In this insightful episode, Zack Shapiro, Founder of Raines LLP and recognized thought leader in AI and law, joins hosts Kyle and Moish for a revealing discussion on how artificial intelligence is transforming the legal profession. They explore how new AI tools are transforming workflows, the rise of “cloud-native” law practices, and why judgment and decision-making skills remain crucial for lawyers in an AI-driven future.

Zack shares insights from his own experience, discusses the limitations of current legal tech products, regulatory challenges, the future of legal education, and forecasts the emergence of the “10x lawyer” in a rapidly evolving industry.

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Chapters:

00:00 Welcome to Block & Order
01:04 Introducing Zack Shapiro
04:13 Building an AI-Native Law Firm
08:52 Small Firm vs. Big Law: Adopting AI Tools
11:20 The Power of Prompting & Custom AI Workflows
15:09 Automating Legal Work and Workflow Reinforcement
18:16 Advanced AI Tools: Cowork, Claude Code, API
19:13 Addressing Job Security and The Leverage Model
22:04 Legal Tech Wrappers vs. Direct AI Use
29:33 The Judgment Premium: What Lawyers Will Do in the Future
46:22 The 10x Lawyer & The Future of Law Firm

 

Watch or listen to the podcast here:

   

Transcript:

**This transcript has been prepared automatically by AI and may contain inaccuracies**

Zack Shapiro [00:00:00]:
I think this is a very clear existential threat to the big law leverage model. That’s what my last article was about. But I don’t think it’s an existential threat to the practice of law. I think there’s an important distinction there.

Moish Peltz [00:00:22]:
So earlier today on Polymarket, Moish, I give him credit, flagged this, that there’s a new a new function called Rent a Human, where AI bots can rent human beings to render services on behalf of the AI in the real world.

Kyle Lawrence [00:00:36]:
Did you see this? I, I did see that. It’s quite, quite the reversal of what you expect.

Kyle Lawrence [00:00:43]:
So it just makes me think of vampire movies, you know. Zach, would— is that—

Zack Shapiro [00:00:48]:
well, it makes me think of the movie, the movie Her, right, where sort of the most famous scene is, is more or less that, that situation.

Moish Peltz [00:00:54]:
I didn’t even make that connection. That’s a really good point, actually. Yeah, that’s excellent. Well, very proud guest, very proud B&O moment here. We have an AI specialist on, uh, Mr. Zach Shapiro, the founder of Reigns LLP, and dare I say it, kind of a thought leader in the AI space. We’re very pleased to have you on. Thank you for joining us and, uh, welcome aboard.

Zack Shapiro [00:01:18]:
Thank you for having me.

Kyle Lawrence [00:01:21]:
So before we get into some of the really captivating articles that you’ve been writing in recent weeks and months, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your journey and about what Rains does and your focus on AI and how you arrived here?

Zack Shapiro [00:01:33]:
For sure. Sort of a, I had a weird career trajectory getting to where I am now. I graduated Yale Law School in 2016. I had a sort of very traditional early career for a litigator. I clerked twice in the Southern District of New York and the Second Circuit, spent a year in between those clerkships at Davis Polk. And sort of by the end of that, was pretty convinced that I didn’t want to practice law altogether. The most interesting part of that, I didn’t really want to go to big law at all. I’d summered at Davis Polk, which is, you know, it’s fun being a summer associate.

Zack Shapiro [00:02:06]:
But by the time I left law school, I was pretty convinced I wanted to be, you know, in like tech or business.. But no one wanted to hire me in the one year between my clerkships with no relevant business experience for one year. And so, you know, going into Davis Polk, I had a friend who was at the time starting up a like GarageBand crypto hedge fund and asking me what was at the time, you know, pretty novel, interesting legal questions. And I kind of raised my hand at Davis Polk, you know, if there’s any crypto-related stuff, like I’d like to get involved., and I happened to get the timing, uh, pretty right on that. I was there through the ICO boom. And so like, that was cool, but big law, probably, probably not my thing. Um, so, uh, by the end of my second clerkship, I was, I was looking to exit, uh, the legal profession altogether. Uh, I had a friend who was doing an e-commerce startup, um, sort of doing stuff that was legally complicated.

Zack Shapiro [00:02:59]:
And the deal was, even though I didn’t have transactional experience, uh, I would come in for both in an operational co-founder capacity, and as a GC and sort of manage outside counsel to earn my keep until I transition over to the business side. And that was like a really fascinating, like, learning experience, like a mini MBA. We raised money from great VCs. We sort of sold the company in a mediocre acquihire in 2020. And I learned the exact opposite lesson I thought I would, which is like, oh my God, I never want to be a startup founder again. Like, that is, that’s terrible. But being a startup lawyer rocks, like it’s like the best job. And so, you know, I was in 2020, I was like, all right, I’m going to like get a real job.

Zack Shapiro [00:03:41]:
But maybe I’ll just like freelance with some of the founders I met from my in-house role for a while. And, you know, that went well, became a solo practice. The solo practice became Raines. And so my current practice is Raines LLP. There’s just two of us. It’s myself and an associate., and then we do sort of 3 practice areas. We do, you know, sort of generalist corporate work and fractional general counsel services for mostly startups and some VCs. Um, we do, uh, transactional work, mostly venture, like a little bit of M&A.

Zack Shapiro [00:04:13]:
Uh, and then we do regulatory work sort of focused on our 3 biggest client areas, which are crypto, AI, and telehealth.

Kyle Lawrence [00:04:21]:
Wow. Really, really fascinating stuff, man. I, I’m not even sure where to begin. Moish is really the AI wunderkind. And, you know, we’ve been reading all of your articles and I know we have a ton of questions. Moish, where would you like to start?

Moish Peltz [00:04:33]:
Well, I think, I think what I’ll try and do is just go chronologically through the, the 3 articles that you’ve published. I think all of which have, you know, in my sense of the word, gone viral. Uh, you can tell me the reaction, but maybe we can start there. Um, you know, what was your purpose in, in putting together, um, this series of articles? Did you conceive of it that way or just kind of take on a life of its own and And what’s the reaction that you’ve heard, you know, both from perhaps lawyers at small firms, larger firms, and everyone else?

Zack Shapiro [00:05:05]:
Yeah, for sure. So there are actually 6 articles so far. The first 2 got like a little bit of attention, and it’s really the third one, the cloud-native law firm, that like went crazy. And then, you know, my numbers have been high since then. The initial sort of impetus behind this, it was 2 separate things. One was the sort of weird, anxious zeitgeist I was feeling around what AI is going to do to white collar work, including lawyers. And so two pieces that had gone viral on Twitter before mine, the Matt Schumer Something Big Is Happening piece, which is a software engineer trying to explain to normie friends, like, actually, this is maybe coming for your job too. And then the even more doomer’s Trini Research piece about how the economy is over and nobody’s going to have a job and we’re going to all be eating cat food.

Zack Shapiro [00:05:59]:
And at the same time as that, starting in late December ’25 or January of this year, I had picked up sort of the new version of Anthropic’s Agentic AI for use in my practice, and it completely transformed my practice and my quality of life. And for the first time, I was waking up in the morning just really excited to do work because all the bad stuff was gone and I felt like I had superpowers. And those two things came together to be like, huh, I want to start writing about what I see as a slightly more optimistic vision for the transformation that AI can have. Right. Because I agree with sort of the central tenet of Schumer’s piece and Citrini’s piece that this is a tsunami coming. For the white collar working world. This is going to be transformative. And look, I don’t want to sugarcoat it.

Zack Shapiro [00:06:48]:
There’s going to be a huge amount of disruption and perhaps jobs lost. But for those who are willing to sort of surf this wave, and there really is a deep opportunity right now. We are very early in the adoption curve of modern AI, especially for lawyers. Lawyers are going to have a huge blind spot here. This is actually really exciting. And I don’t see, I mean, unless we get to real deal AGI and we have bigger things to worry about at that point, I think there is a place for lawyers who like to do lawyer stuff. And so that was really sort of the impetus for the series as a whole, is sort of exploring that concept. What do I think is going to change? What do I think is going to be valuable? And how am I navigating this myself?

Moish Peltz [00:07:33]:
Yeah, I agree with you completely. And I think my reaction was pretty consistent to yours, to both pieces, the Citrini one’s probably like, all right, like a little bit too much, but like I get the idea. And I think just generally, yes, there is a tsunami coming of white-collar workers and it’s going to impact legal as it’s going to impact, you know, our friends at the Mag 7. So, and that’s happening whether we like it or not. So I think we agree there. And we’ve also, you know, I’m also using Claude. I’ve been using it since probably the same time. And I similarly feel excited like you do.

Moish Peltz [00:08:07]:
I think the last time I felt this excited is probably that DeFi summer NFT era where that was like, for me, like a really big, like things were changing, things were new. It was a lot of fun to be a lawyer. I feel like this is kind of that same. But my reaction to your Claude piece was perhaps more, more skeptical just about, and maybe that’s because of our, of our positions at different size law firms. And so that really drove my interest in, which I don’t think anything about your article is necessarily incorrect or wrong, but my thinking was, well, and there’s small firms and there’s large firms and there might be different tooling for both kinds of firms depending on what they’re trying to accomplish and who their client base is. And I guess what’s your theory about that? And I just following up my question of like, you know, is the reaction from like small, like fractional counsel, tech-forward lawyers, like, yeah, 100%? Or is there like a mixed reaction across and it’s like, oh, I’m just, I have a blind spot because I’m at a larger firm?

Zack Shapiro [00:09:11]:
Yeah. So let me first say that like the, you know, just script, like the experience of having 8 million people like read an article and the volume of inbound I got from that is like completely overwhelming. And I’m sorry, I’ve been spending like a lot of my time sorting through that. And there’s like a huge selection bias, right, of who decides to reach out to me versus who doesn’t. So my, I’ve had many, many conversations over the last couple of weeks, but they might not be representative. But what I will say is I’m hearing from people at all size, like firms and in-house lawyers. And I am prioritizing the like larger law firms because I think there’s a more interesting opportunity set there. And, um, No, I think this is going to be broadly applicable.

Zack Shapiro [00:09:55]:
Now, descriptively, like currently, absolutely there’s a different tech stack that is like feasible in my two-person firm versus big law, right? Like big law is not tomorrow going to start doing what I’m doing. I totally understand that. Um, but there are, I will tell you both like up and down sort of from the rank and file to like partners in big law, there are many, many big law lawyers who like read what I wrote and are like, we want to do this and we understand how this is the the future. And specifically, we understand how like Harvey and Legora are not. Um, and then even in like management, right? I’ve had several conversations like, you know, with firms that are trying to figure out how to get closer to what I’m doing. And maybe there is, you know, slightly different architecture. Um, and there are different sort of security trade-offs and, uh, you need to think about sort of consistency across the firm in a little bit different way than I do. But, um, if I had to predict like, what does the successful practice of law look like 5 years from now? Like I would make a strong bet it looks more like what I’m doing than what is being sold by legal tech rappers to big law firms right now.

Moish Peltz [00:10:56]:
Sure. And so maybe you could explain a little bit more detail. And I know you explained in the piece like what, what that means within Claude. Assume our audience is in Claude 4.6 every day and knows what skills are and is implementing that. Um, what, what like specific things are you doing that you’re finding are saving yourself a lot of time? And energy and making your life much better as an attorney than it was a year ago? Yeah.

Zack Shapiro [00:11:20]:
So there are both like, there are two good high-level answers I’ll give you. And then let me just like signpost that there are also detailed like tips and tricks that like I’m, I’m not yet talking about in public. Um, but like there is like additional more granular secret sauce than what I’m about to say, but like high-level, the secret sauce has two parts. Um, the first is, and again, like I don’t mean to just keep like I’m not dumping on legal tech, but it’s going down the wrong path in the fact that it really focuses too much on the outputs. There’s all of the selling point, oh, we’ve trained on this batch of SEC documents or this elite law firm’s litigation briefs or contracts. Fine. Maybe that’s marginally helpful if you’re trying to sound exactly like this firm and create a brand. But like, LLMs have trained on lots of legal documents, right? Like, just lots and lots and lots of legal documents.

Zack Shapiro [00:12:11]:
If you read the whole internet, like, that’s not the weak point of LLMs, right? The thing that moves the needle is not like the post-training you do on specific, like, templates. It’s the prompt. The prompt is the whole ballgame, right? And like, that’s like, if you take nothing else away, like, the prompt is the thing that matters. Okay, so like, what do you do with that? Well, all right, the next thing to realize about LLMs, you know, probably a lot of people listening to this will know, like, LLMs are this kind of like, fuzzy, nondeterministic technology where if you put in a vague prompt, you’re going to get like vague slop output, right? Professional sounding vague slop output, but slop nonetheless.

Moish Peltz [00:12:47]:
All the grammar is good. There’s a little bit more semicolons and M dashes than there is otherwise.

Zack Shapiro [00:12:52]:
And it’s not this, it’s that, right? Like, if I have to read that again, I might kill myself. But conversely, if you are sufficiently— and it’s these two things. If you’re sufficiently detailed and specific, then the technology becomes magic, right? So step number one is being good at prompting. And it’s not really like a technical skill you need. It is the ability to be detailed and specific, which I suppose means you need to imagine what you want out. So there’s maybe a little bit of imagination, but with legal work, it’s not like that much imagination. We know what work product we create, and you need to be detailed and specific about what you want. And that looks like very long stream of consciousness prompts that you type into the AI, or very long stream of consciousness, like speaking into the voice mode of the AI for a complicated legal assignment.

Zack Shapiro [00:13:45]:
I’ve said my average prompt length is something like 2000 words, right? I’m writing an essay into Claude now. It doesn’t look like an essay. I’m mashing my hands into the keyboard and there’s no grammar and the spelling is awful. And I’m actually on purpose repeating things multiple times that I want to make sure it really understands. But it’s all about context, right? The more context, the more stuff you can get into the LLM, the better your output is going to be. And so that’s the first thing that I think you need to do to get very elite work product out of an LLM. Then step 2, and I think there are people, I don’t think there are that many people out there doing 2,000-word prompts, but where I think I’m maybe even more doing things differently is how do you compound that with skills. And so skills, if we’re assuming the audience knows what skills are, I think one of the things I did differently than a lot of people is I just didn’t bother reading the Anthropic skills document.

Zack Shapiro [00:14:36]:
I gave it to Claude and after months of getting good at prompting, I just pointed Claude at all of our chats together and I said, pitch me on the 5 best skills you think will make my life better at work. And then I discussed that for a while with Claude and then I had it build an MVP of all those skills. And they were pretty good and they were pretty useful. And the thing that really first blew my mind and moved me over sort of solidly into a Claude as opposed to ChatGPT user is, as a lawyer, I spent 4 to 6 hours a day in front of Microsoft Word. And I was going back and forth with ChatGPT and getting the line edits I wanted and then putting them in manually. And that sucks. Or assigning that to my associate, which sucks for him. And the thing about Claude is it can write code on the fly.

Zack Shapiro [00:15:22]:
And Microsoft Word is made of code. And so now it can manipulate doc files and like, oh my God, the first time I watched it write Python and XML and then the thing came out in perfect track changes attributed to me, it was like a religious moment, right? It was crazy. So anyway, similar.

Moish Peltz [00:15:42]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re like, no, no, no, I didn’t ask you to do Python. What are you doing? And then it spits out like, oh, okay.

Zack Shapiro [00:15:46]:
Yeah, no, it’s amazing. And then, okay, and then, right, so the second part of the secret sauce after you have MVP skills is then using your practice as a reinforcement learning environment for the skills, right? So you got to pick skills you’re going to use pretty often to get reps in. And then when something unexpectedly goes well, I stop and I say to Claude, hey, this went well. Let’s analyze why this went well and let’s translate that into a change to the skill to make sure this happens more often. Something goes poorly, I stop, claw, I say, listen, let’s analyze why this went poorly. And then I have a method for making changes to my skills to make sure that happens less often. And so the usefulness of the skills compound over time. And then from there, you can chain skills together.

Zack Shapiro [00:16:28]:
There are meta skills that call skills, right? And let me just very briefly emphasize, I am someone who is terrible at using tools, right? I ended up in crypto like everyone else did because I’m neurodivergent and I can’t learn things unless I care about them. And then it’s crazy. But in startup world, I’ve had clients try to get me to do Jira and Asana and Notion and all of these horrible things, and I can’t do it. And what was very different about AI is there’s none of that. You just talk to it. You just imagine what you want and you describe it. It’s like it’s like a really dumb genie where if you specifically describe what you want in enough detail, it will do it and it’s magic. But if there’s any room for error, it’s not going to be good.

Moish Peltz [00:17:19]:
That’s great. I love the self-reinforcement learning aspect of it. I think fundamentally that’s new, and that’s where I agree with you. Seeing how Claude works is just— this is fundamentally new because if you use it right, continuously improve these prompts and you have it reflect and give feedback on itself and its output and how you’re interacting with it, then, well, then you’re just progressively getting better with every time you use it.

Zack Shapiro [00:17:45]:
And by the way, once it’s like fine-tuned enough, like one of my favorite, like, you know, it’s like, this is really nerdy, like it’s a parlor trick for myself. But like, if I have a, you know, a contract edit I want that’s not so complicated, I could just like put in the Word doc and say, please fix. And then it does an amazing job. And that’s hilarious every time that happens.

Kyle Lawrence [00:18:03]:
That is always fun.

Moish Peltz [00:18:05]:
I enjoy that as well. So then does Cowork, are you using that as part of this process?

Zack Shapiro [00:18:16]:
I am. Yeah. So I very rarely use Claude Code. I use it for vibe coding projects for ad hoc tools that I use, but I don’t think that Claude Code at this point really matters so much for most lawyers. In terms of my practice, it’s a mix of Claude, Claude through an API. I convinced Anthropic to give me a zero-day retention license for stuff that needs that, and then Cowork for certain matters. And it really kind of depends on the type of work I’m doing, whether I’m using sort of regular Claude or Cowork. CloWork is really amazing for ingesting context quickly in a way that you can’t do with regular Claude.

Zack Shapiro [00:18:57]:
So if you’re doing, I’m not a lawyer, but if you’re doing doc review, you could just point it at a folder and it just hoovers it up. To go back to the movie Her, it’s a lot like the scene where he turns on the OS. It’s like, oh, I read your whole hard drive and all your emails.

Moish Peltz [00:19:13]:
Worst idea.

Kyle Lawrence [00:19:13]:
Yeah, that’s one of my favorite applications of this is that. Because I am a corporate attorney. I do a lot of mergers and acquisitions and will often get a treasure trove of documents. And I have to look at the assignment clauses in 200 documents. And now what used to take a couple of days takes all of 2 minutes. And it’s a really wonderful, glorious thing. So no question there. But that to me is the benefit of what these things can do.

Kyle Lawrence [00:19:40]:
Now, the counter to that, or not the counter to that, but the counterargument I hear I always hear from people in our firm, and you talk about this a lot, is this idea that we are paying for licenses. We’re basically paying the company that’s trying to replace us in a way. It’s like, here, take my money, and now we’re out of a job. That’s the fear we always hear. And I’m sure you get that all the time. And I’m sure when you put these articles out, you get a lot of Luddite-laden comments about things like that.

Zack Shapiro [00:20:08]:
How do you— I do, but not that comment, right? I actually think my articles are sort of really I try and hammer home the exact opposite of that view. I think that if you’re using AI the way I am now, like, yes, it automates away, like, the terrible busywork you didn’t want to do. Um, but it actually allows you to be a more effective lawyer and your life looks a lot more like presumably what you went to law school for. Um, so I, and I don’t, I don’t think that the workflows I am doing, uh, are going to replace lawyers now. Conversely, again, like I feel very differently about the legal tech products, right? I think that like Harvey and Lagora are not set up that way, right? Like the Harvey founder, I think was like a first year associate for one year in big law. Um, and then the Lagora founders were not even lawyers. And I do think with those types of more opinionated wrappers, you do find yourself in danger of being like, you’re a cog in a machine that’s like then eventually pretty easily replaced. Um, I think if you’re a lawyer working with the bare metal, uh, like I don’t think anything about being able to point Claude Cowork at transaction documents and M&A, and then very quickly getting the context that you need to advise your client is any species of like lawyers getting replaced by machines.

Kyle Lawrence [00:21:19]:
See, to me, actually, when you put it that way, that’s a bigger concern for the big law associates that have 2,000-hour, you know, billable requirements, because now instead of a project that takes 20 hours, takes 4 seconds, what do they do?

Zack Shapiro [00:21:30]:
Yes, I think this is a very clear existential threat to the big law leverage model. That’s what my last article was about. But I don’t think it’s an existential threat to the practice of law. I think there’s an important distinction.

Kyle Lawrence [00:21:40]:
I think that’s very fair.

Zack Shapiro [00:21:41]:
And big law can deal with it, whatever. Before we go there.

Moish Peltz [00:21:45]:
We’ll see. Yeah, right. They might not. That’s, we’ll get there. But I do, I do want to zero in on the, the Harvey, Ligora, Spellbook co-counsel. Um, uh, so we, we, we are a Harvey shop. We also. Do have a Claude enterprise license.

Moish Peltz [00:22:04]:
We have an OpenAI enterprise license too. And we’ve adopted those at various times based on what we thought was right in the moment. I personally have used Claude Code and Claude Cowork and I’ve been vibe coding and doing other stuff, primarily not for like substantive legal work, but for other, you know, legal adjacent projects, marketing projects, other things like that. But I’ve found that the way Harvey in particular works, and they’re not paying me to say this, I just enjoy the product myself. I find it very useful. I’ve built workflows. And I think a lot of those workflows are very similar to what, granted, you’re using, I would say, Claude at a higher level than probably almost any other attorney. But the idea of a workflow and the idea of a 2,000-word prompt is fundamentally similar to what is like a, what would be called like a workflow in Harvey.

Moish Peltz [00:22:56]:
And so, but I think the difference is it’s much easier for a small firm or set costs aside. Say, let’s just say these products are the same cost, cost neutral. That not being a factor, to take a legal-specific product and adopt some of the best things of Claude and then drop that into a legal environment, I do think that the vertical product has a leg up in different vectors versus a general purpose product.

Zack Shapiro [00:23:27]:
And what is the leg up?

Moish Peltz [00:23:28]:
What is the leg up? I think that there’s some things about Claude that frustrate me as a purchaser. Before they, which they did recently, enabled enterprise with one click, you had to get a human to grant you a magic license. And if you couldn’t get a human on the phone, which nobody could at Anthropic for the last couple of months, that was a difficult process, which seems silly. They’ve solved that. But the idea is that with Harvey, they have sales reps. Yes, they’re trying to sell you something. And they have, as I saw you tweet, like sponsorships to the Dallas Mavericks, which like, great, that’s how they’re spending my money.

Zack Shapiro [00:24:03]:
Fantastic.

Moish Peltz [00:24:03]:
But they also means they have people that are there that when you have a problem, when you want training, when you want to change custom admin settings, when you want to do all sorts of things, you have someone that is responsive to you. In an enterprise setting, I think that’s useful. Whereas Anthropic, at least for now, doesn’t have that. They have like one dude doing their marketing and that’s cool. Like, I love that. But like, maybe you want more of a service type product. And there’s, there’s, so that’s, that’s one, that’s one thing that concerns me.

Zack Shapiro [00:24:33]:
Yeah. So at least of the three things you mentioned, right? So the first is it was hard to get an enterprise license. Like, it seems like that’s fixed. That seems like a completely tractable problem. You know, to— you mentioned sort of like the mark. I mean, like, it just feels a little bit like Harvey is like pulling a Richard Hart with your guys’ money. Fine. Like, if that’s exciting or like that makes people happy to see the Harvey sponsorships, I suppose that might have goodwill.

Zack Shapiro [00:24:59]:
I don’t, I don’t know that that is like helpful. And then customer service, like, I don’t know, like when I am stuck in like how I use Claude, I find actually Claude is incredibly helpful explaining how to fix it. And that’s faster and cheaper and better than waiting for a random CS person on the phone. And then I just think that the expressivity of the skills in freeform, I just don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all. I think that to the extent that the wrappers are prescriptive or opinionated, that just feels like a huge net negative Forget if they’re the same price. You couldn’t pay me enough to add a layer of muck or like, here are your options on top of the AI experience I’m having now. And again, I’m someone who’s bad with tools. It’s just really not hard, right? It’s not.

Zack Shapiro [00:25:53]:
You just need to be willing to do it and you need to fully go native and commit. And there absolutely is compounding and economies, personal economies of scale to leaning into the tech. Giving it more context, refining your skills. But, um, I think those are best done at the personalized layer, right? And, you know, this idea of like, you can be a 10x lawyer. Like, I just don’t know that you’re going to be fully a 10x lawyer if you’re building like workflows within a thing that is like meant for the engineer’s idea of how lawyers should work. Now, could there be a legal tech product that does it better? Theoretically? I do believe so. Like, look, I’ll be honest, like, that is one of the things I’m thinking about now. Like, is there a, like, a thing you could sell to big law that provides this experience with, like, a little bit more handholding than the bare metal? Like, maybe.

Zack Shapiro [00:26:45]:
I don’t think it’s in the market right now.

Moish Peltz [00:26:47]:
Yeah. And I would, I would imagine, yes, they’re spending sponsorship money on sponsorships and they’re trying to grow brand and scale, but a lot of—

Zack Shapiro [00:26:54]:
They’re really good at selling. Like that, I will absolutely hats off at the valuations and the size of their raises.

Moish Peltz [00:27:01]:
Yeah, we saw the Gore also raised like $500 million this week.

Zack Shapiro [00:27:04]:
And yeah, that’s quite the Series D for like a 1-year-old company.

Moish Peltz [00:27:08]:
Right. Exactly. But then I think the other part that concerns me, which I think Harvey does solve for, is 6 months ago, like ChatGPT was the best thing. And then like 3 months later, Gemini was the best thing. And now Claude’s the best thing. And like, maybe that’ll persist. Maybe it won’t. Harvey gives you another layer of aggregation of, as a purchaser, I don’t need to go, as I did, buy ChatGPT, and now I’m like, oh, I want Claude because it’s better now, and I got to figure out what the best tool is.

Moish Peltz [00:27:37]:
And then if I have all my skills integrations in one tool, I got to transport them to another. Again, maybe that’s solved by, you know, you just ask the tool to transport it through the program. Yeah. I mean, but I just think there’s this aggregation layer where you’re trusting Harvey to say, okay, You go out and you find the best models for legal work and you bring them to me and apply them to my platform.

Zack Shapiro [00:27:58]:
But Harvey doesn’t know what the best models are. Harvey’s pushing people. Harvey, invested in by OpenAI, my understanding is kind of mostly pushes ChatGPT. It doesn’t give you the full agentic Claude experience. By the way, if we’re talking about price, you can have all of the leading models for cheaper than Harvey, and then you don’t need to decide which one to buy. Just buy them all and you’ll save money. And look, I’m not sure if— my sense is that the Anthropic leaning into coding is maybe a commanding lead that will persist in a way that I agree before they were leapfrogging. That absolutely could be wrong.

Zack Shapiro [00:28:35]:
I’m relatively now loyal to Anthropic’s UI, but not so loyal that if Codex really pulled ahead and that was really better, I would switch that. And we’ve seen both. OpenAI and Anthropic specifically design their system to be as interoperable as possible with your data from the other system. At the end of the day, the context we’re talking about, the skills we’re talking about are markdown files. Any LLM can read a markdown file. I just don’t think the switching costs are that big. And especially given the costs involved, what does it mean that Harvey is allowing you to switch? You can both switch yourself and you can have them all at the same time for cheaper than Harvey.

Moish Peltz [00:29:10]:
All right, well, we’ll see. I come out on the other side here. But I also don’t because I love Claude too and I love using it. So I’m just also thinking, okay, how do I roll this out to 100+ people? And I feel like Harvey just makes that easier for me. And maybe part of that is harder to describe, but I totally get where you’re coming from. Moving on, your next article was titled The Judgment Premium. And maybe you could tell us more about the thesis behind there. And the kinds of knowledge that are now becoming more valuable.

Zack Shapiro [00:29:48]:
Yeah. So the judgment premium is sort of the spiritual part two of the cloud-native law firm. It’s like, okay, all these tools are really exciting. They’re going to take away a lot of sort of like the grunt work that goes into lawyering now. And then the question is like, what’s left? And, you know, for, I guess, years now since ChatGPT came out, I’ve been hearing from Silicon Valley, you know, think boys that the answer is taste, that taste is going to be the skill of the future and everyone’s going to vibe code based on taste. And that seems like directionally right. But I really wanted to nail down, like, what does that mean? And what does that mean in the context of the legal profession? And I think that the sort of, you know, I was a philosophy major in undergrad, really like sort of philosophy of language and mind. And so this is how my brain thinks about things.

Zack Shapiro [00:30:36]:
When you go to the concept of taste, I think it breaks down into two things, one of which is vulnerable to AI, which is like pattern recognition. But then the other is like decision making. It’s picking between alternatives when there’s not one obvious answer. And it’s that latter thing that humans do. And I think that decision making has two components. One is like, is this sort of like more judgment, taste, sort of you’re going to pick the right thing. And then the other is like bearing the responsibility, right? So it’s the liability piece, right? Like you want a human in the loop to make certain decisions so that human can be responsible. And I think sort of that cluster of concepts around judgment is what lawyers are going to be paid for.

Zack Shapiro [00:31:22]:
And, you know, judgment is, you know, probably part of it is like genetic or something, but a lot of it is like judgment is learned. Judgment is a skill that’s developed. And so if my thesis is right, that judgment is the thing that will command a premium, right? If that’s the thing that clients really kind of are mostly paying for now, even though it’s packaged as you’re paying for the associate swinging axes in the billable hour mine, if you want to have a good legal career, you should be focusing on judgment. And if you’re a young lawyer, which I absolutely— that’s a tough position to be in right now. Double down on, aside from like learning how to use Claude, like double down on developing judgment, right? To be able to actually like advise clients in tough situations. That’s where you earn your keep as a lawyer. And my view is that’s where you will continue to earn your keep as a lawyer.

Kyle Lawrence [00:32:09]:
Well, given an accelerated timeline with all these things, I mean, you’ve argued in some of your articles that we’re not looking at a decade or 5 years, like we’re in it. It’s, it’s all happening right now. So if you’re somebody who’s graduating from law school, how will you cultivate that skill? And that to me, which harkens back to earlier in the conversation when we have these tools tools that are doing all of these things for us and they do them very quickly and very effectively as we’ve seen and we’ve utilized. If I’m a first-year associate, how do I do that other than just the tried and true method of doing it?

Zack Shapiro [00:32:40]:
Okay, that’s a great and a difficult question. Um, and I don’t have all the answers to that, but I, but maybe I have some. Um, one is like, if you’re going to be like in a big law environment, try and like be in the room when the partner is like advising the client on something tough, right? Like, have, like, strategy discussions. If you’re a, like, young litigator, you know, like, easier said than done, but, like, really do think about doing a clerkship because you’re with the judge making judgment calls all day. It’s, like, really good for that. If you are on the sort of corporate or transactional side, think about if there’s a way to get early, like, in-house experience or, like, better yet, like, you know, if you have an opportunity to, like, have sort of a non-legal business role, like, that is an excellent sort of judgment development tool. But like, try and be around where the decisions are made. If judgment is sort of boils down in large part to decision-making, like you want to be where the decision-making is happening and not where the, you know, soon-to-be automated grunt work is happening.

Kyle Lawrence [00:33:41]:
Yeah, that’s fair. And kind of coincidentally, I’m going to go on a tangent for a second. That talks, you think about work from home, right? Today, it’s March 13th, is the 6-year anniversary that New York shut down for the pandemic, which is wild to think about. But what happened with the pandemic is we all worked from home, and then afterwards everyone was like, well, I kind of like wearing pajamas, uh, sitting in this meeting. This is kind of nice. And full disclosure, I am wearing sweatpants, but I’ve come full circle. I don’t like working from home anymore. I prefer being in the office.

Kyle Lawrence [00:34:10]:
And for the young attorneys that we’ve been training, we, we don’t dictate that, we don’t mandate that they be in the office, but we strongly encourage it for the reasons that you’ve mentioned. And I completely agree with that.

Zack Shapiro [00:34:23]:
I think that’s kind of a boomer take, to be honest. So I have, I’ve personally been working from home since March of 2020. Um, I would never give it up. Uh, like, look, I go to like meet clients and I have in-person meetings, but like, oh my God, you’d have to drag me kicking and screaming back to an office. Um, and they’re like, that’s not the only way to get judgment, right? Like it’s not that these senior attorneys are so brilliant. And if you’re really like a first year associate, you’re mostly dealing with mid-level associates who are not selected for judgment at all. By the way, this is the thing I think really, really needs to change. If you’re like at a big law firm, Right? Like even the most prestigious law firms aren’t at all differentiating between the sort of brilliant, creative, tech-forward, like, you know, like lawyers with young lawyers with indicia judgment versus the guy who got A’s and was on Law Review.

Zack Shapiro [00:35:10]:
And if you’ve spent any time in big law, especially as like a first or second year associate, you know what it’s like to work with a mid-level. Yeah. Who was on Law Review and got A’s because they like just know how to grind. And those people are a nightmare to work with. And I think there’s a little bit of poetic justice and there’s maybe less of a future for those people than the people who like to do lawyering. But I don’t know, another hack would be work with startup laws. That has been a huge hack for me, not because anything to do with lawyers, but with startups. They are very used to young people having say and they’re very used to being okay with an 80% answer.

Zack Shapiro [00:35:48]:
And like 80% answers are where you develop judgment. And lawyers are congenitally terrified of 80% answers, right? You need to be hedged 6 ways from Sunday. And like for your Fortune 500 clients, like you need 8 memos and you need to be 100% sure. And like, that’s not what it’s like. You know, when I started doing startup law, someone described it to me as like, you’re the, you’re the bouncer at like a strip club. Your job is to make sure like the real police don’t come. Um, and you know, sometimes that’s like the job and like, that is a great training ground for judgment. Especially in crypto, by the way, right? Like, especially there’s nothing I can do that’s going to make the Howey test different.

Zack Shapiro [00:36:20]:
So let’s talk about how we’re, you know, right? Like, it’s— I don’t know. I think there are practice areas that are better for this than others, but I don’t think you need to be in an office all day.

Moish Peltz [00:36:29]:
On the issue of taste, I’m curious what your thoughts are on the idea of I, as an attorney, have worked and have developed a voice and the ability to write and have my own way of thinking. And now the way, the easiest way to produce work product is to press a button that kind of destroys all that, but achieves a really efficient, technically correct out and similar outcome. Just the taste and the voice is lost. And I find myself struggling with, well, this is the correct answer. This is done most efficiently. And here it is with what happened to, you know, decades of experience of learning to write and having a liberal arts background and all these things. And so I’m wondering how you think about that and how you’d advise, especially, you know, carrying off that last question of the young attorneys. How do you learn to not just develop judgment, but also taste and the ability to think and write?

Zack Shapiro [00:37:34]:
Yeah. So I think there’s also just completely a false dichotomy and like not, not a problem. Right. So like, look, I did a lot of education to learn how to think and write. I also went to Williams, which is a liberal arts college. I spent a year at Oxford. I went to Yale Law School. I did a lot of time thinking and writing.

Zack Shapiro [00:37:50]:
I also use AI for everything. All of my pieces are written using AI. The distinction here is not between writing and getting good at writing and using AI. That is just a false dichotomy. The distinction is, are you going to abandon all of your judgment and just let the AI run? Or are you going to do all of the difficult cognitive lifting that good writing entails and then put that in the AI to make the work product even better? And I absolutely don’t think you need to forego AI in order to be a good writer, become a better writer, do really interesting, satisfying writing. You need to both use AI and do the cognitive work. The problem is the slop when people don’t do the cognitive work. But the problem there is the not doing the cognitive work.

Zack Shapiro [00:38:40]:
It’s not the using AI. The AI is just like, allows— it’s a temptation to not do the cognitive work.

Moish Peltz [00:38:46]:
And I agree with you, right? And I’ve created articles with AI that are obviously created through AI. I still occasionally write stuff without AI, but not very often. I had back in whenever in 2023, I believe it was the first blog post using ChatGPT 3.0, which was submitted. So it’s like, I’m with you on that. But then every once in a while, I read an article that is clearly written by a human and clearly has a voice and clearly has a human voice of that author. And I feel like that will become diminishing. And I guess my question is, does that matter? People tell me it does. When I talk with other attorneys, they say, oh, well, you wrote that with AI.

Moish Peltz [00:39:31]:
I’m like, yeah, I know.

Zack Shapiro [00:39:32]:
But yeah, I think I’m just going to take the stronger version of the position and be like, I just don’t think that these things are necessarily incompatible. A lot of my writing process with AI specifically is working hard to make sure the AI understands my voice. And I don’t mean I’m giving it a bunch of examples of my writing for context and asking it to parrot me. I mean, I am going in and explaining at length, at tremendous length. Here is how I think about things and here are how I want things to land. And here is, if I was a writing tutor and I was explaining to someone how to write, that’s the level of detail for pages and pages and pages and pages. It’s not train on the dataset of my writing and imitate me.. And I think the former can be considered having a writing voice, even if one draft of the prose is generated by AI.

Zack Shapiro [00:40:32]:
I just think that distinction is going to fall away. Maybe not. We all know what clearly AI-written stuff looks like, and it’s intolerable, right? Yeah. And people are going to be allergic to that. And so, yeah, not sounding like that is really important.. But the difference between something that is thoughtfully crafted, including the use of AI, versus fully handwritten, I just don’t necessarily see it. I mean, that being said, I had a class, I took a philosophy class at Oxford with this really old school curmudgeonly professor there who was like, I had to handwrite 20 pages for every tutorial with him and then read it out loud to him. And he would stop me every time he disagreed and we’d have to debate until we reached consensus about it., and that was kind of a good learning tool, but just not how most scholarship needs to be produced.

Zack Shapiro [00:41:24]:
Right. And so the times change, the technology changes. Having a voice is a real thing. Generic AI slop is a real thing, but I don’t think it’s as clean as did you use AI or not?

Kyle Lawrence [00:41:34]:
I think it’s clean when you watch certain movies and you can kind of tell when scripts are written by AI and that’s a different animal because you’re really cutting out a lot of people’s thoughts.

Zack Shapiro [00:41:44]:
It’s horrible.. But studios, I’m going to go on a tangent. Slop is slop, whether it’s written by a human or an AI.

Moish Peltz [00:41:48]:
But when you’re using it, when you’re reading it for enjoyment versus when you’re reading it for, you know, I’m trying to achieve a practical business outcome, it’s serving a different function, right?

Zack Shapiro [00:41:59]:
Of course. Of course.

Moish Peltz [00:42:00]:
But I think you can do both with AI.

Zack Shapiro [00:42:03]:
So moving on to your next article, 10x Lawyer Thesis.

Moish Peltz [00:42:07]:
So there was one actually in between. You skipped it. I missed it.

Zack Shapiro [00:42:09]:
Maybe you can explain that one too. Yeah, so I’m sure I read it, but I just didn’t have it in my show notes. Yeah. So I wrote one called We Have No Idea How to Regulate What’s Coming, which is like my reaction to the Maltbook stuff. And it’s like, I almost called it like, it would have been too deep a cut, like a too deep, like a lawyer joke. But it’s like the modern day Paul’s graph of what happens when two generations from now, whatever OpenClaw is at that point, people are going to go to their OpenClaw and they’re going to say, go make me money. And that’s going to be the full prompt. Right.

Zack Shapiro [00:42:40]:
And then the Open Claw is going to spawn 5 other Open Claws and they’re going to do research and they’ll be like, all right, I need $1,000. And so you’re going to give it like $1,000 USDC and it’s going to find some arbitrage idea in DeFi. But $1,000 isn’t really enough to fully arbit out. So it’s going to come up with the idea to launch a token on a DEX to raise more money to be able to fully arbit out. And it’s going to create this incredibly— its child that it spawns creates incredibly valuable IP, you know, to trade, but the trade it does is like an illegal, you know, MEV sandwich attack. And so now it’s committing securities fraud. And so, and then like some of the money goes to ISIS somehow, right? And so now you’ve got like valuable IP and profits and losses and, and securities offering and fraud. And the original prompt was 4 agents removed from that, which is go make me money.

Zack Shapiro [00:43:29]:
And like, I’m watching what’s happened. So aside from my law practice, I’m the head of policy at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, which is a DC-focused think tank, Bitcoin-focused think tank in D.C. And I spend a lot of time talking to like the administration and Congress about, you know, like the Clarity Act and the developer protections and like people just don’t understand that at all. And like it’s molasses. And the idea that like Congress is ever, ever, ever going to figure this out at the speed it’s moving is just like laughable. And so it’s going to be like one septuagenarian federal judge at a time that’s going to have to look at the open claw of the open claw of the open claw doing a sandwich attack on spooky swap. This is a disaster.

Moish Peltz [00:44:11]:
Truly. I sort of pulled on that.

Zack Shapiro [00:44:13]:
He could probably write the Judge Rakoff opinion on that issue. Maybe Judge Rakoff can pull it off. He might be the only one. Yeah, Judge Phail is pretty inconsistent on this stuff. And I don’t know. And so I was thinking, what do we do about it as lawyers? And so I actually think this is another boom area for lawyers, like the lawyers that are interested in these weird sci-fi hypotheticals that are just going to happen soon. That’s pretty cool as a litigation career. And on the corporate side, which is where I have more experience, the closest thing that reminds me of is for the last 6 years, I’ve spent a huge amount of time and brain damage on legal wrappers for DAOs, which is a similar problem, which is not having legal personhood.

Zack Shapiro [00:44:52]:
And all of the options are bad. And I’m sure you guys are familiar with Metal X Labs. What they’re doing is cool. I think the UNA is an interesting—

Moish Peltz [00:44:58]:
but There are no good options.

Zack Shapiro [00:44:59]:
Gabe Shapiro was a previous guest of the show. Yeah. And so we’re going to need a version of that for agents. So anyway, I wrote like a— that one was fun. I just did like a tour of the sci-fi things that happens when, first of all, especially for a non-crypto audience, why might agented commerce actually make crypto real for the first time? Because we basically don’t have product market fit in anything other than Bitcoin and stablecoins. But now we really might, especially since all the token people are gone.

Moish Peltz [00:45:28]:
And then like, what kinds of like incredible legal problems is that going to create? Yeah, I love the idea of like an actual autonomous CEO of a DAO that’s just like an open clock.

Kyle Lawrence [00:45:38]:
Like, great. Fantastic. Yeah.

Moish Peltz [00:45:39]:
I’m surprised we don’t have that yet, actually, now that you say that out loud. I do think that people are talking about it. I know. Well, anyways, there was definitely discussion of like, they’re just not autonomous enough. Now we have autonomous agents. Like, this seems like it’s a match made in heaven.

Zack Shapiro [00:45:55]:
Yeah, but anyway, so the actual agency and liability questions, which are probably unanswerable at this point. So yeah, yeah, that’s the point I make is like they’re unanswerable, like Congress isn’t going to do it.

Kyle Lawrence [00:46:04]:
And so like we’re going to have to get creative. Well, the other issue, and it’s something that we talk about on the show all the time in terms of Congress regulating crypto, is that Congress moves so slowly. You mentioned it before, and this technology moves so fast. By the time they get tech, they get anything Yeah, no, there’s no time to turn into law.

Zack Shapiro [00:46:22]:
It’s going to be so obsolete. It doesn’t matter. Yeah. So there’s that. And then there’s the 10x lawyer, which is, you know, like, that’s the first 5 articles I kind of wrote. I guess the first 4, excluding the cloud-native law firm, I kind of wrote all together to just like get out some of my thoughts. The cloud-native lawyer was like, okay, like, let me part of the way through. I’m just going to like say what I’m doing.

Zack Shapiro [00:46:48]:
And that was like a scary moment of like, all right, how like forthcoming are going to be about how AI everything my firm is. And I just decided to go for it. And that was the one that got the biggest reaction. And then The Tax Lawyer is the first one I wrote sort of after The Cloud Native Law Firm was really successful. And that was based on some of the conversations I was having with people in big law who were asking, what does this mean for us? And I would say to generalize The conversations I’ve had with people at the most elite law firms is they understand kind of that this is a tsunami and it’s coming. And I think they understand that more or less that Harvey and Legora aren’t really the answer. And that, yes, those are good at making you feel safe and it gives you something to say to clients that you have AI, but they’re going to need to do something else. And maybe that something else is developing a proprietary in-house tool or making— I think Cleary acquired an AI company or something, but they don’t really know what to do.

Zack Shapiro [00:47:55]:
And so we’re having conversations about what does this mean for hiring? What does this mean for whatever? And so that piece really focused on, okay, what does this mean for the practice of law? That’s where I sort of most clearly spell out my anti-legal tech wrapper thesis. But also, like, more importantly, like, the major assumption that underpins big law is, like, you make money through leverage, right? In a litigation matter, like, yes, the, like, there are all these headlines about, right, you know, $3,000 an hour partners, but like the partner only has so many hours in a day, right? The money is not made from the partner’s billing. The money is made from the army of junior associates that you bill $1,000 an hour, which is crazy to do grunt work. To do due diligence and doc review. And there’s just no shot that survives for 5 years. And that’s not to say that big law is going away or that some of the most amazing AI lawyering won’t happen inside of big law. But it does mean the big law business model is going away. That’s just definitely true.

Zack Shapiro [00:48:58]:
And instead, what comes next is this idea of the 10x lawyer Um, you know, in software engineering, right? Like the idea of a 10x dev has been around for a long time and, and people understand they’re just like vast differences in productivity among people, uh, just based on talent. And I think that kind of does exist. Well, not the productivity, but the, the vast differences in talent exist in law, right? Like you, you know, you meet lawyers who are just like, they’re different.

Moish Peltz [00:49:22]:
They’re built different. Um, yes. How, how different is that 10x engineer concept from the fact that there is someone that actually does command, you know, $3,000 an hour rate and there’s people lining up to pay that.

Zack Shapiro [00:49:33]:
And that, is that not that same concept? Well, they’re like the, the $3,000 an hour rate is not that much different from the next partner over who’s not actually a 10x lawyer in terms of talent, right? Like there aren’t, right? Like, yes, like there is a quality bar for being a senior partner in big law, but like it doesn’t differentiate between the Michael Jordans of the legal space and, right. And, you know, someone who made partner for some other reason, right? And like, and it doesn’t translate into productivity in terms of output because you have to manage a team. Um, and the people who are paid best in big law are actually not necessarily paid because they are monster talents. They’re paid because we have horrible constraining legal ethics rules about non-lawyer ownerships of law firms and commissions. And so they’re paid to be salespeople, right? At the end of the day, a rainmaker is a really good salesperson and maybe what they’re selling is their own talent. And I think in many cases that’s true, right? That’s why they can sell. But that’s not necessarily true. Um, right.

Zack Shapiro [00:50:30]:
Some people are just like, they have really good client relationships and that’s what you get paid for. And I think, I mean, sure, there will still be some of that. Like, I think that’s starting to change with like big venture funds are starting to get interested in the, like the Arizona MSO thing. Um, but, um, there will be actually 10x lawyers in terms of productivity. And that I think is what is going to replace the, uh, the current leverage model. And I’m somewhat agnostic as to whether that’s going to play out inside big law firms or outside big law firms. I think that’s a really interesting question. That like, I don’t know, but I think that’s what will play out.

Moish Peltz [00:51:01]:
I think it’s both. And I think you’re going to see it like with firms like Cleary. I don’t know if it’s going to be Cleary, but the idea of a lot of this incubation is going to happen within big law and a lot of it’s going to happen without, and there might be winners and losers on both sides of that, right?

Zack Shapiro [00:51:18]:
Yeah, it could be. Um, but like, I don’t know, like the race is going to be on to find who the, who the actual 10x lawyers are. Right. I think that’s really exciting. I think like the ability to like express talent in law is going to be cool. Now, the flip side of that is like, you know, boy, is it not going to be egalitarian, right? It’s going to be the classic K-shaped economy we’re seeing everywhere else. And so, you know, I don’t want to be too sort of like glib or gleeful about this, but in terms of like what humans are going to be able to do like that, that part is like really genuinely exciting. Wow.

Kyle Lawrence [00:51:50]:
Fascinating stuff. I mean, we want to be respectful of your time and we are bumping up against our hour here, but what’s next up? What are you working on? And what is the next 6 months going to look like? Normally, I say, what do the next 5 years look like?

Zack Shapiro [00:52:02]:
But we don’t have that kind of time. Yeah, I have no idea what this next 6 months looks like. You know, this has been, like, really overwhelming. The response to this has been really cool. I’ve had, you know, like, thousands of people reach out to me. And so, like, apologies if, like, you know, I’m sure I’ve missed, like, a lot of that. But, you know, I have some very cool new sort of AI-forward clients already. And I’m working in GitHub with legal requests through GitHub with clients now.

Zack Shapiro [00:52:30]:
So I’m going to continue to iterate on sort of the tech and the way I do stuff. I do feel like now that I’ve announced, all right, here’s how I’m doing things, people will figure out some of this stuff. And so I definitely feel the pressure to be on to the next level of what is possible with technology. And then the technology is changing every couple of months, if not every couple of weeks. TBD what that looks like, and that’ll be really exciting. What I’m trying to think through now, to be totally honest, is what’s the highest leverage thing I can do with this now? I both mean sort of personally and selfishly, but I also mean in terms of, like, there is this tsunami coming. It is coming for law. The change is going to happen.

Zack Shapiro [00:53:14]:
I actually do have, like, sort of strong viewpoint here that the current setup with how AI is disrupting law is not going to be good for lawyers and you’re going to be a cognitive machine and it is going to replace you. And I do think there is this different way of doing things. And if I can play any part in bigger than my own practice helping people know that and exploit that and experience that, I really would love to do that. And so I don’t know if that’s some sort of consulting or forward deployment business model, or God help me if it’s like a startup. But that’s what I’m thinking about. And so I would like to find a way, right? It’s amazing what I am able to do now using AI for my clients, but my only personal time and attention only scales so far. And so I’m never going to be able to have, with a 2-person law firm, especially doing startup problems, it’s different if you’re doing large litigation or like very large corporate matter, like transactions where like, okay, you’re replacing a lot of people with your judgment. That’s not my practice.

Zack Shapiro [00:54:17]:
And so the, what I’m working on now is like, what is the, what is the scaled version of what I’m doing?

Moish Peltz [00:54:25]:
Super fascinating. I love to, this conversation. I know you got a ton of inbound. So, uh, really appreciate you, uh, picking out my, my DM and agreeing to come on the show.

Kyle Lawrence [00:54:33]:
No, it was fun. Well, we’ll look forward to having you back on.

Zack Shapiro [00:54:36]:
Maybe, maybe when Congress gets its act together and passes something, anything, we’ll have you back on.

Kyle Lawrence [00:54:39]:
I’m not holding my breath, but that would Be great. But maybe when you have a, you know, a couple of more articles in the hopper, we’d love to dissect them and have you back on.

Zack Shapiro [00:54:47]:
So, Zach Shapiro, thanks for coming by Block Order.

Moish Peltz [00:54:49]:
Have a great day. Thank you. You too.