48:31)
Well, we just had presidential election in United States, you might’ve heard. So that could affect quite a lot depending on the ability for non-citizens to work in this country. And then we’ve been talking like at the tech level, like so many tech companies are basically run by people from other countries on H1B4 visas. What if that goes away? What if the economy craters because of tariffs? There’s a lot.
Greg Lambert (48:33)
did we? What?
Sarah G. (48:56)
Yeah!
Greg Lambert (48:56)
Yeah,
Niki give us something a little more uplifting than that.
Marlene Gebauer (49:00)
Yeah.
Niki (49:03)
I mean, listen, I don’t know if you watch Bob’s show, but we do P-Dooms at the end of it. And I always, P-Dooms like how likely are you to think the world’s about to end? And I always have like the highest P-Dooms score. Like I’m convinced the world’s about to end. So I don’t know if I can give you anything uplifting. I mean, honestly, when I was, when I was thinking, my response is like, I hope the robot overlords don’t take over. That’s why I welcome them all the time on LinkedIn and on Blue Sky.
Greg Lambert (49:15)
I think we’re too lazy for it to end.
Niki (49:26)
I am concerned about UFOs with all of those drones. You know, I’m more concerned that like maybe the we’re going to get like attacked by some alien life force. Also, there was just like out of I think it was Harvard, there was a headline about the we might be living in a multiverse that the new quantum computers show that. So I kind of feel like I have no idea what’s going to happen in legal tech. I feel like it’s going to be dwarfed by one of these.
Greg Lambert (49:31)
drones.
Marlene Gebauer (49:32)
my god, the drones.
Greg Lambert (49:47)
Yeah
Niki (49:53)
huge scary things so unfortunately I have nothing uplifting. I got nothing. I got nothing uplifting to offer. I don’t know.
Marlene Gebauer (49:54)
Maybe we shouldn’t even worry about it, you know?
Greg Lambert (50:00)
Marlene, you get anything?
Marlene Gebauer (50:02)
I do, a couple of things. So I do think, you we’re going to see more.
regulatory movement and guidance movement in terms of what we can and can’t do with with Gen. AI. I’m hoping that consolidates somewhat so that it’s not a bunch of different standards. But you know, you do see that overseas. You do see that in the states that is happening. I think you’re going to see more of that. I’ll say the word, I’ll say a genetic workflow. It’s like we’re going to see more of that. And I’ll just kind of leave it at that. And then the other thing
Greg Lambert (50:34)
Yeah,
use whatever words you have this year and then add a gentic to the front of it.
Sarah G. (50:38)
Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (50:40)
It’s getting to it.
Greg Lambert (50:43)
So the one that I see that I think is gonna be very interesting is to see how much the technology wing of law firms are going to push Microsoft Copilot as the answer versus the knowledge wing of the law firms, which are looking at some of these larger research tools, point solutions. So it’s gonna, I think,
there’s going to be a bit of a battle that’s going to go on and to see who has the money to spend and where it goes in 2025. So that’s my projection. All right, well, Niki Black and Sarah Glassmeyer, thank you very much for coming in and talk to us and looking back and looking forward.
Sarah G. (51:31)
Thank you for having us, yeah.
Niki (51:31)
Absolutely.
It was a ton of fun.
Marlene Gebauer (51:34)
And of course, thanks to you, our listeners, for taking time to listen to the Geek & Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you, so reach out to us on LinkedIn. You can also go to Blue Sky now.
Greg Lambert (51:45)
Yep, you can also go to Blue Sky, I think we’re both on it.
Sarah G. (51:47)
Yeah.
Greg Lambert (51:50)
Niki, where can people find you online?
Niki (51:53)
LinkedIn for sure. That’s my home base, which would have surprised me to know when I wrote that book with Carolyn Elefant in 2010 about social media for lawyers. I never would have predicted LinkedIn as like the place to be. And also Blue Sky, I’ve transitioned over there so you can find me there as well.
Greg Lambert (52:10)
and Sarah.
Sarah G. (52:11)
Yeah, same. I pretty much divide my time between LinkedIn and Blue Sky. LinkedIn a little bit more professional or professionally topic oriented. Blue Sky, anything goes, but yeah. He got more selfies with people at Ulta than I did, yeah.
Greg Lambert (52:20)
Yeah, if you want to find out about Sarah’s dad, go over to Blue Sky. Yeah. Go look back and look at their cruise. Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (52:22)
Dad, you listen. And it’s like, all attention to those, Sarah.
Hahaha!
Greg Lambert (52:32)
The cruise was interesting. That was like super drama.
Sarah G. (52:36)
Yeah, yes it was, yeah.
Niki (52:36)
You
Greg Lambert (52:38)
Ha ha!
Marlene Gebauer (52:39)
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.
Greg Lambert (52:44)
Thanks, Jerry. All right, guys, thank you very much. Talk to you later.
Marlene Gebauer (52:46)
Thank you.
Sarah G. (52:47)
Bye.