Interesting Lawyers Podcast: MIT Data Scientist turned Technology Lawyer discusses A.I., and What to Expect in the Near Future

TRANSCRIPT

(upbeat music) – Hello and welcome to the Interesting Lawyers podcast.
I’m your host Russ Adler. Thank you for joining us. Today’s guest is Brent Britton. Brent is an intellectual property lawyer with Bochner,a law firm serving the tech industry and tech entrepreneur. entrepreneurs with offices in San Francisco, of course, New York and Tampa, where Brent resides. Brent is the only lawyer who has a master’s degree from MIT Media Lab, which is really one of the think tanks and original sources of a lot of the technology that we have in our lives today. today, including AI.

And you’re going to hear about Brett’s experience working on AI projects before anyone had any idea what it was and is becoming a data scientist before deciding to become a lawyer for some reason.
And in addition to that, Brent is also one of the coolest lawyers I’ve met. He sports two full -sleeve tattoos on his website,which talks about all of his experience and the tattoos, and he proudly displays them on the website to promote his personal brand. And that’s something that I think is really very important these days.

Brent, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, Russ, it’s great to be here. Couldn’t be happier. Where does our podcast find you today? So I’m here at my home office in Tampa, Florida. I’m here to talk to you. I’m here to talk to you. I’m here to talk to you. I’m here to talk to you. I’m here to talk to you. I’m here to talk to you. in the Hyde Park section of Tampa, Florida. Let me just speak to a couple of quick points from your very kind introduction, which I appreciate deeply.
There was a period of time when I was checking in with the MIT Media Laboratory to assess or ascertain whether any of its other grads had gone off to law school. And for years and years,
none of them had. I stopped checking a while back because it just didn’t. didn’t really seem all that likely. So it’s possible that in the past few years, someone’s graduated from the Media Lab and then gone off to law school.
But to my knowledge, I’m still the only one, which is kind of odd. But what do you want to do? Well, I would assume that most MIT grads from the Media Lab would go off into tech or tech -related industries.
So why the hell did you decide to go to law school? Where did that come from? Well, plenty, there’s always a smell. smattering of MIT students in general who go off and become lawyers or become patent agents.
Because you need a degree in science or engineering in order to be a patent lawyer. The Media Lab– very special place, of course. And law school is an unlikely place for Media Lab grads to go because there’s so much emphasis on cutting edge technology and sort of the philosophy of science and technology.
And my expectations leaving the lab back in the early ’90s would have been to sort of go to probably Hollywood and do computer animation for Hollywood movies.
I probably would have ended up at some point at Pixar, for example, had I chosen to stay with technology. But a few things happened. And, you know, I was a student there at MIT.
MIT when the Supreme Court decided that patents could protect software and this was the first and until then software hadn’t been patentable and a lot of people were upset about this and there was a lot of discussions happening and it didn’t seem at all clear that software should be patentable because after all it’s just applied mathematics and applied logic it almost seemed like sort of too pure.
pure thing to be the subject of patent protection. And so there were a lot of discussions happening. It occurred to me that the scientists and engineers on the one side of the discussion weren’t really communicating well with the regulators and the police and the legislators on the other side of the conversation.
And I make to make a very long story short, I chose to go to law school to help to help bridge that gap to sort of be the engineer who goes and learns about the law. because I’ve been a kind of math geek my whole life and when I didn’t know a patent for a potato when this discussion started and so I figured I ought to go learn how the law works and it turns out as an engineer the laws are pretty nifty thing
to to attack academically because it’s really the rule base that runs society very much like software is the rule base that runs a particular you know application application.
And so it turns out the law is just kind of one big hackable database for an engineer like me to get into and try to pull apart. So let me ask you this before we move on.
So nowadays, who are your typical clients and what do you typically do for them in an archo? Sure, my practice is largely focused on formation to exit representation of the technology startup.
So, we’re going to get a client walk in the door might be a might be a fresh college grad or even college student might be a middle age person, whatever they’ve gotten the entrepreneurial desire and they’re going to start a company.
And we do everything for them formation governance documents, co -founder agreements, venture capital transactions, mergers and acquisitions, full spectrum, intellectual property, patents,
trademarks, copyright. copyrights, et cetera. All of the agreements that fall out of running a business such as customer agreements, vendor agreements, privacy policy, terms of service for the application.
If there is one, all the employment stack, the employee handbook and all those documents and really anything interesting that comes out of being a technology company such as an AI policy,
for example, is on the rise. I’m putting my kids through college nowadays, writing internal AI. AI policies. – Yep, we’ll get to the AI in a second, but keep going. – Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course,
I’m happy to report that on occasion, small companies become large. And so we also have a prop of clients who are not ranked startups anymore,
but they’re enterprises and going concerns. And we do a lot of spot technology work for example, large medical institutions institutions that are in licensing a ton of software,
you know, every, every month, we’ll, we’ll come in and we won’t do their healthcare work, but we’ll do their technology licensing or something like that. So it’s generally a tech -focused practice,
generally an entrepreneurship -focused practice, but we are a general commercial law firm, Botner at large does just about everything. Let me go back to your humble beginnings and ask you to tell us about a story you shared with me the other day when we did our pre – call about Craigslist.
Tell us about that. Yeah, so I graduated law school in way back in the olden days of 1994 and immediately went off to Silicon Valley where a certain dot -com bubble was beginning to inflate and three,
three, I worked at Big Law for a few years and actually learned a great deal and a wonderful time, but about three years after law. school a friend of mine and I decided we ought to start our own law firm and do technology and startup law ourselves because we kind of had it all figured out so we thought and anyway we started a firm in San Francisco called Britain Silverman and Cervantes in 1997 which became a bit
of a darling of the dot com bubble in legal arena in San Francisco for a few years and you know it led to a lot of interesting It was a really fun time to be you know I wasn’t married,
I had no children, I could sleep under my desk, I could I could party all night and it was a fun time to be in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and we got to meet a lot of interesting people and yeah one day this fellow came into the office at Britain Silverman.
Nice guy you know little little pudgy, really kind, good you know good looks at my children, I’m a boy. boyish good looks, if you will. And he said,
you know, I’ve had this website for a, for a while now, and it’s sort of a community calendar, and then people kind of buy and sell things on it. And I’m just wondering if I should maybe start a company around it.
And yeah, his name was Craig Newmark, and the, the company was Craigslist. And so we got to be Craigslist first lawyer, and, and help launch that. that empire,
which interestingly is now a non -profit and has been for some time, and it’s really fun to have been there sort of when things first get started. I was going to ask you if he had a big exit from Craigslist,
but if they were non -profit, does that mean there’s no exit? There’s just an exit? A attorney -client privilege would sort of preclude my commenting on specific details,
but my understanding is Craig’s doing very well and it’s very happy and it’s well deserved And there’s a special place in my heart for Craig’s list and the story because I found my dogs on face on Craig’s list and I Oh,
it’s a craigslist that I found these dogs and there was a male and a female and I renamed the male Craig because I found him on Craig’s list. So when you told me about that,
it really resonated. I knew I was bringing that one up. That’s fantastic. And may I say, Craig Newmark is a wonderful human being. I’ve been involved. I’ve been in Tampa now for, well,
for 20 years. And a few years back, we had a technology event with the Tampa Bay Technology Forum that I was involved in at the board level. And we threw it up at Mosey and Craig was kind enough to come to town.
town and give a presentation and talk about the history of Craig’s list and the future of technology and all that so he’s just a fantastic human being. Yep well it’s come a long way that’s for sure. So I want to talk to you today about AI artificial intelligence you’d mentioned to me that while you were at MIT working in the media lab doing cutting -edge disruptive things and developing these disruptive technologies you
actually had a chance to work on some early AI projects. So can you just tell us briefly about your involvement at the Media Lab with AI back in the day and what it was about?
Well, I certainly don’t claim to be one of the founding fathers of AI or anything like that. I did take an AI class when I was an undergrad at the University of Maine in the late ’80s and sort of started fooling around in Lisp,
which was a programming language of choice. for AI programming back there in the late ’80s. And, you know, started, I think I can comfortably say I wrote my first AI program in 1987,
something like that. But yeah, I got to MIT and just fortunate, I mean, luckiest cat in the world to be able to get into the graduate program at the MIT Media Laboratory.
And got to study AI under Marvin Minsky, one of the– guys who kind of, you know, fathered it or grandfathered it, if you will. And we’re involved in a number of really interesting projects,
not the least of which was, you know, computer systems that could read track your eyes and track your hand movements and sort of some early VR type stuff and interpret what you mean when you say,
you know, what is that and put it over there and that kind of stuff. So Brent, when it’s really really fun when you when you look back From today looking back to when you were in the Media Lab What are your thoughts about the AI that’s currently available for consumers GPT?
Other similar products and and what are your concerns for society generally speaking? Sure. Well, let me start. There was a there was a fellow back in the ’40s whose name was Alan Turing,
and he first conceived, well, he didn’t first conceive because people have been conceiving of artificial intelligence for as long as we’ve been making machines. There’s been this sidebar conversation like, “I wonder when and if a machine will able to think for itself and make decisions.” Well,
Alan Turing proposed something which we now call the Turing test, which he called the imitation game. which is that if you could talk to a human and talk to a computer and you’re blind,
you can’t tell who’s talking to you, and you can’t tell the difference, then the computer has passed the Turing Test. The basic idea being that we don’t know what intelligence is, but we know it when we see it.
Like, I’m talking to you right now, Russ, and I don’t know that you’re intelligent. You could be a simulacrum for all I know. All I do know is that you appear to be here, and you can’t tell who’s talking to you. you appear to be a thinking, functioning human being.
Funny you say that, I’m wondering if you are an AI -generated image who’s really, who’s the person’s really on the golf course right now. Exactly, would that that were so. But so the point is you see that I judge whether or not you are intelligent and everything else in the universe is intelligent based on whether it converses with me.
And so when the AI sort of you know the early AI could pick up a block and set it down and are in the right place, and we said, well, that’s not intelligence. That’s just raw computing power. And then it sort of more or less learned how to drive a car.
And we said, that’s just, that’s not artificial intelligence. That’s just the sort of rapid vision processing. And then it beat the world grandmaster at chess. And we said, that’s not intelligent.
That’s just computing power. And then it beat the world grandmaster at go. And everyone said, what the heck is go, but hey, hey good on you, but it’s still not intelligence It’s just raw computing power and it won on jeopardy and we said it’s still not intelligent And then it taught to us in November of 2023 To open AI release chat GPT and we were able to converse with it And I claim that at that point AI as a
thing began to pass the touring test Because even though you have a pretty good idea that you’re not talking about to a human being, we’re getting a lot closer to a conversational AI that simulates fairly well a human being.
I’m sure we’ve all heard that, you know, the way the large language models work is basically sort of autocomplete on steroids, which is, you know, it kind of predicts what to say next based on what other people have said next in the past.
And it’s not intelligent, we all know that. it is a large language model but it’s very complex and it’s very interesting and it can do subtle and nuanced things conversationally.
It can find facts and ideas and of course it can make them up. So there are a whole lot of risks associated with the use of large language models.
World domination is not one of them. I don’t have a great many concerns that that, ’cause there are other ways to generate what we would call artificial intelligence than just the large language models that you see in GPT and BARD and REST.
They’re somewhat able to create novel things. They certainly can author original works of authorship,
but we can talk about the legalities of that. Yeah, if you– like, ’cause I have a lot to say on that subject. So what’s great about the large language models is that for the first time in history, we have a machine that’s actually generating original stuff.
There’s never really been, you could do random art drawings or whatnot that’s sort of based on whatever, but for the most part, the computer has never created original stuff. original content.
And now it does. And that’s a watershed moment. Yeah. And you told me it’s getting so good that in a few years, it’s going to put you out of a job as a transactional IP attorney.
So… I don’t see why not. I don’t see why not. Because you give the AI access to all the case law, and it will…
will ingest it and suddenly it knows all the case law way better than I’m going to go look it up in the library or online or anything like that. So now you’ve got a lawyer,
a research assistant with perfect knowledge of all the case law. Hey, what’s the role when somebody trips in a movie theater and they fix the carpet the next day? Is that a sign that they should have been liable in the first place? Right? And I can ask you questions that can say,
well, in the case of Smith versus Jones, the answer was was this, because of that, and they and the other thing. So now I’ve just put first year associates out of work. It can ingest all the contracts.
And if I say, hey, write me a contract that does X, Y, and Z, it could probably do that. Now, today, okay, it can barely write a passable non -disclosure agreement.
It’s getting better every day. There are people out there who are building their own for price. large language models to, you know, customize the work products so that it’s appropriate and smarter than the dumb stuff that you can get out of it sometimes,
but it won’t be long. It’s going to be five minutes before the AI can practice law, at least transactional law. I’m not saying it’s going to show up in court anytime soon,
so there’s still a role for litigators. Thank you for that. that. But it can practice transactional law, can write contracts, it can apply for trademarks and patents and whatnot,
better, stronger, faster, more efficient than any human will ever do. So I think I’m among the best lawyers in the world at what I do. I’ve been doing it for 30 years and I’ve never seen a contract written by another human being that I didn’t want to cover with red ink,
because people don’t know from from the grammar nowadays, I’m afraid, but I think the AI is going to beat me. I think it’s going to beat all of us at all the things that require computing power because everything going on in my brain is at some level just raw computing power at an extraordinarily slow speed compared to what the AI can do.
Brent, yeah, tremendous irony here, Brent. And, you know, early on, you’re in the media lab at MIT. working on these AI projects. Little did you know that one day,
when at the top of the hill as an intellectual property lawyer, along is going to come this product, this monster, this Frankenstein that you created, and it’s going to put even you out of a job.
Did you contemplate that at any time? Sure, sure. Pardon me, I’ve come down with this head cold that’s inflicting the universe lately. But first of all,
I didn’t create AI. I dabbled in it, and that’s really the extent of it back when I was a software engineer. But I get the irony, and I think anyone who’s read any science fiction that involves AI has contemplated numerous types of future,
both utopian and dystopian, that involve some kind of AI. presence in civilization. And I think one of the things we need to confront as a society is,
you know, what do we do when a lot of intellectual labor can be replaced with automation, with AI? What kind of society do we live in when the only true labor is manual labor?
And And most of what thought, you know, information workers, intelligence workers, if you will, do can simply be done better,
stronger, faster by the AI. I mean, certainly there’s going to be a period of time during which I will still bring in the client and I will still intermediate that relationship. And that may last for a long time.
But the tools behind me that are doing the, you know, doing the legal work are are going to become more and more and more dependent on and integrated with functioning artificial intelligence which goes to one you know one immediate thing that comes up I speak a lot on this topic I speak to engineers and lawyers and the other things and what ends up coming up is well geez when we get real efficient how do we bill
for our time and you know if it took us if it took us 20 hours to do this deal and we got paid for 20 hours, now we can do it in four, what happens to our margin and our profitability?
And my answer is you got to stop billing by the hour. It’s kind of the dumbest thing ever, quite frankly. I stopped billing by the hour several years ago. In favor of value -based pricing, right? Absolutely. I do everything on a fixed fee.
I assess the work. I say it’s going to cost you X. Client pays me X and I do the work until it’s done and the client is happy. And if the scope changes, it’s going to cost you X. Client pays me X. Client pays me X. one way or the other, then we reassess the fee.
But yeah, I mean, I think when I draft a contract for a deal, it’s going to have an intrinsic worth. It’s going to have an intrinsic value to the parties in that transaction.
Whether it’s a $10 ,000 transaction or a $10 million transaction, there’s going to be some value that that document creates. And I can think I think between my client and me, we can assess that and put a price on it and it’s not going to be necessarily related to the amount of time I spend preparing it.

• Yep. So Brent, let me ask you some questions about some of the IP litigation that’s going on. I know you’re not a litigator per se, but I’m sure you’re very familiar with it. I’m hearing about a lot of lawsuits being filed,
  having to do with AI and specifically the way that AI models are trained, all the content that they consume, books, websites. websites, anything, anything they feed to these engines,
  now it’s kind of coming to roost on them with these lawsuits for infringement of intellectual property rights. Could you tell us briefly about what’s going on in today’s landscape that way?
  Yeah, sure. I should mention that I’ve got a book in progress that I hope to be on paper or at least released by May called AI law, how to use AI in your business without getting fired,
  sued, or arrested. Which covers this very topic. So under the copyright statute, if you take my photograph and you put it on a photocopier and scan it,
  you’ve created a copy and that’s clearly a copyright infringement. But if you look at my photo and then walk away and create a new photo of that is substantially similar.
  to my prior photo. That’s also a copyright infringement. So copying can include access plus substantial similarity. So what you have with the AI is yeah,
  they hoovered up everything. They sucked all the data and the content, the internet and everything, excuse me, into their large language model and they built the AI.
  And so the question is, does the output of of the AI infringe any part of what was hoovered in for the input? And I think the answer is potentially yes,
  if the output is substantially similar to some component of the input, you clearly have the access part, right? ‘Cause they accessed it and they hoovered it into the database.
  So it seems to me that it’s possible that some of the output of some of the AI may be infringing some of the input that went into it.
  At the end of the day, it comes back to money, it comes back to whether or not royalties are due for using that content, accessing it, right? It could be.
  We don’t have a regime yet. There are some cases pending. And we do have we do have an indication from one of the judges that the. model itself is potentially not infringing,
  that just creating a large language model is not making an infringing copy of anyone’s data or work of authorship or photograph or what have you.
  That’s a debatable question, but we have some indication from at least one of the judges and at least one of the cases that that’s gonna be the way they… come down, that just the model itself is not infringing.
  I should say that the pace at which technology moves is in stark contrast to the pace at which the wheels of justice turn, right? Because I’ve never seen a steeper height curve than AI.
  When Chad GPT was released in November 23, it got its first five million users in, I think, a week or something. and then it’s got 50 million users within a couple of months.
  I mean, it was just enormous. And yet, you know, the cases were filed shortly thereafter and we’re just getting some of the initial motion practice and some of the initial,
  you know, rulings on some, some, some things. Now, you know, I am in no way going to tell you that the law is unprepared to deal with AI. Because we do have plenty of regimes in place.
  to handle things like copyright infringement or whatnot. But the pace at which the law processes those findings is, as you know,
  can be rather frustrating. Right. Sounds like it’s going to be a while before the U .S. Supreme Court weighs in on this, which is probably what’s going to set the rules, just like there are other rules. Yeah, it’s really interesting,
  because I think you have a pretty good claim that if you know know that your book, let’s say, has been integrated into the AI, and I go and I say, “Hey, write me a book like that book,” and the AI does,
  and it’s substantially similar, I mean, that’s kind of a copyright infringement. The Getty case, for example, where the Getty Images Library was duplicated into the defendant’s stable diffusion.
  I think they’re called into their AI, you know, that’s that’s a case where if you go to the AI and ask for photo of a soccer player, you’re going to get one and you can hold it up to one of the photos in the getty database and.
  You know, it’s really hard to say they’re not substantially similar, especially when the getty watermark is reproduced in the results of the AI. So. Some of these cases are a little bit more slammed down. -dunky than others, I think,
  from a sort of you -know -it -when -you -see -it approach to copyright infringement. But yeah, time will tell, and we don’t have good rules right now. I can tell you that the Sarah Silverman case where she discovered that her book had been integrated into the large language model.
  And if you ask ChadGBT, I think it was ChadGBT, for a summary of her book, you will get… one. You will get that summary. Now, we don’t generally regard summaries as infringing copies because it’s not enough to be substantially similar.
  It’s the same with like a book review, for example. It’s not an infringement to review or comment on a book. It’s long as you don’t reproduce the whole thing or literally the legal standard is,
  don’t reproduce the heart of the work, which is one of those great bright lines that we all know. know where that is. But anyway, the Silverman case, I’m a little less sanguine about her prospects for success just because I don’t think we have a lot of precedent for summarizing a book to be a copyright infringement.
  Yeah. You know, when I think about mass infringement, I remember Napster, which popped up. Any song for free was the greatest. I used to, you know, everyone used to grab it,
  I’m not going to admit to you. downloading it on the air because I don’t want to get sued. But playing that out, yeah, but they’ve violated lots of copyrights there on music.
  And the whole thing ended up being fixed by Apple Music. I think that was the first product that really cleared this up. And they would collect royalties for the artists and a structure was put into place to provide for that.
  So, hopefully. I mean, it’s had a good analogy, and how do you see it playing out in terms of a change of money changing hands with what’s going on with the AI now? – Yeah, so it’s the same thing that happened in the early part of the technology age when radio became popular and people started to copy music and play it on the air,
  and then we invented the technology. sort of compulsory license where, you know, if you use the composition, you have to pay the composer, and if you use the recording,
  you have to pay the publisher, and that’s all sort of built into the business now. So it’s a great case of where when technology enables something that it shouldn’t be permitted necessarily,
  or that compensation is required for, a business will eventually evolve to make that work. work well. And rarely are changes in the law required. I mean, we have a lot of well -established laws in the United States regarding how ownership of copyrightable works works,
  if you will. And yeah, I happen to be tangentially involved in some of the cases against Napster back in the late 90s, early 2000s. In fact, my firm,
  prior firm, year ago, represented James Taylor, Billy Joel and Country Road Records, which I guess was, I can’t think of his name. But anyway, you know,
  it’s funny, one just quick story, Billy Joel came to the office one day in Manhattan, and, and, and came to the front desk and it said, I need to get up to the lawyers and they said, well, we need to see some ID and he didn’t have any.
  And he’s like, he’s like, um, um, I’m Billy Joel, let me in.” Anyway, we had to go down to the lobby and let him in. So, yeah,
  the Napster is a pretty good analogy to this because all new technologies tend to perceive, and this is again one of the reasons I went to law school, because I’ve been on the internet before it was called the internet,
  and it’s just, it’s been my entire life. And it’s odd how many people seem to think that just because something’s new. and enables some new behaviors, that there’s no laws that are going to govern this behavior.
  When the internet first launched, it was considered the wild, wild west. And you could get away with anything. And it turns out, no, you couldn’t. There are still laws against harassment and child pornography and all the things.
  Just because you’re using the internet to seduce somebody doesn’t make it legal. [COUGH] Excuse me, when Napster came out, the idea was, well, look, we can just rip all these CDs and distribute them and everybody can get all the music and we can do it ’cause we can.
  We may do it because we can do it and that was wrong. Turns out a copyright infringement of massive proportions is just that and so you’re right in that new business models need to be created to figure out how to compensate people for their hard work.
  It’s not fair for a… and artists and musicians to produce content for our enjoyment without getting compensated for it in some way. And of course, we have Spotify now and Pandora and all of them.
  So we now have new business models and we don’t need to steal music. We don’t need to go illegally and lawfully download music because we can go get it quite easily at reasonable cost.
  And, you know, I can’t… there may be some likelihood that something like this happens, whether it’s ASCAP BMI or Spotify or something, happens with digital content that gets ripped into an AI where there may be some compulsory license,
  there may be some kind of compensation regime for how, to compensate people for their work. For their work, because again, if I’m, you know, novels and I’m publishing out on the internet,
  it’s not worth it for me if everybody can steal it and get it for free or if the AI can reproduce it or recapitulate it without any compensation. So yeah, I think you’re spot on. Actually,
  I think there’s likely to be new business regimes that help deal with the realities of paying people for what they do that’s valuable to you. It sounds to me like a lot of lawyers are going to make a hell of a lot of money from the litigation.
  I know you’re going to be out of a job, but maybe you can pivot to litigation or something, but I still think that you’re well situated as an IP lawyer. I’m not going to be out of a job.
  I’m just not going to be practicing law because I’ve started a company to produce the lawyer of the future, the AI lawyer of the future. And it’s called idyllic. You can find a little bit about it at.
  idyllic .world, but we’re working on an AI tool to begin to replicate some of the things that I do. And we’re not going to let it actually practice law at first,
  but the time’s gonna have to come, and this is another thing we’re gonna have to deal with at some point, is the ubiquity in the world of these bottlenecks through which people and people and people and people and people and people commerce must pass in order to get specialized knowledge.
  You can’t practice law without a license, no matter how smart you are, no matter how much you know, which means I can’t put up an app that’s run by an AI and call it a lawyer and tell people they can get legal advice from it because I’ll get,
  I’ll get attacked by the state bars. But, you know, at some point, as I say, again, we’re going to have to re -contemplate how we deal with society, especially when it’s very easy to democratize knowledge that used to be specialized,
  because I’m sure you’ve seen headlines. The AIs have sat for the bar exam and they’ve passed it with flying colors. So you have to ask yourself, what is the value of the lawyer’s brain,
  if not just knowledge of the law? So again, I think that we’re crushing the bottlenecks with the AIs, just another step in this sort of complete democratization of everything. initiated by Craig Newmark himself,
  by the way, so yeah, I think we’re going to get to a place where a lot of people like me are going to not be practicing law or not as much and we’re going to have tools beside us that are going to be doing the lion’s share of the work,
  and I’ve started idyllic in order to frankly get ahead of that and start creating the tools that I myself will use to do my own job for as long as I have one and then my clients can use it directly when we can figure out how to deal with the unsavory topic of the unlicensed practice.
  And who better than you, the lawyer who helped or worked on AI in the past, then it’s going to put you out of a job in your present position, but then you’re going to use the same AI to build an AI lawyer that’s probably going to be better than all the other lawyers.
  So it’s like you’re getting the last laugh it sounds like here. Well, I don’t know, as long as I get the last dollar, that’s all I’m going to do. There you go. All right. So, now for the most important thing, Brent. For those listeners who are also watching this podcast on YouTube,
  can you show us your tats? Sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, not going to take my shirt off, but I mean, you could probably see the better in the little picture that you showed there at the top of the bit with my full sleeves in view,
  because I’m wearing a tank top. They look great. And look, first of all, they’re beautiful. And second, I’m just intrigued by the fact that you use the tats on your website.
  It says like 20 years experience to full sleeve tattoos, which I thought was super cool. So I just, I love how you’re using that to differentiate yourself and build your own personal brand.
  How has that worked out for you in terms of business generation clients or any stories you might have about the Tats? Yeah, yeah. So when I started my legal career, it was pretty clear to me that I was not going to be a suit and tie guy.
  You know, I looked at the folks back in the early nineties who I was working for who’d been practicing law for 20 or 30 years and realized, “Wow, I don’t know if, you know, I don’t know if I can be that kind of person.” And luckily,
  as I say, I ended up at a big law firm that nonetheless had a really relaxed attitude towards dress code. And we were all scientists and engineers in the Silicon Valley office of this big law firm.
  And I decided that I wasn’t going to be the standard issue lawyer, which is kind of, I had been that person most of my life. It’s slightly edgy.
  I’m not a complete radical or anything, but maybe odd little attire, wardrobe, whatever from time to time. And I went to law school. I had hair down in my belt and rode a motorcycle. I was kind of a sort of curl jammy kind of dude in a leather jacket.
  But so it’s worked out fine, I think. I mean, I’ve started and exited from two law firms in my career. I’ve had a relatively relatively lucky go of it in terms of my ability to attract clients and keep a practice going and feed my family.
  So I’d have to say that I’m a fan of being not standard issue. No judgment to anybody who wants to play everything by the book and follow the rules and blend in.
  God bless you. I hope you’re having a happy life and that makes you fulfilled. But I think what I’m saying is that of is the sort of weirdo mentality that it takes to be an entrepreneur. And maybe one of the reasons why I relate to my clients so intimately is that nobody ever really became a successful entrepreneur by following the rules or doing the same thing they did yesterday.
  The whole mindset is one of, it ain’t broke, but I can still fix it. And let’s think outside the box and let’s do something crazy. and let’s consider all options and let’s not do what we did yesterday just because it works.
  Let’s think about a new and better way. And that’s where we get, you know, that’s where we get telephones and teddy bears and skyscrapers and iPhones is by people looking at the world and saying,
  yeah, we got enough, but we can have more and we can do it better. So so that’s the that’s the I’d have to say in a nutshell that I’m sure I put have had a wonderful career had I walked the walk and talked the talk of the typical transactional corporate lawyer.
  But I’m very pleased with the one I’ve made by not doing that. And when your AI replacement comes out, idyllic, can you come back on the show and visit with us about it and show us a demo or maybe just send idyllic?
  Maybe that’ll be enough. Yeah, right. We’ll get a little robot face or something. We’ll make him very handsome. Great. All right. Well, I really appreciate it. your visiting with us today and sharing some of your background and experience and your tasks with us,
  of course. Brent Britton from Bochner. Try saying that 10 times fast. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it and I hope to see you again soon.
  Thank you, my friend. It’s a great pleasure. I appreciate the opportunity to share things with your audience. All the best and that’s a wrap for today and this wraps up our episode of the Interesting Lawyers Podcast.
  Thanks for joining us and see you next time.