YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Walsh

lines on the record: 66
first: 2025-10-27
most recent: 2025-10-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I think these models they don't replace lawyers, right? I think they help the lawyer and they augment what the lawyer does. So if you think about an activity that a lawyer might do, like let's say that they were preparing for a deposition. So they need to come up with a list of questions that they're going to ask the individual that's being deposed. You can take the facts around that particular case and you can load them into a vault and then you can point the system to that vault and say based on the facts of this particular matter, develop a list of deposition questions. And then, you know, that's something that a lawyer would have done on their own, right? In the past, they may have, you know, referred to a list of questions that they had previously or something.”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's one thing I want to push. I'm very curious about that because it feels like the lawyering part of being a lawyer is being subsumed into a system and that might change how we lawyer. Very curious about that. The other part is, well, is anyone going to look at the work being done? Because we're already seeing lawyers get sanctioned for filing briefs with hallucinated case citations in them. There was just a case where I believe a court had to rescind an opinion because it had a hallucinated case citation in it. This is bad, right? Like this is just straightforwardly a threat to the system and how we might think about lawyers and judges and courts. And it's not clear to me that anyone's going to use the tools as rigorously as you want. So on the one hand, there's the, we've made the thinking easier. And on the other hand, it's, oh boy, everyone's going to get really lazy. And they're both kind of in your answer. They're both kind of like, we're making it easier to look at this stuff.”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two things I really want to push on. One, again, I was not a good lawyer. I don't want to ever pretend on the show or to you or to anyone that I was any good at this. But, you know, the thing you learn in law school is a particular way of thinking, which is a pretty rigorous, structured way of approaching a problem and then going to find the. Relevant cases and precedents, and then trying to fashion some solution based on that. That feels like we're just moving words around, but it's actually a way of thinking. Right, and before AI showed up.”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not, the law is not deterministic, right? There are lots of different factors that go into this, but you need to have a system that's legally driven, that's purpose-built for legal situations in order to really operate in a courtroom type environment.”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Privacy is another issue, right? You know, there's this special relationship that exists between attorneys and their clients and that attorney client privilege, there's some privacy requirements that you need to have in order to maintain that if you're using one of these just consumer grade models, you don't have that level of privacy and security that you need. Transparency is another issue. You put this question in, you get an answer back based on what? Like what was the logic that the system used? So again, our system, we opened up the black box and you can see the logic that's being applied and we give the attorneys the ability to go in and actually change that, right? If this model is getting something wrong, the attorney has the opportunity to change it so that they get the outcome that they're really driving for. But as you said,”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Address those with a courtroom grade solution. So our system is backed by $160 billion and records that curated collection that we have. That's our grounding data, right? So you can go into court and not say, I found this on the internet, but you could say you can refer to a specific case, right? We also have a, we call a citator agent, right? So we'll check that case to make sure that it wasn't fabricated by the system and that it's actually still good law. And you can also look at the case law summary. So you know what the case is about. You can look at the head notes. So you can see the particular points of law that were addressed in that case. Again, you can see if it's still a valid case.”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to have authoritative content. The cutoff date for GPT 4.0 was 2023, I believe, right? You need to have information that's constantly updated. Your audience probably doesn't know. You probably know this because you're a lawyer, but there's the citator, right? Which traditionally has said this is good law, it's not good law, right? It's been overturned. Now it will tell you if it's the law at all, right? Or if some system just made it up because these systems, they're probabilistic, right? They want to put together and answer that's probably right. Well, that's not the standard that we have in legal. You can't go in with something that's probably right. And so you have this whole list of issues. These models don't address. And so what we've tried to do is”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure We'll come back to it. I'll grant you that. Yeah. And then you look at the activities that lawyers do. They draft documents. They do research. They summarize things. The models are all like really, really good at these types of things. And so you kind of have this perfect storm of this technology and the things that lawyers do kind of coming together. And yet when people try to use these models, these consumer grade models, there are all kinds of problems with them, right? You can't just put it, like you said, it's not deterministic. You can't just put information into a computer and get an answer out if that were the case. We wouldn't need a court system, right? What we see happening is with these models, they're just not built for the legal system. So you can't go into court and say, I found this on the internet.”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, you have these massive investments that are happening with the foundational models, right? These hyperscalers, you know, each one of them is putting in close to $100 billion, Microsoft, Amazon, Google. And so these models, they just continue to get better and better and better over time. That's the foundational model level. We don't really operate at the foundational model level. We build applications that utilize these foundational models. And at that level, what we see is prices are dropping, right? So we used to pay $20 like two years ago for a million tokens. And today, you know, we might pay 10 cents for a million tokens, right? So that allows us to do things at speed and at scale that we've never been able to do before. And if you look at the law, you know, there are a lot of things about the law that make these models attractive. So most of the law is language-based, right?”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI is that problem in a nutshell, right? We're going to take a computer, we're going to make it better at natural language, we're going to fundamentally make the computer not deterministic, right? You can't really predict what an AI is going to do. And then we're going to apply that to the fundamentally not deterministic, the very human nature of the court system. Somewhere in there is a big philosophical problem about applying computers to the justice system. How do you think about that?”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That jump from being the sort of gold standard database of legal opinions and reasonings and case notes and all that to we're going to do the work for you or we're going to help you do the work that's a that's a big one that's a cultural jump obviously there's some acquisitions along the way you can talk about that helps you make that jump What drove you to make that jump to say actually the lawyers need help drafting the proposed opinions they might give to a judge What made you say, okay, we've got to step into actually doing the work?”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. We've transformed over time that we were kind of just that research provider. Over time, we've acquired more businesses. We've integrated those businesses and kind of in 2020 when we launched our Lexus Plus product, we integrated all those things together. And so we became an integrated ecosystem of solutions. And then in 2023, when we launched Lexus Plus AI, that's when we became really an AI powered Provider information analytics decision tools and drafting solutions and the capabilities of AI have really allowed us to do things, do more things than what we've traditionally done in the past.”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm very excited to talk to you. I feel like the legal profession in America, you know, I'm very much a failed lawyer. My wife is a lawyer. There's a lot of lawyers and the virtual team. The legal profession in America is just at a moment of absolute change, a lot of chaos actually, and an enormous amount of uncertainty. And LexisNexis, if the audience is know, tends to sit at the heart of what lawyers do all day. Most lawyers are using LexusNexis all day long, every minute every day. And what that product is and what it can do and how it can help lawyers do their job connects to a lot of themes that I think we see both in the legal profession and then with technology and AI generally. So just start at the start. What is LexisNexis? How did you explain it to the layperson?”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the big promise, Lexus Nexus, is making about protege is simply accuracy, that everything it produces will be based on the real law, and much more trustworthy than a general-purpose AI tool. You'll hear Sean explain how they've built their AI tools in teams so that they can make that promise. LexisNexis has hired many more lawyers to review the work of AI than Sean expected, for example.”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a big deal because so far AI has created just as much chaos and slop in the courts as anywhere else. There is a consistent drumbeat of stories about lawyers getting caught and sanctioned for relying on AI tools that cite hallucinated case law that doesn't exist, and there have even been two court rulings retracted because the judges appeared to use AI tools that hallucinated the names of the plaintiffs, incited facts, and quoted cases that didn't exist. Sean thinks it's only a matter of time before an attorney somewhere loses their license because of sloppy use of AI.”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enterprise companies with huge databases of proprietary information in 2025 can't resist the siren call of AI. And LexisNexis is no different. You'll hear it right away. I asked Sean to describe LexusNexis to the audience, and the first word he said wasn't law or data. It was AI. The goal is for the Lexus Nexus AI tool called Protege to go beyond simple research and help lawyers draft the actual legal writing they submit to the court in support of their arguments.”
2025-10-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · LexisNexis CEO says the AI law era is already here · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT