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Hosted by Jared Correia, Legal Late Night is a weekly, pop culture-infused romp through the latest & greatest business management ideas and technology tips for lawyers, featuring engaging guests, and constructed in the format of an old school television variety show.
Jared Correia (00:00):
Hello again, friends and neighbors. We've got a show that promises to be at least mildly interesting for your listening and watching enjoyment. In my monologue, I'm running down my favorite the Twilight Zone episodes. I've watched them all and now you must suffer for it too. For our interview, we're chatting up Ben Schorr of Affinity Consulting. We're going deep on all things Microsoft, where Ben worked for almost a decade for the counter program Ben rates the eighties. Let's now enter the fifth dimension. It's as vast as space and as timeless as infinity or something like that.
(00:45):
When I searched Twilight Zone on Google to start doing some research for this monologue, the first link that came up was a Reddit thread asking Is all of Twilight Zone worth watching? First of all, that's a worthy assumption to start with for such a great television show. Second, I'm here to tell you that the answer is yes, no plot twist coming, just a hard yes. Now, there are lots of worthwhile horror slash sci-fi anthologies out there. Alfred Hitchcock presents tales from the Crypt American Horror Story, at least the early seasons, the Outer Limits Black Mirror Rod Sterling's own Night Gallery, but to me, the Twilight Zone is the seminal sci-fi anthology series, everything about it, everything after it is indebted to it in some way. It's been rebooted several times, three more times after the initial run. Most recently with Jordan Peele show running, he of Get Out Us and them fame, and that's kind of amazing because the original show was launched in 1959 before John Kennedy was elected president before we landed on the moon, before anyone had ever sent an email.
(02:03):
The TWI zone is fucking amazing, largely because of Rod Sterling who created the show and who wrote a large portion of its episodes, especially the early ones. Now, the show did Peter out towards the end of its run, but that was mostly because Starling had been producing banger after banger over the first several seasons and eventually ran out of ideas. After the Twilight Zone, he created Night Gallery, which is more of a straight horror anthology series in order to refresh himself. The writing on Twilight Zone is exceptional. The episodes are so well structured. There are unbelievable ending twists In the vein of M Knight Shaalan, there are many actors who appeared on the Twilight Zone before they got famous and the series addressed important themes. Sterling was a debater and a writer in his youth and he put those skills to work on the Twilight Zone.
(02:55):
When the Twilight Zone came out, people weren't talking about the evils, fascism and racism and censorship and war, at least not on television, but certainly address all those things, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, and he took a lot of grief for it taboo, but go watch Twilight Zone, literally birthed by someone who actually fought fascism and then tell me how you feel about our current political situation. Sterling had been a paratrooper initially, then Light Infantry, then part of a demolition squad in the Pacific Theater in World War ii. So he saw some real shit and would not be cowed about dramatizing it. His detonation regimen was known as the Death Squad because it had a 50% casualty rate. Yeah, they weren't like killing other people. They were being killed themselves. You got to really piss somebody off to get on the Demolition Squad Before creating the Twilight Zone, Sterling was a script writer for radio and television.
(03:54):
When he came back from the war, he started to gain recognition in the mid fifties writing for television anthology shows like Playhouse 90 and Craft Television theater. Now, lots of early television was sponsor driven and yes, that is the craft of craft mac and cheese, which you might be familiar with. So there was some heavy censorship of some of his scripts, including for somewhat inane reasons, like a lighter company not wanting him to reference matches, feeling like he was compromising all the time for both important and marginal things. Sterling decided that he needed his own show so he could say what he wanted. The Twilight Zone was green lit and released its first episode in 1959. The Twilight Zone had 155 more episodes after that over five seasons and 92 of those episodes were written by Sterling himself, which is a crazy number for someone who was also running the show.
(04:49):
You don't really see that all that much anymore. Now, if you've never seen the Twilight Zone or only dabbled, it is well worth the watch. The most amazing thing about the Twilight Zone to me is how definitely it outlines the human condition. This show could come out tomorrow and pretty much every episode will be relevant in terms of modern day concerns, which are maybe just timeless concerns. Now, if you want to get going on your watch slash rewatch, every episode is available for free on Tubi or with existing subscriptions to other streamers including Amazon Prime and Paramount Plus. Twilight Zone was originally a CCB S show. I'll even help you get started by listening the 10 Best Twilight Zone episodes, counting down from 10 to one, but first, some notes on my list. You're going to be angry if you watch the Live Twilight Zone because I'm not going to include some of your favorite episodes and I did pair this list down from an original 30 candidates.
(05:47):
This may seem like a chocolate list, as I said, if you're a Twilight Zone aficionado, but I'm going for the best episodes. Not necessarily my favorite, but not necessarily the most unique and not necessarily the most underrated. Not every season needs to be represented either. I'm just looking for the best episodes, the classics the most iconic, that's all I'm trying to make new fans, so to that extent, no spoilers. Yes, that's right. I'm trying to not spoil a TV show that came out almost 70 years ago. That's my level of commitment to this exercise. Alright, let's get to the list. Number 10, the after hours Season one episode 34, A woman is spending the day shopping in a popular department store. Though everything seems eerily familiar, a season two episode of the show, severance also called the after hours, pays homage to this classic with lots of Easter eggs.
(06:45):
Cultural relevance, baby Number nine, the silence. Season 10. Season 10. There were only five seasons. Season two, episode 25, an older man active in a gentleman's club. No, not the stripper kind, the kind where you have intellectual discourse. Fuds with a junior member before coming up with a clever way to shut him up for good. Jonathan Harris, later famous for a 1960s called Classic TV show, lost in Space, has an early role here as a lawyer. Number eight, will the Real Martian please stand up. Season two, episode 28. Stranded Bus Passengers Wait, rescue at an out of the way cafe, but there's certain one of them is an alien. Here's a classic Twilight Zone trope of getting people isolated, claustrophobic and twitchy and then seeing them just turned on each other. It ends poorly usually, and this is even better executed in an episode further up our list.
(07:46):
Interestingly, the name of the bus line in this episode is Cayuga, which is a lake in upstate New York where Rod Sterling and his family had a vacation home. Number seven, a stop at Willoughby season one episode 30, a commuter beaten down about corporate life, falls asleep on the train home from work and wakes up in 1888. The question is, will he simply stay? There is a sponsored brick on a sidewalk in North Conway, New Hampshire, which memorializes this episode. How do I know that? Because my family has a vacation home there and just like Rod Sterling, I got to get away too. Six, the monsters are due on Maple Street, season one, episode 22. During a power outage, the members of a small neighborhood start accusing each other of more and more vile and heinous things, but what will happen when the power comes back on?
(08:46):
Interestingly, both the Wheeler and Sinclair families in Stranger Things live on Maple Street. That's not a coincidence. All right, number five, it's a good life. Season three episode, A little boy can control reality and bend everyone to his whims and wishes only he's not quite emotionally mature enough to handle that kind of power. Hi Jinks and Sue. Terrible Deadly High jinks. This is one of the only Twilight Zone episodes to ever have a sequel, which was released during the 2002 reboot series. Number four Nightmare at 20,000 feet. Season five, episode three. There's some something on the wing you know about this episode. Everybody makes fun of it. William Sha overacting, even if you've never actually seen it, it's seared into popular culture so mentally ill. William Shaar is flying with his wife when he begins to see things that no one else can, including the iconic goblin on the wing of his plane, forcing him to act to try to save himself and the other passengers.
(09:52):
But is he a hero or is he some lunatic? Now, by the way, 20,000 feet is not a typo. Propeller planes in the 1960s flew much lower altitudes than modern airplanes. Number three, the midnight Sun. Season three, episode 10, the Earth has fallen off its orbit and is approaching the sun temperatures skyrocket. As a New York City landlord and her tenant, an artist attempt to navigate the end times, they'd give anything to be cool again. The episode was filmed in the summer and the heat was cranked up on set to provide the proper effect. We're almost there. Number two, to Serve man. Season three, episode 24, aliens come to Earth providing nothing but solutions for mankind. Is it too good to be true? Well, of course it's, it's the fucking Twilight Zone. The lead alien, Richard Kyle is the guy who plays him, also played the villain Jaws in the James Bond franchise and Mr. Larson in the original Happy Gilmore, otherwise known as a good one, and he's seven feet, two inches tall.
(10:59):
The aliens are supposed to be nine feet tall in this episode. Number one time enough at last season, one episode eight, the greatest Twilight Zone episode. Burgess Meredith. Later, the Penguin in the Batman TV series and Rocky's trainer in the Rocky movies is a frustrated banker who just wants time alone to read his books. But what happens when he finally gets it? He'll have to find out. This is also one of Rod Sterling's personal favorite episodes. Now start with those 10 if you love them. Here are some additional selections, some obscure, some equally famous in their own right, but let's do a little bit of Twilight Zone smattering before we finish up. I have the beholder, season two episode six. The protagonist is having a special surgery to become beautiful, but will it take miniature Season four, episode eight, Robert Duval falls for an actual doll living in an abusive relationship inside a dollhouse.
(12:02):
Does love Conquer all. Find out next week on The Twilight Zone. Next on Thursday we leave for home Season four, episode 16. That's not a statement. That's the title of the episode. Brooks from Shawshank Redemption leads a group of people abandoned on the alien planet until they're rescued, but he experiences difficulty letting go of his little fiefdom, the Lonely Season one. Episode seven, Jack Warden is imprisoned alone on a planet until his captors provided a female robot companion. Will he learn to love her? How many times has this been a trope in movies and TV shows since then? The Old Man in the Cave, season five, episode seven. This is effectively a parable about AI with an unexpected twist. He's alive. Season four, episode four. Dennis Hoffer's character is an American I see who receives help from the ghost of the real Hitler. Things turn out poorly, as you might imagine.
(13:02):
Next the Howling Man. Season two, episode five, A man tells a visitor that he has been wrongfully imprisoned in a monastery, but the monks relay a separate version of events. Damn, I swear for IMDB Next, the Obsolete Man, season two, episode 29, another Burgess Meredith Classic with an unique spin on 1984. At least that's what I think the Brain Center at Whipples Season five, episode 33. What happens when the robots come for the Automation Loving Executive after all his employees are gone? That's a relevant question, is it not? Two. Season three, episode one, we got a young Charles Bronson and a young Elizabeth Montgomery who star in an episode focused on what happens to combatants once the war is over. Death ship Season four, episode six. This is a great Jack Klugman episode. He's a frequent contributor to Twilight Zone where he is a captain of a spaceship, landed on a far flung planet.
(14:05):
The crude discovers their doubles only they're dead, the little people. Season three, episode 28. This is a play on Gulliver's travels wherein a giant would be tyrant Gets has come up and the Invaders. Season two episode 15, similar theme. A woman is attacked in her home by tiny creatures and staves them off without ever saying a word. The lateness of the hour. Season two, episode eight almost made my top 10 list features a daughter rebelling against her elderly parents with unique results. And lastly, a nice place to visit Season one. Episode 28. A common thief discovers that the afterlife is more favorable for him than he might've thought. Now, while it did not make my list of Best Twilight Zone episodes, season three's episode deaths had revisited, which is Sandra's between. It's a Good Life and the Midnight Sun. That's a bad beat, and in which a former SS lieutenant goes back to visit a Nazi concentration camp and is haunted by the ghosts of the people he murdered.
(15:12):
This one features one of the singular Rod Sterling closing narration as follows, all the dcos must remain standing, the dcos, the Belsen, the Buchan Walls, the Auschwitz is all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument. To a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it, they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by his remembrance, then we become the grave diggers. Something to dwell on and to remember not only in the Twilight Zone, but wherever men walk God's earth. God damn, I love a good Rod Sterling monologue. Maybe the whole show should be me reading Rod Sterling Monologues. No, I can't do that. Can I? Now that your weekend plans are locked in, let's talk with Ben Shore of Affinity Consulting. I'm micro hard just thinking about it. See what I did there? All right, he's up next. So am I. Well, everybody, I've effectively run out of things to say, which is awkward because this is a podcast, so I will simply eat some soup slowly while you listen and watch. Hold on, I'll be right back now. Just kidding. That sounds fucking awful. We got to get to our guest quick. Our guest today, first time ever doing a podcast with me, which I'm frankly embarrassed to mention, is Ben Schorr, who is an innovation strategist at Affinity Consulting. Ben, welcome to the show for the first time.
Ben Schorr (16:55):
Thanks, Jared. It's good to be here.
Jared Correia (16:57):
You forgive me for my lack of urgency in getting on a podcast. It only took me 15 years.
Ben Schorr (17:03):
Most people put it off much longer than that.
Jared Correia (17:08):
You've been on a bunch of podcasts, you've been in the legal space for a long time, but I wanted to ask you, you just made kind of a big move. You moved over from Microsoft to Affinity Consulting. Can you talk a little bit about why you made the change and then also I think for folks who don't know, what about your career in total? How'd you get here?
Ben Schorr (17:28):
Yeah, back in. Well, let me do the career part first because that might lead into
Jared Correia (17:32):
The Yeah, let's do that.
Ben Schorr (17:34):
So I started in legal tech in the late 19, geez, when my father was an administrator.
Jared Correia (17:43):
Wait, what was that? I didn't catch that. No, go ahead.
Ben Schorr (17:47):
It was pre-internet, at least pre-consumer internet, and my father was a systems administrator for a firm in Los Angeles for a PI mill in Los Angeles, and he moved to a new firm and they panicked a little and asked him who he thought could maybe replace him and run his system. I was in college at the time and he said, well, my son could. And so they hired me.
Jared Correia (18:10):
Oh, that's
Ben Schorr (18:10):
Wild. So that was my first foyer into Legal Tech was back in the days with 3 86 PCs and HP Laser Jet Twos and Word Perfect 4.2 for dos.
Jared Correia (18:22):
Will you slap me if I don't know what any of those things are? That's
Ben Schorr (18:25):
Quite all
Jared Correia (18:25):
Right.
Ben Schorr (18:26):
So I've been around a little while. So yeah, so I was at that firm for a year or two, and then I was having lunch with a friend who was an independent IT consultant back in the day, and we were chatting about what we make and it turns out he made five times what I made per hour. I immediately opened my own IT consulting shop and started working with all kinds of different law firms, and of course I was based in la so I also ended up with a couple of celebrity clients, which was kind of fun.
Jared Correia (18:54):
That's awesome.
Ben Schorr (18:55):
Yeah, my favorite was Alex Trebek. He's great. What a great
Jared Correia (18:59):
Friend. Really?
Ben Schorr (19:00):
Yeah.
Jared Correia (19:00):
Really? Yeah. Okay. I got to say, how do you get hooked in with Alex Trebek?
Ben Schorr (19:05):
So I was part of this referral group where a bunch of business professionals have breakfast once a week and they pass referrals to each other. Well, the accountant in the group was super connected in Hollywood. He was like CPA to the stars basically. And so he took a shining to me and he started referring me to some of his celebrity clients. I ended up with Alex Trebek and Shirley McLean and who else? I never met Shirley McLean. I worked with her people, but I never met her, but Alex Trebek, yeah, worked with 'em lots of times and he and his wife Jean and went to the house many times and yeah, great people, really nice people. He's exactly what you think. He is super smart, super nice.
Jared Correia (19:44):
Were you doing personal computing stuff or did they have businesses that you were able to run?
Ben Schorr (19:50):
It was kind of both. He was sort of running his own production company stuff. He had his business side stuff, so we were doing word perfect and QuickBooks or Quicken or whatever it was called back then. This was in the early nineties and we settled some spreadsheet stuff and all that stuff. You had a little home office.
Jared Correia (20:12):
That's great. So you're out there at Beck's house being like, did you turn off and turn your computer back on again?
Ben Schorr (20:18):
Teaching use Quicken? Yeah, it was crazy. So I'd ran that consulting shop for a while and then in the mid nineties I got recruited by a law firm in Honolulu to go out and be their IT director, and I thought I moved to Hawaii. They didn't have to twist my arm too hard for that one. And so I went out and I spent eight or nine years as the director of information services for Damon Key, one of the big law firms in Honolulu. Great folks really enjoyed there. And then I got lured back into the world of consulting by a Swedish based firm that probably no longer exists. They were a bit of a shambles, but I learned a lot about how not to run a consulting firm from them.
(21:05):
And one day seeing that the ship was sinking, the VP of sales for that company and I were chatting about what are we going to do because this place seems to be in trouble. We thought, well, maybe we could open our own shop. And so sure enough, we opened Roll and Shore and Tower, and that was back in 2005 I guess, and did that until Microsoft called me in 2016 and said, Hey, we've got a role you might be good for, you want to talk about it? And I said, maybe. And then they mentioned a number and I said, oh, yes, I think we should do that. And so I had worked around Microsoft my entire career as a Microsoft MVP and occasionally as a Microsoft contractor. So to be offered a full-time role, there was an exciting opportunity.
Jared Correia (21:51):
That's cool. Yeah. And you were there for a while, right at Microsoft?
Ben Schorr (21:55):
I was there for nine years at Microsoft and then this, they told me that my rule was being eliminated along with a couple thousand of my closest colleagues. And so yeah, I don't know. That was a big shock to have them making that change at that point. And so they did, but coincidentally, my wife and I had been chitchatting just making small talk a couple months before and the topic was what would we do if something ever happened to my job at Microsoft? When you work at a big corporation, you realize good thing you had that conversation at that point. We had had that conversation. Yeah, I mean I had always said it was up to me, I'd like to retire from Microsoft someday, but I also recognized it's not entirely up to me. And when we were chatting about what we would do if my role at Microsoft ever came to an end among the very short list of companies I said I'd be interested in talking to was Affinity. I've known the Affinity folks.
Jared Correia (22:55):
Yeah, they've been in it for
Ben Schorr (22:57):
A while. I remember when FI started though 20 years ago, a lot of respect for Debbie as a leader, a lot of respect for the company and what they do. And so Debbie reached out to me pretty quickly when the layoff news broke and said, would you like to talk about something? See if we could make something work. And I was very happy to have that conversation and luckily we were able to make something work and here I am.
Jared Correia (23:20):
Hi, so you're at Affinity now. What are you doing over there?
Ben Schorr (23:22):
Yeah, so my official title is innovation strategist, which basically means I'm talking to a lot of clients. I'm helping them with issues they're having primarily Microsoft 365 and ai, and I'd spent the last three years at Microsoft working on copilot, and so there's obviously a bit of a copilot bias, but one of the things Debbie and I talked about when I first joined was I wanted to make sure that we weren't just going to be about copilot, that the story for ai, especially legal, is much, much bigger than copilot. And
Jared Correia (23:51):
So
Ben Schorr (23:52):
Copilot is a big part of the story, but we're also talking about chat, GPT, we're talking about Paxton, we're talking about
Jared Correia (23:58):
Spell
Ben Schorr (23:58):
Book, we're talking about sio, we're talking about locked toolbox, all the different things.
Jared Correia (24:02):
Yeah, so let's jump into this. Now, this is one of the things I wanted to ask you about. You got copilot, which is the generative AI tool, and then you got copilot notebooks and then you got Microsoft, I forget what they're calling it now, 365 enterprise or whatever, where you get the copilot overlay. What are the options? Firms win 365 using AI at this point.
Ben Schorr (24:27):
So firms are actually with copilot, at least the options are actually simpler than they appear. Microsoft is a brilliant at branding as we know. I'm stifling a laugh here, well done. And they don't have copilot copilot Pro, which is a consumer product because pro means consumer of course, and thankfully by the way, they're fixing that branding shortly I think. Alright, so that's good, but there was a lot of confusion. I'd get attorneys who'd come up to me and say, Hey, I bought Copilot Pro but I can't make it work in my Microsoft 365. And I'd say, yeah, you brought the wrong copilot.
(25:11):
So there's basically three flavors of copilot. There's the three version. Then anybody can get just copilot.microsoft.com in any browser. There you go. It's basically just like free chat jt. Right? Then there's the Copilot Pro version, what's been called Copilot Pro, but that's for home users and that only works in Microsoft 365 family and personal subscriptions. So if you've got a business subscription, which you should as an attorney and your copilot pro won't work for you, that's the $20 a month version. And then the $30 a month version is Microsoft 365 copilot. That's the one attorneys should have. That's the option. It's just that one. It's $30 a month proceed. One thing that's kind of surprised me is how few attorneys have ever given me any pushback on the price. We always thought 30. It's so cheap. Actually not. Yeah, I mean it's a dollar a day basically.
Jared Correia (26:02):
I mean if we're talking about licensed users, then I guess a little expensive, but still what you're
Ben Schorr (26:07):
Getting out of it and the biggest thing is that you might have in your firm, maybe you've got 25 licensed users or Microsoft 365 for example. Do you have to buy CO out for all of them? No, you don't. I mean, if you've got 5, 10, 15, 17, however many people are going to use it, you can buy that many lessons to co out. So you don't have to give CO out to every single person in your firm if they're not going to use it. A lot of times what we find is that firms will start off with a small pilot group, few attorneys who are anxious to use it, maybe a couple paras, whatever, and so they start off with a half a dozen licenses, but then after a little while the other attorneys start to see what the guys who have it are doing with it and go, well, I want that too. And so it tends to grow it kind of organically as people figure out, oh wow, there's some stuff I can do here that would be helpful
Jared Correia (26:49):
And I can gripe about Microsoft as good as the next guy, but I also think it's difficult for people just to find the products to buy, which is why I wanted to ask you about that. I think that's true of Google too. What do you get? Who knows? I think it's hard to find
Ben Schorr (27:07):
With Microsoft, I say for most firms, Microsoft 365 Business Standard is probably the right plan for most small to mid-sized firms. Microsoft 365 Business Premium. If you want the more advanced security stuff, which is perfectly reasonable if you're bigger than 300 users, which is not that many firms, but then you're looking at the E three E five kind of plans if you really want the advanced D discovery stuff and the teams calling, and if you really want the whole shebang, you're all in on it then. Okay, sure. Microsoft 365 E five is your plan. You could do that even with free users. I mean you don't have to have 300 users to do E five, but that's for the firms that are really going to go whole hog on all the Microsoft
Jared Correia (27:48):
Stuff.
Ben Schorr (27:49):
But no matter which of those plans you get if you weren't copilot, it's just one plan. It's Microsoft three five copilot
Jared Correia (27:55):
Now that you're free of the Microsoft shackles.
Ben Schorr (27:58):
Yes.
Jared Correia (27:59):
What do you think of the broader AI landscape? What should people be looking at for generative AI tools or some better than others? What other products do you like that people should be looking at that they might not be aware of?
Ben Schorr (28:12):
Yeah, it's interesting. I joked recently that every time a bell rings, a new legal tech AI product is launched. Yes, I think that's true. Actually. For a demo presentation I had either Crow profile or Chachi bt, I forget which it was. I used both and others create three fake legal AI products for me, three names, just names. I just want three fake names of legal tech, AI product, and so it did, it drafted three fake ones and I double checked and made sure those products didn't really exist. Right.
(28:42):
And a few weeks later when I had to give the presentation, two of those names had been taken by actual the two products left with those fake names. So yeah, it's changing fast. My general guidance is a couple of things. First of all, it's not a one only deal. You don't have to only use one product. Theis don't care if you use multiple ais. Monogamy is not required in the field of ai, and so I definitely recommend people use the best tool for a job. Copilot is a good productivity ai. Could you use it for legal research? Yes. Should you use it for legal research? Probably not.
Jared Correia (29:19):
Yeah, I would agree.
Ben Schorr (29:21):
It's not really tuned for that, right? I mean, will it do it? Yeah, it'll try. Sure. But that's not it's primary function. So using copilot for your productivity AI and using something like Lexus or using Paxton or something like that or co-counsel as a more legal specific for those use cases, perfect to that. At the same time, you want to be careful not to end up with 50 different AI tools, then you're sort of paralyzed by which tool do I use when, and you don't want to end up in that situation, so having two or three is fine. Having 20 or 30 is a little nuts
Jared Correia (29:56):
On the research side. Do you think it's simply because there's not as much data in terms of case law and statutes and the large language models, or do you think there are issues beyond that in terms of replacing a research engine?
Ben Schorr (30:08):
I think it's probably mostly just about the tuning what the product's been trained on and where the product's been refined and tested and also what you have access to. I mean obviously if you're getting into co-counsel or Lexus, they've got access to some proprietary data sets that copilot or chat GT is not going to have because it's a proprietary dataset. And so that's another reason to me for using some of those legal specific tools that have access to the quality data sets that you rely on. And so I think that's probably most of it. Copilot will take a good swing at it, but it's be dependent. It's really going to be, what copilot is going to be able to lean into is publicly available information, which may not be sufficient in every case and also a little bit of retrieval, augmented generation of course, looking at your own files internally, things you've got in your own data sets in Microsoft 365, which again may not be sufficient for what you're trying to research. And so yeah, it'll give it a good try and it may often be right, but it just wouldn't be my preferred tool for legal research.
Jared Correia (31:13):
What use cases are you seeing for law firms beyond research and then what products are they using for that?
Ben Schorr (31:21):
Yeah, I mean a lot of it's practice specific. So what we're seeing PI firms and med mal firms, they're doing medical chronologies is a really big one because that's time consuming to do manually and the AI can do a pretty good job of it if you throw a bunch of bills and things into an AI and have it sort them out and build a chronology for you. So we're seeing a lot of that probably the price at least immediately to mine that pitches that as sio and they're doing a good job with that. I think Paxton can do that too. Yeah,
Jared Correia (31:52):
I think you're
Ben Schorr (31:52):
Right. A few others, like I said, every time I turn around there's another legal AI product that can
Jared Correia (31:56):
47 different products for sure.
Ben Schorr (31:59):
And so a lot of it turns into personal preference. I think to the extent that you don't have to build a hard to switch workflow, it's okay to try different things. I'd be a little nervous about some legal tech AI startup you've never heard of who comes out with this product that's got $7 in funding. I mean only because I don't want to have to learn a product, commit to a product, get invested in using this product in our workflows and then have the product disappear next week.
Jared Correia (32:29):
Although I think that's good general advice about buying software.
Ben Schorr (32:32):
That's a good point. Yes. So it just depends a little bit on what your switching costs are. I guess you have to give some thought to how hard is it going to be to switch off this if it goes away or if it starts not working. Well, I'm a big fan of auditioning different ais for things. Give it a case or ask it questions you already know the answer to and see how it does with those. But there's a lot of personal preference too. The different ais are going to present things in different ways and you may like the way that Paxton presents something better than the way co-counsel does or vice versa. And so that's just a personal preference thing. It feels like the pricing is all sort of sorting out water's finding its level a little bit. So the pricing is not as big a differentiator as it normally might be.
Jared Correia (33:13):
What are you seeing in terms of custom gpt? Our only big firms experimenting with those or small firms testing it out.
Ben Schorr (33:21):
I'm finding some big firms are doing it and some small firms, but the small firms who are doing it are mostly people who are tech enthusiasts. It's these guys who have a Linux machine at home in the closet. They just like playing with it and there's nothing wrong with that. That's fine if you're a tech enthusiast and you want to play around with doing that stuff, that's cool. I do find some firms are using custom GPT on a, I hate to say primitive, that sounds pejorative. They're not creating these autonomous agents that are out there doing everything for 'em, but they are getting a lot of value out of some custom GPTs. Like I saw one guy who had built a custom GPT in chat GPT that did a daily news briefing for him and it was as simple as he was able to tell
Jared Correia (34:03):
It a legit use case. Yeah,
Ben Schorr (34:05):
Absolutely. And he was able to tell it, give me a daily news briefing. I want the headline and a quick summary use only authoritative sources keep your tone neutral and I'm interested in these topics. So he had business and economics and legal tech and intellectual property or something like that, and he said, I'm not interested in celebrity gossip. So he was able to build a little kind of a custom GPT that gives him a personalized daily news report with links back to the original sources and that saves 'em a ton of time and gets them up to speed quickly on the headlines of the day, and I've seen variations of that for practice area give me the top news items over the last week that are impactful in my practice area.
Jared Correia (34:47):
That's cool. Similar question, have you seen people using some of the notebook tools? You talked about copilot notebooks. Google Notebook I think is really good also, which is kind a different thing for folks because you are imbuing it with the data and then it is doing things on the data that you input a law firms using those. And what do you think about those?
Ben Schorr (35:07):
I have not seen very much use of that yet. Seen a little bit, but not that much. I see a lot of people playing around with it. One of the first things they want to do is do the audio overview where it creates the little custom podcast.
Jared Correia (35:16):
People love that.
Ben Schorr (35:17):
Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I actually use that. I uploaded two different, so Microsoft does an annual, I think they call it Future of Work Report, and then Thomson Reuters or somebody had done one also and it was basically these 12 page thought pieces with research on what percentage of people are using ai, what percentage of people are working from home and what's the future of work look like, that kind of stuff, productivity and what's the state of work. And so I uploaded a couple of those reports and I had to generate the audio overview and so I listened to it while without taking a walk. Was this 20 minute podcast comparing and reporting on reports? That was pretty interesting. It was semi useful.
Jared Correia (36:01):
That's a great use case and that's so simple for people that do just uploading information like you do anywhere. Definitely. Can I ask you three more Microsoft related questions? Non ai, hard one. Okay. I'll only do three. I won't tax you. Number one, are people still using desktop versions of Microsoft Tools? And if they are, what's your pitch to get them off of it? Do you think they need to get off of it because that's going to sunset at some point, right? There aren't going to be any more desktop tools,
Ben Schorr (36:32):
Probably not anytime soon. I mean especially in corporate and definitely in legal. I mean the desktop versions still rule, and there's a couple of reasons for that. I think one is just inertia, right? I mean the attorney's been using the desktop version of Microsoft Words and Microsoft Word existed, and so they're just not moving off it. But also capability, the web versions are getting features quickly. In fact, in some cases new features come to the web version first because it's easier to deploy them to the web version
(37:02):
Or it is to deploy into the desktop versions. So that happens, but there's still a lot less capable than the desktop versions. And also things like lawyers especially, but also just corporate general are really dependent on third party add-ins, whether it's Cleo or my Case or whatever your third party add-in happens to be, and most of the time the third party add-ins are built for the desktop apps. They're not really built for the web apps as often. You're seeing that now with the classic outlook, new outlook situation where new Outlook is sort of a PWA. It's sort of a desktop version of the web app, but it means that a lot of the classic add-ins don't work, and that's the number one reason why I hear attorneys aren't using new Outlook is that have add-ins that they count on, whether it's net documents or whatever, that working classic outlook and don't work in new Outlook.
Jared Correia (37:50):
Okay. Question number two, I hate Microsoft Teams. Am I wrong?
Ben Schorr (38:01):
You're entitled to your feelings. I mean, you're feeling are valid.
Jared Correia (38:09):
If I was another attorney who's a Microsoft team skeptic, I would rather use Zoom, slack, other applications outside of teams. If I was a skeptic, what am I missing out on?
Ben Schorr (38:21):
What are you missing out on? Well, I mean there's a lot of cool integration with the other Microsoft stuff that's built into teams. You're missing out on $9 a month or whatever it is. You pay to add Slack or Zoom to your account when you've already got Teams. I think Teams is good. I see I have the opposite situation, especially having been at Microsoft for nine years. All we used is teams basically.
(38:47):
And so it's just what I'm familiar with and so it's where I'm more comfortable nowadays. Of course, now at Affinity, we use Teams, we use Zoom, we use everything. It depends on what client we're talking to and what the situation is, but it's a toolkit, whatever tool you like best. I think Teams has some, the integration to Microsoft 365 is probably the number one selling point for teams and and having that compatibility, the easy setup, easy management, that's really the big. And then now the copilot integration too, although there's a lot of other third party tools like Fathom and Zoom has its ai. Although I haven't heard a lot of good things about Zoom's ai,
Jared Correia (39:24):
But it's not great.
Ben Schorr (39:26):
Yeah,
Jared Correia (39:27):
I think it is a personal preference thing for the most part. I think you're right. I've been using Zoom since 2011. That much time.
Ben Schorr (39:35):
If it's not broken, don't break it. It's fine. There's no rule that says you have to use Teams. I'm working with a firm right now that's moving to teams partly because they want the integration, partly because they think it does everything Slack does and they won't have to spend the money on Slack every month.
(39:52):
They already get teams. I get that. A lot of customers at Microsoft 365 were like, what else do we get with this Microsoft 365 thing that we don't even know about? And we started talking about Forms and Stream and Clip Champ and all these other stuff and then they go, oh wow, that's and planner. And they're like, oh my gosh, we've been spending all this money on all these third party tools to do that stuff. And we could do, it's all in micro. Yeah, bookings. Bookings is another one. It's like, really, we've been spending on Calendly. I'm like, well, Calendly does more than Bookings does, but you might not be using the features that Calendly has that bookings. So
Jared Correia (40:23):
Yeah, I mean the cost savings, if you look at all the basic tools that Microsoft 365, it's like the biggest bargain going, I talk to people about this all the time, like productivity software, there's stuff in there that you're not aware of that you could be using that you're probably paying for other stuff. And if you make a conscious decision about doing that, I think that's fine. But if you don't know about it, at least check it out.
Ben Schorr (40:44):
I tell people now when they're asking me about should I be using Calendly? I'll say, well, you know what? If you're a Microsoft 365 subscriber, try bookings first because you've already got it. If Bookings does what you need, then you're good. If you try bookings and it's not quite as much as you need, then you can go to Calendly. I mean, sure, Calendly is better. Does Calendly do more than bookings? Yes. Do you need that? Maybe. Maybe not.
Jared Correia (41:05):
Yeah, I don't think people are out there using the full breadth of any software really. I'm being honest. Last question for you. In the Microsoft vein, OneDrive, SharePoint, what's the deal? Are they the same thing? Are they different? What am I using one and not the people ask me this all the time, so I'm coming to you.
Ben Schorr (41:25):
So I got to give credit where credit was the first person I heard say this was a lady named Jennifer Thornberg who was a trainer for one of our big clients, Microsoft, and she was describing to her people OneDrive versus SharePoint. She said, OneDrive is your me files and SharePoint is our We Files.
Jared Correia (41:43):
That's a great way to describe. Its a
Ben Schorr (41:45):
Good way to characterize that. OneDrive, they're both file storage. SharePoint has more than file storage because it's got all the intranet webpage stuff too. But OneDrive is basically a file store in Microsoft. You buy, you get a terabyte per user, so each user gets one terabyte of OneDrive space.
(42:02):
Anything you put in OneDrive by default is just yours. Nobody else can see it. Nobody else can access it. Just you can choose to share stuff in OneDrive with other people if you want to, but you don't have to in SharePoint, anything you put in SharePoint is accessible to everybody who's on that SharePoint team. So that could be one other person. It could be everybody in your firm who knows. Could even be outside guests. It could be, there could be clients or co-counsel or external witnesses or who knows. All of them can see any files you put in that SharePoint site. So things that you're working on that are just for you, that's usually the right OneDrive is usually the place to put that stuff. Stuff that you're working on for a matter for a client or for the practice. That might be stuff that should go in your SharePoint site. It's depends on what it is, but that's me. Files versus we files is a great way to characterize that.
Jared Correia (42:46):
And of course, not that this is a problem to solve, but by technology, but you got to get people to put the files in the right places.
Ben Schorr (42:54):
Well yes, that is definitely another issue for sure. And not put them in places. Yeah, put them in the right places and be careful where they put them. Right.
Jared Correia (43:04):
Ben, thank you. This was a lot of fun. We did a lot of Microsoft stuff. Will you hang around for one last segment? We'll see. Alright. Alright. I'll make sure the Flex Capacit is working and then we'll get into it. See you in a second, everybody. Welcome back, everybody. We're at the Counter program is how we end every show. It's a podcast within a podcast. This is a conversational space where we can address usually unrelated topics that I want to explore in greater depth with my guests. Expect no rhyme and very little reason. Ben, welcome back. Thanks for hanging out. I appreciate it.
Ben Schorr (43:42):
Yeah, you bet.
Jared Correia (43:44):
You mentioned this earlier and you tried to skirt around it, but I was reading your LinkedIn profile and it said you started your legal tech career in the eighties and the eighties were amazing. I feel like now. I was a little young in the eighties, but I was around so I wanted to, because we do this a lot on the show where we look back on the halcyon days of your, I wanted to talk about some pop culture trends of the eighties and we're going to call this segment. Ben rates the eighties. So the only question remains, are you ready to rate the eighties?
Ben Schorr (44:21):
We'll find out. I took my ginkgo below that, so we'll see if I still remember the
Jared Correia (44:26):
All right, I lied. There's not one question. There's a lot of questions. All right, let's start. What was the best eighties hairstyle and did you rock any of them? Oh god. Some choices like the side ponytail was high in the eighties, not for me, as was flock of seagulls as people had perms in the eighties. Do you have a favorite? Did you have one?
Ben Schorr (44:52):
I didn't have any of those. I have to say the Flock of Seagull is probably the most iconic eighties hairstyle of those though.
Jared Correia (45:01):
Yes, I would agree. So you just had the straight up regular boys or your man's haircut going on in the eighties?
Ben Schorr (45:09):
Pretty boring. Yeah, I think I went through a short phase where I was sort of in a, you might vaguely describe as a mullet, I guess it was a little bit long in the back. It wasn't, not as dramatic as some, but
Jared Correia (45:23):
I got to say
Ben Schorr (45:25):
That wasn't a conscious effort. That was just me not getting my haircut very often, and so I had long hair in the back.
Jared Correia (45:31):
I got to say I was pretty badly kitted out for the nineties myself. I didn't have any of the nineties hairstyles, unfortunately. All right. Next up. What was your favorite eighties movie soundtrack? Bonus points, if you had any of these on cassette?
Ben Schorr (45:52):
I think for soundtrack, I think thought you were going to say favorite day movie.
Jared Correia (45:57):
We'll do that in a second.
Ben Schorr (45:59):
Yeah. Favorite soundtrack of those? I think probably Top Gun mean they all faltermeyer stuff. It's hard. It sets the tone so nicely and it's
Jared Correia (46:09):
Such a good, I got to tell you, Kenny Loggins monster of the eighties, he saw every 80 soundtrack for the most part except for like Purple Rain ke. Have you seen Top Gun Maverick and did you like it?
Ben Schorr (46:22):
I did see Top Gun Maverick and I enjoyed it. The other thing I've really enjoyed on the topic of Top Gun Maverick, there is a guy, he's a retired fighter pilot, and he does a series. He goes by his call Sign Mover and he does, he has a video, he has a YouTube channel, and he did a series of videos on Top Gun Maverick of him and this other retired fighter pilot watching Top Gun Maverick and talking about it.
Jared Correia (46:47):
Oh, really?
Ben Schorr (46:48):
It was super interesting. I love getting into that technical geeky stuff. I was never a fighter pilot and I don't know that much about that world. I know a little bit as
Jared Correia (46:57):
A cat did they say it was accurate to the movie?
Ben Schorr (47:00):
So they loved the movie. They thought it was a lot of fun, but there was a lot of technical, there was a lot of eye rolling. There was a lot of that. That's not how that happened. So for me, it was super interesting to hear that through their eyes kind of stuff. I love that. Listening to somebody who really knowledgeable talk about stuff like that, and they were really knowledgeable and really interesting. So if you have a few minutes, YouTube Mover Ruin movie Top Maverick, it's like a nine video series or whatever of the two of them talking about it. It's really entertaining.
Jared Correia (47:31):
I like both Top Gun movies. I thought Top Gun Maverick was great and I remember the Top Gun video game, the Nintendo video game. I used to play that a lot when I was a kid,
Ben Schorr (47:38):
And I was super pleased to see that Val Kilmer made it back for the second movie.
Jared Correia (47:43):
Yes, that was awesome. I will say I still have PTSD for trying to refuel my plane in Top Gun on the Nintendo. So you brought it up. I want to ask you, favorite eighties movie? What do you got? Well,
Ben Schorr (47:55):
Since I mentioned Val Kilmer, I mean got to be real genius.
Jared Correia (47:59):
Oh, okay. I've never seen that.
Ben Schorr (48:02):
So
Jared Correia (48:02):
Good. Walk me down the road. I'll watch it. What's it about? So
Ben Schorr (48:07):
Real Genius is it's a comedy. It's a very, very comedy, and it's about a young high school science protege who gets admitted to Pacific Tech, which is loosely modeled after Caltech, and to work on this specials team at Pacific Tech. And Val Kilmer plays Chris Knight, who's the wacky irreverence senior on the team. Yeah, they're all geniuses and they're trying to solve this problem. And then later in the movie they find out that the stuff that they're experimenting on and building actually has a nefarious purpose, which they then have to have to all
Jared Correia (48:49):
Don't spoil it for me. I'll
Ben Schorr (48:51):
Watch it. No spoilers, but it's a lot of fun. It's campy, it's silly. It's good jokes. It's Val Kilmer's. Terrific. The spring cast is fun. It's just a funny movie.
Jared Correia (49:03):
It can't be fun. Good sound. That's what an eighties movies should be. And I'll have to listen to the soundtrack too, it sounds like.
Ben Schorr (49:10):
Yeah, it's, oh shoot, everybody, everyone wants to rule the world. He did that. Oh, tears for Fierce. Richard Fierce are on there. A couple others. By the way, speaking of Jewish for Fears, if you haven't saw a video of them from a couple of years ago, doing a live in studio. Everyone wants to rule the world and it's great and they still sound good. I mean, how old they are now, but they still sound
Jared Correia (49:38):
Good. Sure. Yeah. Alright. This is great. We got a lot of good recommendations there. Stuff I didn't think I would be talking about. I got two more for you. This one I think is directly in your lane. Okay. What was your favorite technology device from the eighties? Or which did you cherish the most? Just as you think about it? Just give Sony Wachman was big in the eighties cassette and the CD version later on the VCR was a thing in the eighties. I remember my parents could never set the time on the VCR and I always had to do it. Apple Macintosh came out in 84. Lots of hardcore technology stuff happened in the eighties.
Ben Schorr (50:19):
We had an Epson QX 10 that we got in 1982. I think it was a CPM based precursor to the pc. We actually beta tested a word processor for it called Val Docs back in the day. Really? Yeah.
Jared Correia (50:35):
I've never heard of that. Was that something that people were selling or was that like a free
Ben Schorr (50:40):
Yeah, they were trying to really never break tag go. The QX 10 was interesting. It had a lot of purpose-built keys on the keyboard, like print and save and things like that, that were built into the keyboard way back in the day. But I'd say the tech that I probably cherished the most was my in television video game console.
Jared Correia (50:59):
What was on the in television,
Ben Schorr (51:02):
It had all the usual stuff, really primitive 16 bit football and baseball, and I think they came out with an Indiana Jones game. I remember the audio on it was so primitive it couldn't do voices. It could do really cheesy Nintendos style music text on the screen, but it couldn't do. Yeah, it couldn't do any live, couldn't actually play voices. And so they came out with a plugin for it, like a cartridge plugin thing that was a voice module and that was such a big deal
(51:34):
And it played really primitive voices. And so I remember the first game I got for it with the voice thing was like a B 17. You were flying over, it was World War II and you're in a B 17, and the voices were like the other crew members telling you when it was time to drop the bombs or that enemy fighters were coming from three o'clock or something. Right. And the game was very 1987 or whatever as far as quality of it, but it was just so exciting to have a game that had actual voice. Whoa.
Jared Correia (52:02):
Just so you know. I was just Googling it. If you don't happen to have one,
Ben Schorr (52:06):
They're
Jared Correia (52:07):
Still workable in television games. Are
Ben Schorr (52:09):
They
Jared Correia (52:09):
Consoles out there? Yeah,
Ben Schorr (52:11):
They had busiest controllers with a disc on them that you moved with your thumb in circles and
Jared Correia (52:19):
All right, I got one more for you. Having fun. Your favorite 1980s store that is no longer around. I have one that's a solid, so Blockbuster was my favorite eighties store.
Ben Schorr (52:37):
Isn't there still a Blockbuster? Isn't there? And you bend Oregon.
Jared Correia (52:39):
There's technically one left. I think so. I'm cheating a little bit, but I used to love, it's funny, now I'm on Netflix or whatever and I'm scrolling through the shows and my kids are like, what are you doing? Just pick something. But it reminds me of walking around the Blockbuster and looking for and then seeing, do they have the tape behind the cover? Is it actually in stock? I love blockbusters. I wish they were everywhere still.
Ben Schorr (53:08):
Yeah. For me, we had one in southern California called Gemco, which was probably a precursor to today's Walmart or Target, I guess it was this. I just remember it being this huge, my parents used to shop for groceries there, but then they also had this huge section that was clothes, electronics and other stuff. It was like the precursor to today's Walmart, Supercenter, or Target or Gemco was always kind of fun to go to.
Jared Correia (53:36):
I've never heard of that one before. I learned a lot of new things today.
Ben Schorr (53:40):
Wait, I think Gemco make it to the nineties on that one up. Probably not.
Jared Correia (53:45):
I'll Google
Ben Schorr (53:45):
That later too.
Jared Correia (53:46):
Yeah,
Ben Schorr (53:47):
And then well, of course, I'm not sure if Fry's Electronics was around yet in the eighties, and of course now it's unfortunately relatively recently departed.
Jared Correia (53:57):
Ben, I had a lot of fun. This was totally tubular for sure, man.
(54:04):
Thank you. We'll have to have you back on. We won't win the other 15 years. Take care, man. Sounds good. You too. Thanks for our guest, Ben Schorr of Affinity Consulting. To learn more about Ben and Affinity consulting, visit affinityconsulting.com. That's affinityconsulting.com now, because I'll always be a nineties kid who actually recorded this episode on a vintage talk boy, but whose true passion is burning CDs for anyone who would listen. I'm now just doing the modern version of that, which is creating Spotify playlist for every podcast that I record where the songs are tangentially related to an episode topic. This week's playlist is eighties, one hit wondrous and is sponsored by 3M overhead projectors. I'm just kidding. By the way, though, the overhead projector was a staple of the 1980s classroom. That's actually not so much of a big deal anymore. Cree has found his way, I suppose. Join us next time when I make a fried bologna sandwich, then another, then eat both. See you. Then I promise not to chew with my mouth open.