TLH Ep.40 Educating for Impact: Law, Technology and AI Regulation with Jeanne Eicks
Hello, Legal Helm listeners! Today, we’re delighted to welcome Dean Jeanne Eicks, Associate Dean of Graduate Programs at the Colleges of Law. Dean Eicks is a nationally recognized expert at the intersection of law and technology, with a unique background as both a former Chief Information Officer and current law professor.
At The Legal Helm, we’re committed to exploring how innovation is reshaping the legal industry—and today’s conversation does just that. We’ll be diving into the evolving legal frameworks surrounding AI regulation and discussing how emerging technologies are transforming legal education and expanding access to justice. Thanks for tuning in!
Your Host
Bim Dave is Helm360’s Executive Vice President. With 20+ years in the legal industry, his keen understanding of how law firms and lawyers use technology has propelled Helm360 to the industry’s forefront. A technical expert with a penchant for developing solutions that improve business systems and user experience, Bim has a knack for bringing high quality IT architects and developers together to create innovative, useable solutions to the legal arena.
Our Guest
Jeanne Eicks, Associate Dean of Graduate Programs at The Colleges of Law, develops curriculum, teaches, and prepares students to create meaningful change in access to justice. With a background as both a Chief Information Officer and a law professor, she brings a distinctive perspective to integrating technology into legal education. Her expertise at the intersection of technology and business enables her to address the challenges posed by rapidly evolving innovations and their impact on the legal field, shaping the next generation of legal professionals in a tech-driven world.
Transcript
Bim Dave: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Legal Helm, where we dive into the latest trends, challenges, and innovations in the Legal technology space.
Today I am thrilled to be joined by Dean Jeanne Eicks, associate Dean of Graduate Programs at the Colleges of Law.
Dean Eicks is an expert at the intersection of law and technology, bringing a unique perspective from her experiences, both A CIO and a law professor. At the Colleges of law she develops curriculum and prepares students to drive meaningful change. in The access to justice.
In today’s episode, we’ll be discussing the evolving legal frameworks surrounding AI regulations, and also how technology is transforming legal education.
Dean Eicks, welcome to the show.
Jeanne: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Bim Dave: So you’ve had a, a pretty interesting, and dynamic career in law and legal technology. What inspired you to get into academia and to your current role?
Jeanne: Uh, inspiring is a, kind word. Um, let’s say it was winding and meandering. when I was in law school in my second year, um, I received my moot court brief back and I was marked way down because I didn’t blue book correctly. Now my argument was sound, all of the other pieces were sound, but I didn’t blue book, right and I came from a family of engineers and I said “Oh my Lord, I have to write a pearl script for this to fix it because I can’t be marked down because I didn’t get the period in the right place”, so I used regular expressions to create blue booking for my legal briefs because that’s what we did in the mid nineties. Um, so at that point I started a little.com startup in my second year of law school, because that’s what everyone does, right? And from there I ended up after I graduated law school as a computer science professor with a new business. and my alma mater called me to come back and be their first CIO, acknowledging that technology had a strategic role in law schools and from there I transitioned into providing a legal technology type of curriculum for Vermont Law and Graduate School and my academic dean then hired me away to colleges of law and says “You know what? You had great ideas for master’s programs and LLMs. Let’s get those started at the Colleges of Law”
Bim Dave: Amazing.
You’ve just given me flashbacks when you mentioned pearl scripting, I think one of the first jobs that I had out of university was building a pearl script for the electricity and energy sector over here in the UK. And it was pretty challenging. So, that’s probably why I’m not a programmer today.
Jeanne: You know what? It was more challenging to see myself marked down to a C on a brief that would’ve quote quoting the professor otherwise deserved an A if I had managed to get my blue book correctly.
Bim Dave: We, we live, we live and learn.
So, legal education is undergoing a big transformation at the moment, right? And I’m interested to hear what changes you believe are most essential to better prepare law students for the realities of what modern legal practice will look like.
Jeanne: Um, there’s two or three paths here, right? There’s the notion that innovation and just basic business has to be brought into legal practice and sound business practices like project management that was absent from the legal field for a long time and businesses were doing it well and re-engineering processes, you know, in the nineties and the eighties and here we were, you know, in when I started teaching these courses in, 2010 and earlier with no idea that there was any role for project management or process reengineering or any of those things in the law. And then when we start thinking about re-engineering legal processes, um, and removing steps and making it more efficient, technology has just built-in place in that creation of efficiency. So, serving your clients better now, and today is about having technology, I’m not saying anyone that’s listening to this podcast doesn’t already know, right? I’m speaking the truth from my perspective. So as we, as we think about these things, we have to think about how to educate our students both about the rule of law, but the practicalities of legal practice and that includes things like just matter management and how to do it well and how to use those tools and implementing them as a key portion and a foundation of the classroom experience, so, other schools might use online tools like Canvas or something like that when you can use a matter management tool to lead students through the coursework and you use like a Clio or something else that’s accessible and easy and where the vendor is willing to work with the schools to make it freely available, you get the students adjusted to managing their workflow and keeping track of their time and using technology tools in that way, just as a baseline foundational underpinning of practice. So, that is at the at the most basic level that’s, that’s at the, what I, what I would almost call clerical level. And then you start thinking about, okay, how can we be smarter lawyers? How can we teach students law better, faster, smarter, cheaper, all of those things, right? And one of those ways is technology is oftentimes a rule driven system and when we think about things that are rule driven, the law is naturally aligned with that kind of thinking and so when we teach students how to use rule driven tools, whether it’s as API or using, basic automation or it’s using something like, um, community lawyer was for a long time in the US where we were teaching them how to build drag and drop legal apps and now we’re using AI based tools, but we’re teaching them how to apply the rules of law in a technical space and I think that’s where we’re going to end up.
Bim Dave: Yeah it’s really, really interesting to to hear that. How do you see the role of a lawyer changing over the next decade with all of that kind of technology [00:06:00] exposure, that you talk of and the innovation that’s happening in the sector at the moment?
Jeanne: So my my greatest hope is that this is the great equalizer for access to justice and access to law and legal services. Um, my fear is that of course it becomes something that the elite can afford, so where we end up depends on the democratization of some of this technology and how we’re making it freely available or not as the case may be and then how we are adapting to using that law in practice. So if the law is doing the stuff that used to be filling in the forms and doing the mundane and lawyers become the advisors, we’re counselors. That’s what law is, right? We’re supposed to be providing counsel I think the role of the lawyer becomes more counselor, becomes a more arguably humane and humanitarianly driven practice. Is that really the way it’s gonna shake out? I don’t have my crystal ball out today, I can’t tell you for sure. I’d like to think that it gives us more opportunity to work with clients one-on-one and less requirements and less fees related to the paperwork and the amount of writing that’s required to do something that looks very similar to the last one just like that we did right? There should be ways to use rules and use AI to shift those clauses so they address the needs of a particular client and moves us into a different way of providing legal advice and that’s, how I see it. I also see a place for AI providing direct legal advice for simple things, I really do. And there’s a blending there of government automation and what lawyers are sometimes called on to do for people, whether that in the US is social security and, you know, filing for that or filing appeals or things of that nature. That’s something that potentially could be directly to the consumer instead of having a lawyer in that step, so that would remove legal jobs.
Bim Dave: Yeah, absolutely. And you touched on something very interesting there which is the cost of providing the legal service to a customer will most likely fundamentally change right? Over the coming months and years with all of this technology in mind. What does that do in terms of how you prepare for just understanding pricing models when it comes to the education at a younger age right? Because I think the thing I’ve noticed, particularly with some of the more seasoned lawyers that might be out in the industry today. There was a time when I would, speak to them and we would be building things like financial dashboards to tell them how they’re doing from a financial perspective for a particular client, um, and be able to have all these amazing, you know, drill downs to get down to the nuts and bolts of how things are priced. But actually, like, a lot of the times the adoption rate of any lawyer using that technology was really, really low, like literally uh, you’d probably get like 10% adoption across the firm for accessing these dashboards, which are giving them some good information and I remember talking to one of the managing partners and the response I got was I don’t really care about the numbers, I’m here to practice law and that’s what I want to do, if my finance team tell me there’s a problem, then I’ll deal with the problem, right? But actually, like I really wanna just focus on practicing law and working with my clients. 2 things would be really interesting to understand from your perspective is, has that changed and how has that changed? And, how do you think it will look in the future? In terms of how you prepare students for the future.
Jeanne: I actually have a course right now that I’m in the midst of teaching, um, where one whole unit is about fixed pricing, scope of work, proposals as a law firm, and how to write a proposal, how to predict the time it’s going to take to do something so you can give a fixed price or within 10% kind of price, what that looks like and in the, in the US right, our model rules of professional responsibility sitting out there, depending on the state you’re in, have some limitations, or have newly related changes, like limited scope practice and things of that nature and so helping people think of what they do as lawyers differently. The whole idea of bringing in, particularly for folks that practice law for years of not taking a matter from start to finish is new, I said, think about handing it off to other associates who do really well in your firm, now instead imagine you are on your own doing that and you have created a network through which you can hand off the other portions of a matter and the consumer becomes the general contractor instead of the law firm right? And so lots of different business models and teaching students to think about how they give services in a different way and bringing them in early on the idea that we don’t in law school teach students about rainmaking and what that looks like and that’s an old term for just doing business, right? Which is what other business owners do. So, how do we bring new clients in? How do we connect those clients to a revenue stream? How do we decide? Some clients, some businesses will not do hourly rates anymore, they won’t do retainer, they want a scope of work, a fixed bid and that’s it, so, it’s a whole new way of thinking and these law students don’t necessarily have mentors in the field, in some ways they’re doing some reverse mentoring when they get out of law school and helping the practice change how they think about providing legal services, billing and being part of that sort of “you’ve gotta pay attention to the revenue, where’s the money coming from?” thinking which is different, right? it’s a new way of practicing law, you can’t divorce the business side from being a lawyer, it would be nice, right? It would, it would be lovely, but it’s not real. I’ll use a school metaphor, we used to go in and become academics and we, we taught in our specific area of interest, um, I don’t know, an academic now that doesn’t participate in some way in student recruiting, right? Because that’s part of a holistic approach to any business that you’re in.
Bim Dave: Absolutely. So I wanna, talk a little bit about the subject of the year and, last couple of years which is AI. So, AI is moving faster than most regulatory frameworks. How do you think legal education and policy can keep up with that pace of innovation?
Jeanne: You know, legal education is, and education broadly, is it a crossroads here? Um, because the last study I saw on this, it came out, looking at students who use AI versus students who don’t use AI and how it impacts their analytical capacity and the notion that students who use AI don’t have the same analytical capacity as students who use AI and so, how do we ensure that students don’t use AI or is that even the right path? We’re in the process at the colleges of law really thinking about how we implement our internal policy so that our students are both taught how to use AI responsibly, and then how we overcome the analytical deficit and arguably the plagiarism deficit, right? Um, how do we ensure that they’re thinking for themselves, right? The courts are encountering this, the courts are now having to double check everything that they wouldn’t have necessarily checked before because they fear that that AI has hallucinated a case. And, this brief is counting on a hallucinated case. So, so you’ve got court clerks that are, that are sensitive to this. Um, and oftentimes these judges are teaching in our classrooms and they hate it. And so, how do you bridge the gap between sort of legal field that really is against AI businesses and clients who are demanding the use of ai because they know it can reduce their legal spend so much, right? So, how do we prepare students for this world of dichotomies, right, in the approach to AI? And for better or worse, our approach has been to say, use AI and show me exactly what you do, and then teach them to put their analysis and prompt writing as much as in what is extracted from the tool. And so, it’s like a hammer, right? You use a hammer for a nail, you don’t use it for a screw. How do we teach students when to use AI and how to use it wisely? And then, how do we write a policy that allows faculty the flexibility of using AI when it’s appropriate, yet forces students to really demonstrate their knowledge when it comes to an exam or something of that nature? It’s a difficult conversation to have at this point and there are so many different viewpoints.
Bim Dave: Indeed, indeed. I think it’s quite interesting because as you see people coming out of education now and prepared for for the technology piece of it. We’re also dealing with the fact that some law firms are still very traditionally focused on the billable hour and, a little Reluctant to change in technology. Are you seeing any of that element in terms of like now you’ve got a student coming out that’s really hungry to be able to use their skills and then they get put into a situation where actually they’re not actually getting to leverage some of those, um, cool things that you’re teaching around prompt engineering and other things that could actually enable them to be more efficient.
Jeanne: When I was at Stanford’s future law a year ago, because we’re coming up on the next one, next week I was talking to managing partners and firms specifically about the question you’re asking me. I’m like, so we are preparing these students, but we send them to you, and they come back to us and they say “All of that stuff you taught us is completely useless, and we’re lucky we’re not using typewriters” and that’s, that’s what I hear back from our recent alums sometimes. And she said it’s the clients, the clients are going to pressure us to use the tech and we’re going to have to have those associates in place who know the tech and can use AI and can implement it because we’re not gonna have a choice.
And I heard that from several managing partners, so, I think maybe change is slow to come, but I think there’s gonna be economic factors that force firms to adapt to technology. Particularly AI, because it’s become so buzzy, the consumers want it, the consumers wanna know why the lawyers aren’t using it. Why did this take you two hours when I asked chat GPT and it gave me the same answer as you did, and it took 30 seconds.
Jeanne: Obviously hallucinations, which is becoming less and less of a problem, as the systems, um, grow and become more accurate, right? So there’s that depending on something that’s not accurate, much like the sort of adoption slope we saw in eDiscovery and using tools in eDiscovery. I think we’re gonna see something similar here in AI where people are gonna start worrying less about it being wrong because it’s wrong less frequently than the human beings. And in those situations, I think our next challenge becomes, what is the unauthorized practice of law? What is legal practice? The legal guild, where is it gonna go after this? And I don’t know, I don’t know. I think it’s going to be torn down in some ways, I don’t know how it can’t be, but you know, there’s the other silicon valley phrase “move fast and break things”, we need to be careful we’re not breaking anything that we can’t fix, right? And so, lawyers move, we’re risk adverse people, we move slowly. Um, and because of that risk aversion, I think our adoption of technology is going to be, well, at least we’re gonna try to do it with eyes wide open. I don’t know that we’ll always succeed, because I don’t know that you can always predict what’s gonna happen with AI. The folks that I spoke to, you know, I go to a lot of legal tech conferences, we all see the same people at these conferences, it’s the same faces when you’ve been doing it for decades you know, they’re all your buddies when you go. And they all say the same thing, they say ” We can’t predict”, “AI is not there yet”, so three years ago they were saying “AI’s not there, it’s gonna be 10 years before the AI can pass the bar exam”, three months later it did, and that’s how fast we’re moving. And so when you’re moving that quickly, how do you really get a handle on what guardrails you need to have in place? And with government fluctuations right now, it’s really hard to get a legislative baseline, so it’s going to be on organizations that provide standards information, I think, to do some of that instead of public ordering, more of a private ordering around AI and setting those limitations. Right now, there don’t seem to be guardrails and that makes me very nervous. I see a time in a not very distant future and it’s probably happening already where much like doctors really hate to hear from WebMD when the patient comes into the treatment room, right? I think there’s gonna be a lot of lawyers that really hate to hear about what AI said, and hate to be told that they’re wrong because of AI. So, how do we regulate that? The little line at the bottom of the chat GPT response that says you really should seek a lawyer for legal advice is not enough, clearly people are acting on what came before. Um, what kind of guardrails do we need? Can we tell AI? No, you can’t, I think that horse is out of the barn. I think it’s too late, I don’t think we can recapture that. So, where do we go next? I look to the EU to make the inroads here because the system is more functional for creating that kind of forward thinking legislation at the moment. Um, and much likely saw with the GDPR and thinking about privacy law, We’re gonna see that for AI and the EO as well and already have, right?
Bim Dave: Yeah, yeah, they definitely seem to be pushing forward fast, so, hopefully that will help to give the guidelines that are needed.
Do you think that we are doing enough to prepare future lawyers for some of these AI related issues? Like you touched on data privacy being a big one, there’s the bias and just the whole liability for, you know, making autonomous decisions and not checking them.
Jeanne: Right, so, trust but verify. I mean, it’s not that we didn’t teach these things in law school before. It’s not that we didn’t teach people to always check the work of their associates, right? Or people who hand you something. If you have a paralegal working for you, you’re responsible for what goes out under your signature. There are rules that actually cover the changes in AI within the model rules of professional responsibility it’s making sure people understand because this is a slightly different setting, how to apply those rules within this setting and making sure that they understand that means that you can’t trust it just because it’s a computer. Just because the AI said so, doesn’t make it right. You have to read it, does that make sense? Is that a good argument? It’s a tool, not a solution, right? And there’s a difference, we use a tool to do a specific portion of something, but then we go back and check it, we tweak it, we make it ours, right? So I think there’s some of that teaching students how to use prompt writing and I know prompt engineering is vogue right now, whatever we decide to call it, it’s about much like you had to learn to search well in using Lexus or Westlaw, you’ve gotta learn how to write the prompt well. Um, and so it’s teaching them how to do that, but then we have the additional obligation of teaching them how to look under the hood and think about algorithms in such a way that they can combat bias, that they recognize civil rights violations as they occur within AI. And all of those pieces become, we we’re offering at the colleges of law, data science and the law course, right now, Sarah Sutherland is teaching that for us. Um, she wrote a book on data science in legal practice, and it’s a really wonderful take on how to stop and think about how data is used and how AI is used and how it can be beneficial to the profession, but also all of the hidden gotchas, right? And so teaching those really important bias problems within the legal curriculum has now become something you have to do. And we can’t just stick our head in the sand, it’s here, it’s happening, we have to move forward. And we have to prepare our students the best way possible for those changes.
Bim Dave: And what are some of the things that you do to encourage students? In your space to be able to engage with the emerging technologies, um, that apply to them in the future? And maybe like some of them come in with a vision of, what studying law actually is and maybe a traditional sense, right? But how do you get them excited about that stuff? Are there things that you do to get them engaged?
Jeanne: We taught a recent weekend course, and it was, they had a two week up lead up online and then a weekend intensive where they actually wrote AI applications. Most of the law students did it to help them practice and study for the bar exam, they fed it the information from their notes, from their study guides, and they used it to create basically an AI tutor for themselves for the bar exam.
You wanna get law students excited, help them create tools that help them pass the bar exam, I mean, they’re, they were all, they walked out of there very excited. Now, that’s not to say we didn’t have some that came in and said “Oh, you know, I can use this in my work”, we had a HR professional, um, and he put all of the HR manuals for his very large company into the large language model. And he had it use all of those documents to answer HR based questions within his organization. And so there was a way in which the employee was doing the first step of that compliance policy work that hR used to do and so he was very excited about how much better that made his life and how much better he could serve the employees, because within his organization, they speak over 200 languages. And so the AI could translate all of these answers from these policy manuals for the individuals that were asking the questions. So it made him excited because he could apply it directly to something he was doing in his career. And so at Colleges of Law we’re doing some things where we, we have non-traditional students here and that means they’re already out in the work world doing things and so they can automatically see how to leverage these technologies in a very law forward way. So it’s a smart wedding and I don’t, fight a lot of the traditional pieces, Until they come back to me and say “This firm is not ready to move forward, what do I do Dean Eicks? I say, um, keep going, right? Change is hard and you have to be there to both facilitate change and step up when somebody says “Our client is asking us to do this, no one here knows how, does anyone know how? And then when they ask that question, you can raise your hand.
Bim Dave: Yeah, absolutely.
it’s very interesting to kind of hear some of the, the technologies and the software businesses that are out there now creating solutions for various elements of the workflow of, of a lawyer. I was talking to a company recently who’s doing a lot of stuff around predictive outcomes of cases, for example, where they’ll grab all of the data for a court, consume it and then come up with a prediction of whether or not you’re gonna be successful or not and and even help you put your arguments together.
I’m thinking that there’s an element of additional, I guess, pressure, um, mental health concern, right? that needs to be balanced out here as well, because, I’m just thinking the amount of pressure that isn’t on a lawyer anyway, um, having to deal with, some of the cases that they have to deal with and then combined with the fact that actually there’s almost like an element of, competition in the room in terms of some of the technology, even though it’s there to enhance what they do, how much do you focus on that element a bit in terms of how do you actually navigate as a lawyer, the kind of things that you’re gonna be dealing with from an emotional perspective? Um, workload balance perspective, because I imagine that this has always been the case when you move from education into practice. There’s a lot of pressures that you have to deal with anyway, right? In terms of case volume and all the rest of it. Are there things that you do to prepare a lawyer for that part of the journey beyond the technology and the physical practice of law.
Jeanne: In some ways compartmentalization is a useful tool. So that’s part of that project management that we teach, we actually have a project management course and we try to teach them how to manage those loads because with good organization and good time management, it reduces the stress, right?
It’s not gonna do away with it because as you say, a lot of what lawyers do is weighty, right? It’s emotionally weighty matters. Um, and it’s not gonna do away with volume, but the tech can help reduce the volume and reduce some of the demands and make you work more efficiently. It’s a lens, right? How do you choose to view the tech? You can view it as competitive or you can view it as assistive and as long as you’re perceiving it as assistive, you’re going to try to leverage it to make your life better and not fight it. I think that fighting it creates even more stress and makes it a downhill spiral.
And, and some of that’s about change management, right? Good change management and in a firm is going to help you implement that technology in a positive way and in a life positive way for the attorney and not in a competitive way. That overlooks the difficulties for folks that aren’t digital natives, I talk to a lot of lawyers that say “I just wanted to retire before this happened, i’m so sorry I didn’t” so that’s hard too I think you have some really good questions and going back to your earlier point that you made about the company that’s actually going to be able to predict trial outcomes, right? That’s an ethics question I give my students on a final exam, actually, um, and the ethics question is, are they obligated once they get that information to share it with a client? Why or Why not? Do you have to say “Yes, you can choose to sue but you have a 15% chance of success, I’m a great lawyer and I can maybe raise that to 20 but it’s still a 20%” What is truth? Right? And it, it becomes very challenging to decide that because if we know that some of this data is biased, if we know that some of these algorithms are not necessarily processing a low income case in the way, same way that they would process an upper income individual case , does that mean that we have an obligation to say you’re always gonna lose because you’re low income and you can’t afford the kind of legal services, you, I mean, this is possibly going to create some transparency that lawyers are gonna find it very difficult to cope with. And we talk about it because I think the only thing you can do to protect and provide knowledge to those students that they can use going into the field is to talk about it in advance, we can’t predict for sure what they’re going to encounter, what we can do is say “Here’s the possibilities and here are different pathways you can follow in these possibilities, we don’t have answers because no one does, because it’s all new.
Bim Dave: Yes, indeed. I mean, if nothing else, it’s gonna be an interesting, few years ahead as some of this stuff unravels and and in some ways exciting, right?
Jeanne: It is! I love being at this forefront because I’m a true believer in so many ways that technology is gonna create efficiency, is going to open the doors to access to legal service and is really going to make the law more available to everyone. And I think for legal professionals, it’s going to shift our jobs into the jobs of counselor more an advisor. I don’t know about you, but the first time I filled in one of those long court forms, I thought to myself “Gosh, that’s not what I signed up for”. But when I’m sitting with clients and I’m talking to them about their new business and the best way to structure it and what makes most sense for them, and I’m thinking about all the chess pieces, that’s what I signed up for. And if AI enables that, then we’ve really got something that will help the lawyers and help the client.
Bim Dave: Totally agree, totally agree. So looking ahead, what’s your vision for the Law School of the Future?
Jeanne: Oh, that’s a great question, um, so much of that depends on what we do with the legal profession in the states, right? We do not have tiered levels of services in most states and having those tiered levels of services would change what a law school looks like, right? And we would have to address education at the differing levels of service.
I think the tiered levels of service are going to happen because of AI and so what does the law school of the future look like? It looks like an institution where perhaps you don’t have to have a JD to do some aspect of practice, and that’s um, you know, I’m sure my colleagues are out there just cringing to hear anyone say that, but I think there are certain types of law that probably don’t require that level of preparation. And if folks are just locked into doing those particular types of law, the medical profession already has this, right? Why isn’t legal doing that in the states? There are many reasons, right? The least of which is the control of the profession over how the profession interacts with the public.
Bim Dave: Indeed. Really, really interesting stuff. Um, so I just wanna move to, to some wrap up questions if I may. The first of which being, which I ask all my guests is, if you could borrow Dr. Who’s time machine and go back to yourself at 18 years old, what advice would you give yourself?
Jeanne: Learn to code formally instead of informally? I taught myself to code um, I would, it was a great time when we were developing all kinds of interesting things and, you know, I would be at Dartmouth and potentially instead of WashU, please don’t hate me for that WashU but Dartmouth was doing so many cool things around AI at that time, and I would’ve loved to have been on the cutting edge of what that was. It was philosophical in the early nineties but it was, it was there.
Bim Dave: Excellent. I can actually relate to that as well because I’m a self-taught, um, Informix 4GL developer back in the day and, this was when we used to have like, physical books on the on a bookshelf, so it was just when I needed to code, I’ll just have a quick look, see how, how I do something and I’ll i’ll figure it out from there but never actually took the time to sit down in class and actually learn it properly and I wish I had ’cause it would’ve made it much more easier and efficient to be able to do it that way.
Jeanne: When you’re self-taught, there’s potholes along the way and you really wish somebody could have pointed that out before you fell into it and I think that’s what a formal education does. It says, here’s the playing field so you could know where to go, um, and I didn’t have that. It was, it was good, you know, the Pearl Script did Blue Book citations, I was happy but I struggled. And I wouldn’t have that for if I could tell myself to do it differently.
Bim Dave: Yeah, indeed. And if you could have dinner with any famous person, non-famous person, past or present, um, who would it be and why
Jeanne: Mark Twain, absolutely Mark Twain. His sense of humor, I would just, I would love to laugh that much over the course of a meal and wise, right? Just wise in a way that don’t know that we have today in our writers and so I would love to have a conversation with Mark Twain.
Bim Dave: I love it. Proper belly laughs always, always good.
Jeanne: And, and I think as I get older I value laughter more and more.
Bim Dave: Yeah, indeed, indeed. And finally, any closing thoughts or advice that would benefit the legal professionals in our audience.
Jeanne: It’s not gonna go away. Technology is here and you have to find a way to make it a partner to what you do instead of an opponent in what you do.
Bim Dave: Brilliant. Dean Eicks, it’s been fantastic and really insightful speaking to you today, I really appreciate you taking time to talk to me.
Jeanne: Thank you so much for having me and your questions are so insightful. So, thank you again for the great interview. Take care. Take care.
Bim Dave: Take care.