AI and the Practice of Law: from CaseText to CoCounsel, with Pablo Arredondo, VP of Cocounsel for Thomson Reuters

**Pablo Arredondo** (0:00)
The first flickers of the power of this technology that I saw was suddenly the computer flagging instances, and I was like, wait, how does it know that that means overrule? Because that is not a normal way to say it.
And it was because we had moved beyond literal keywords. My co-founder Jake and I were shown a demo of GBT-4, and within 12 hours, we had pivoted the entire company around it. A lot of times you'll hear people say, all that will be automated is the menial work that nobody wants to do anyway, right? But they can also help for things that are deeply substantive, like finding inconsistencies so you can go do the famous cross-examination that destroys the witness.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:40)
Hello, and welcome back to Turpentine AI.
If you're looking for The Cognitive Revolution, don't worry. It's not you, it's us. Turpentine is developing fresh new AI-focused shows, and this feed is set to become a best-of show featuring highlights from multiple sources. Meanwhile, we've created a new feed dedicated to The Cognitive Revolution, which you can find and subscribe to at our website, cognitiverevolution.ai. Just yesterday, we posted an interview with Andrew Lee, founder and CEO of email client Shortwave, which has the single best AI email assistant that I've personally used and has become the first email client to effectively replace the Gmail web app as my go-to email experience. Definitely take a minute to visit cognitiverevolution.ai to subscribe for that and plenty more original content, which will only be available on the new feed. Today, exclusively on this feed, we're looking at how AI is impacting the practice of law with Pablo Arredondo, who helped create and drive the adoption of AI and other advanced legal search tools as co-founder of Casetext, and today is doing the same with large language models as VP of Co-Counsel at Thomson Reuters, which acquired Casetext last year. We begin the conversation with a historical overview of legal research, from its pre-digital citation-based origins to the computerized but still fundamentally keyword-driven search era, through the last 10 years of Casetext and the AI-powered innovations that allowed attorneys to search no longer just by keyword but by meaning, dramatically improving their ability to locate relevant case law, and finally on to the present day, in which large language models are beginning to fundamentally change how lawyers perform an ever-growing range of high-value tasks, including document review and deposition prep, contract review, and more. We talk about Pablo and team's first exposure to GPT-4, how they immediately pivoted the company to take advantage of this new technology, and how they've designed their product, and perhaps more importantly, their product development and quality assurance processes with reliability in mind. We also discuss why CoCounsel's price point, which is a couple hundred dollars per attorney per month, is not really a problem given the high-value use case that they serve, and why Pablo has remained a GPT-4 maximalist, at least as of the time that we recorded a couple weeks ago, just before Cloud 3 was released.
Pablo also shares his thoughts on the future of legal billing, the potential for AI-powered arbitration, and the evolving regulatory landscape governing the use of AI in the legal profession. While he is, as you'd expect from a VP at a major company like Thomson Reuters, extremely focused on responsible development and deployment, his hope is that large language models can make legal services faster, less expensive, more accessible, and higher quality for all.
As always, we appreciate it when you take a moment to share the show with your friends. This episode would be an obvious fit for the lawyers in your life. And again, please do make sure to subscribe to our new feed, which you can find at cognitiverevolution.ai. We'll have original content both here and there over the coming weeks, so you'll definitely want to stay tuned to both feeds. Now, here's my conversation with Pablo Arredondo, Co-Founder of Case Text and VP of Co-Counsel at Thomson Reuters. Pablo Arredondo, Co-Founder of Case Text and VP of Co-Counsel. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Pablo Arredondo** (4:15)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:17)
I'm excited about this. We've got what I think is going to be a really interesting and hopefully, you know, it'll be a good mix of fast-paced and deep diving into all things legal AI.
And, you know, you've had a real front row seat in this business over the last 10 years since you founded Case Text.
I would love to start if you would give us kind of a backstory on just a brief history of the application of maybe technology more broadly, but obviously, especially emphasis on AI in the legal profession. I realized that, you know, while I've been into the product and played with it today, and we'll get into that in a lot more detail, I don't really know that much about how things were before. If you kind of know the Abe Lincoln story of like he had to walk a long way, I think, to borrow books and return them. That's kind of all I know. Where are we coming from in legal research? And where have you been over the last 10 years with case text? And then you can take us all the way up to present.