Transcription
For people who are new to the paralegal boot camp, welcome. My name is Ann Pearson and I'm the founder and CEO, but just founder of the paralegal boot camp. And today's presentation is based on something I wasn't going to do. I didn't want to get involved in AI. I didn't I don't want to be the tech person.
Everyone will tell you for the last 15 years I've been happy just teaching litigation litigation bill blowers personal injury boot camps. I have um I have stuck with um courses that I have specialized in for years. I was a litigation paralegal for many years and then I was a paralegal manager and in my time in doing that what I found was there was a gap that we all know this huge gap right when we got our paralegal certificate and graduated from college or maybe just got the paralegal certificate and went to work in a law firm and sat at our desk that first day and thought what am I supposed to be doing and so that's what the paralegal boot camp courses.
And then along came chat GPT and um I I was not going to do an AI course for because it changes so rapidly and I just thought there's enough people teaching tech out there. I don't need to get involved in it. I don't need to do anything about it. And then I started using it and I started hearing the rumblings. You know AI is going to take paralegal jobs. And I thought no it's not. No it's not. And especially when I started using it, I thought, "No, it's not." And then I started really using it and I thought, "M, okay, I'm getting a little bit worried." And then I started using it a lot. And then I started getting really worried. And then I started seeing what it really could do. And I thought, "Okay, now I've got to teach it. I've got to teach it to paralegals because it could really be the next thing."
Just like what I saw um give me a shout out if you're a litigation paralegal in the chat. Just like what I saw in 200 um 2004 2006 really when the the e-discovery rules came out. E-discovery changed the trajectory for litigation paralegals in their career and I'm sure real estate and corporate paralegals there's there was a technology that did the same thing for you but e-discovery allowed not only allowed litigation paralegals to accelerate their careers. There is going to be a workbook. There is I kind of changed it up. I changed up. I apologize. I thought I was going to do a workbook that was going to be for what we were doing, but it's going to be a workbook that you're going to do stuff afterwards. Thanks for that for clarifying that. Um so the the e-discovery that changed the trajectory also kind of weeded out paralegals who didn't want to learn technology because what happened was when those rules came out by 2010 2012 you started seeing it where it was it was required if you didn't have e-discovery skills by 2015 you weren't getting a job as a litigation paralegal. Now, you can't unless you go to work for a solo practitioner. And even then, I think it's kind of hard, but you can't get a job as a litigation paralegal if you don't know how to do e-discovery nowadays.
And so, that's what I'm seeing now. And I thought, okay, what if I could help paralegals now get ahead of it because we are right at the very beginning. And so, that's what this master class is about. I'm not going to be able to teach you all about AI. This master class is me hopefully getting you on the start of it and maybe being able to change your mindset a little bit on why you might want to jump in right now whether or not your firm is using AI and that because that's the biggest the biggest thing that I hear the biggest objection is well my firm doesn't allow us to use it and what I'm here to tell you hopefully to convince you today is regardless of whether or not your firm is using AI, you as a paralegal, regardless of the practice area that you're working in, you can use AI to really advance your paralegal career so that when your firm does, and they will, they might not this year, they might not next year, but when they are ready to use it, you'll already be leaps and bounds ahead of every other paralegal in your firm.
All right, so let me pull up. So for those who didn't catch the workbook thing. So this is going to be the workbook. But what I did is I changed things up. As I was preparing the presentation, it turned out to be a instead of giving you the slides, what I'm doing is I'm going to give you two different paths. So for those of you who don't know, I have an AI boot camp. It's not open for enrollment right now. It doesn't open till Tuesday. So, what I decided is instead of giving you just slides to follow along with because most of what I do are pictures, um, you haven't you haven't experienced an issue with e-discovery in New York State really. So, here's what I'm going to say to that. It's got to be a small firm that you're working with then because like I did an I did um an interview with someone in and literally the title of the interview w was you're not doing litigation if you're not doing e-discovery because think about it like this. So, back in the day, if you've been doing litigation for a while, back in the day, we would have like, for example, here's a letter. I'll turn it around because I don't want to. It's actually a letter that my lawyer sent to somebody. Um, we would send a letter to somebody, right? And it would go in the mail and nowadays maybe we send it by email, but now we email everything. We email everything. How how do you obtain and and use that in court? How do you attach it as an exhibit? How do you obtain it in in a case? Everything is done electronically. So you're you doing e-discovery in litigation. You're just not doing it right if you're not using some type of e-discovery tool.
Anyways, so back to the workbook, guys. I'm going to include it in a link below. So, what I decided, I changed up the presentation halfway through because I found it to be more useful, I think, for you guys, is I'm going to give you two different paths, right? You can, if you want, you can do the the AI boot camp, but it doesn't open till next week. or I'm giving you a do-it-yourself it where I literally am giving you a check by check way of going through and getting all your AI at least a start to your AI um education. That's what's going to be your workbook instead of you just getting some slides. So, I'm going to include a link right now before I pull up the slides. I'm going to include a link to the workbook in our chat. I think you'll be able to open it and even if not I'm going to include a link when I include the replay a copy of it will be in the replay.
So this was my timeline and this is why I'm doing this for you. This is what I the actual path that I took that I don't want you guys to have to take that. It was about 14 months or so that it took me. Um and it won't take you if you decide like um if you want to do the do-it-yourself route. It won't take you that long because there wasn't as much information available to me when I started. So you guys may recall November 2022 is when chat GPT first came out. Can you believe that? Just 2022. So I dabbled in it. It was January 2023. Literally, I jump in and I start dabbling with it. And I look at it like, okay, this is just another thing that's on my desktop that I forget about that's just taking up space. So, but then in May of 2023, I am in some different groups and these other business owners keep talking about how it's helping them. So, I start experimenting with it again. And then by October or so, sometime in the fall of that year, I start diving deeper into it and I start googling it and I start watching YouTube videos on it daily, right? Literally, every morning I commit to it. I start listening to podcasts about what AI is doing for them. I start comparing like some of the other tools, you know, Claude, Perplexity, some of those, and I start seeing a little bit of results. So then in January of 2024, I actually buy a course that was specifically made for here's how online course creators are using AI. And then I start realizing, okay, this is I'm now I see why people are using it. and I start seeing results. And so then in June, I invest in another course, a lot more expensive course, and I learn even more about it, and I start really seeing what it's doing. And then I'm also starting to explore and see what what's happening in legal with it. And that's when I start really looking into, okay, I got it in January 2024. where I was like, "Okay, this is what it's doing for my business, but I still don't I still don't see how that's going to affect paralegals, right? I can see, all right, for marketing, for creating courses, for this kind of stuff, but yeah, now how is that really going to affect paralegals?" that doesn't really hit me until you know last year this time like or June 2024 when I start this other course when I realized oh okay this actually could start affecting paralegals and that's when I decided all right I might need to try to figure out what I can do there that's when that happened.
All right, so let me show you this is what I did this morning. I jumped into chat GPT which I've named him before we go any further you guys can read that I I named him his His name is Robi, short for robot. Jump in the chat and tell me, are you currently using any of the generative AI tools? And if you are, are you using them on a regular basis? And are you using them just personally or are you using them at work? And I'm going to pause because I want to read some of your responses in the chat. Okay, so that's a good mix. Yeah, that's a Yeah, that's a good it's a good mix. It's about like what the people So, when I did um the first cohort or group, the first enrollment for the AI boot camp was in January and that's about where everybody was. Some people are allowed to use it at work. Some firms are rolling it out. You know, it's interesting the personally dabbling in it. That's when I my very first time personally dabbling in it. And this is when I realized it was going to be a little bit more helpful than Google was when I was having an issue with my coconut palm. And you know how when you go to Google something, if you were to Google what's wrong with my coconut palm tree, it's going to come up with landscaping sites, um sites that are going to want to sell you coconut palms, coconut fertilizer, right? It's not going to give you the answer versus if you were to go into chat GPT. It's going to give you the answer.
All right. So, back to this. This is what I did this morning. Hey, Roby. I'm going to be teaching a free AI master class today for the paralegals. And I want to show them this is I give them specific instructions. So, part of what I want to show them is some of the stuff you and I have been working on over the last year or so, like some of the things that you have helped save me time and money on that I would have otherwise had to hire an executive assistant, a marketing person, a graphic design person. I can't even think of all the roles you've played and the tasks you've helped me with. So, here's what I need from you. Please put together a table of what you've done for me that is business related and not personal projects. trying to keep some of that stuff out. And in it, show me what the project was, the general instructions without revealing sensitive business information, how much time you've saved me, and who or what the role that project would have been done by.
So then he was analyzing it. So then click in and show you the next screen. This was what what Roby gave me. And it was a scrollable table. And the link up here was where I could have downloaded it. here and it was a table and it was a pretty big table. So, this is where I want to tell you a few years ago I had twice the amount of people working for me that I do today. I still have there are things that AI will never AI could do some of my video and audio editing, but Troy does it better than anybody I've ever seen. And I just I love Troy. But some of the stuff that Roi does for me, he literally has cut in half the amount of people that I need working for me. So this was the table that he did for me. And then at the end of that, he said, "Let me know if you want to use this as a slide in your AI master class, and I'll turn it into a visual for you." I didn't ask for that. He suggested it. So I said, "Yeah, sure. Turn it into a visual for me." Boom. There's a nice little table that I could have inserted into this PowerPoint.
So then I kind of clap back at him a little bit and say, "Yeah, but are those my brand colors?" Oh, and not yet, Ann. Now, how does he know that? Because I told him a long time ago that the paralegal boot camp's brand colors are those hex colors. So then he actually says, "Okay, give me a moment and I'll regenerate it in your brand vibe with your brand vibe baked in." And that's what he did. gave me a brand new table that has those brand colors and listed out everything that not everything that he's done but the time that was saved and the roles that were played. The reason I wanted to show you that is because that's the value that you could then show to the stakeholders right on what you could bring to the table or what how a year later after you're learning AI. And you'll see why when we start going through your three-step plan.
All right. So today I want to ask you though if you can have kind of an open mindset because a lot of times when I start talking about AI to paralegals and I've seen this on the Reddit boards I've seen it in some of the social media groups. You can't get me to touch AI with a 10-ft pole. I'm assuming that you kind of already have a little bit of an open mindset. You probably wouldn't be attending. Um but some of the comments that I've seen are I'm not touching AI and don't even get me started with it. But so one of them is going to be that maybe AI is not just a fad and that maybe maybe not all AI results are garbage because we've seen some of the stuff that's out there. And so we might have to have a little bit of an open mindset before going into our three-step plan.
So the first is maybe AI is not just a fad like the typewriter and this. So, some of you on here might remember this back in the '90s. These were actual things, right? These were actual computers that we had back in the day when you had these types of computers. People are chiming in. I know. Okay. I'm only 56, but if you started your career in the early '90s, you're lucky enough where you got to see this. The black typewriter was still in the firm. you weren't using it, but some of the secretaries were maybe using it. But some of the older computers looked like this, right? Attorneys at the time, like I remember in the early '90s, we had email internally, but not externally. You weren't emailing people outside the firm. So, that's what we started with, right? They thought those attorneys who weren't like you couldn't email an attorney even though we had it internally, you could not email an attorney and expect an answer. You were told if it's urgent, you do not email the attorney. You walk that into their office cuz they're not checking it. And they thought it was a fad. They thought that's going away. Everybody thought Google was a fad. It's going away. For those of you that don't know, Google wasn't even around until like 1999, I think it was. Everybody thought it was a fad. It's going away.
This quote just came out recently, 2025, from a judge in a case. And this, I think, is really important when you when you get a quote in a case that says AI tools are proliferating and we ignore them at our own peril. And I think that's so important when we're talking about careers, right? Our career could be at peril. So that's mindset one. Just all I'm asking is an open mindset that maybe this AI thing is not a fad and that maybe not all AI results are garbage. Some of them can be, yes. But here's what I would tell you is that when you get garbage AI results, it's probably because the information going in, in other words, the prompt was vague or had missing information.
Now, here's something that you'll find interesting. That picture right there. I went into Roby and said to Roby, I'm putting together a PowerPoint presentation and I'm trying to convey the point that not all AI results are garbage and that most of the time the garbage results of an AI output is because the prompts are vague and missing information. Please generate an image that's going to portray that. And this was generated by AI. Imagine if you are a litigation paralegal and you're trying to put together a PowerPoint that's for a mediation and you could say that to an AI tool or you're a corporate or real estate paralegal, right? And you're putting together a presentation for some type of I don't know. I mean, it could be anything. I'm just I use litigation a lot because I have a lot of reference to that. But imagine whatever you're doing, you could actually say to an AI tool something like that instead of searching and you know scouring the internet for images that you shouldn't be using anyways because they're copywritten. You know, we know we all do that anyways, right?
All right. So, here's the thing about the prompts. This is something where you would say, "All right, we'll give it clear instructions." That's the point. Imagine if you had someone sitting across from your desk and you said, "Hey, here's a transcript. Summarize this meeting transcript. Here's the transcript. The results that you're going to get are what?" Versus this. This is the exact prompt that I gave Roby when I asked him. So I have these monthly group coaching calls inside my billable hour boot camp people who are enrolled in the course and what do I want? So it would literally be like I had an executive assistant sitting across the desk from me and I say so I want you to create a meeting summary and I want it to be useful for the students who can't attend and who might not have the time to sit and watch the whole recording just to find one good nugget of info. Notice I'm not super formal with it. I don't have to be specific. And in fact, I don't even have to spellch checkck it. You don't even have to spell things right. You don't have to be particular. They It doesn't have to be perfect. So, and what do I want it to look like? I want it to have certain sections like section one, I want it to have topics discussed by an and in that section, what do I want? I want it to be timestamped. In section two, what do I want? in section three, what do I want? And so what comes out of that is this beautiful and it's written in my tone because I've worked with Roby now for quite a while. And so Roby knows how I like things because I've corrected it. I've trained it just like I would train an employee. So I give it back feedback. He comes back with something better. I say, "Great, that's good. But now kind of write a little bit more like this." So now literally he'll put emoticons in certain places. Sometimes he like puts too many and I'll say stop with the that's too many emoticons. I still work in in the legal industry even though I'm not I don't work at a law firm anymore. Um, but he'll come back with a great summary that then I put with the the um coaching call so that people who couldn't attend can just skim through it instead of having to watch the whole recording if they don't want to.
The reason why I pulled this one up for you was not just to give you an example of a well-written prompt and it's not just to give you an example of garbage in, garbage out. when I really started seeing how AI was going to change paralegal careers in particular was this. With AI, it's really about the equivalent of being able to delegate effectively to as as if you're delegating effectively to another human being. And that got me thinking, paralegals are way better at that than attorneys. And I got to thinking, if paralegals can master AI, you guys have a way better shot at this. Think about it. Not I'm not beating up on attorneys. I actually do have some attorneys in my AI boot camp. They join it. They've joined it in January. They're taking it. Not beating up. And if there's attorneys on here, I'm not beating up on you. I promise not all attorneys are bad delegators, but paralegals, this is your shot. If you can delegate, you know how to give instructions, right? This is your shot. If you can imagine that you have a junior paralegal that you're training, that you have sitting across the desk from you, this is your shot. It is almost and you know how Okay, here's the other part part that I really want to to lean on. You're overworked. You've got way too many files on your desk. You've got way too much to do. And you know that the firm is not going to hire you an assistant. They've already like they've they've downsized. They don't have secretaries on staff anymore. They've they've literally got a legal assistant or whatever their their new name is, right? They've got that person working for 10 attorneys. And even if they say that they work for the paralegals, they don't because they don't ever have time for you. This is your shot of having your own assistant if you learn AI.
All right, I digress. Sorry. I'm getting I I'm getting messages from people like, "You are passionate about this." I am. I am. Okay, I'm moving on. I'm moving on. We're We're not even at our three-step, but you'll see. You'll see. It's It's going to go quick. I promise. All right. And this one I threw in. This is a freebie the the mindset thing because I have to bring this up in every presentation for new people who haven't listened to the podcast or listened to anything. But this is why that maybe there are things this that mindset shift maybe there are things that you can do to protect your career and this is what AI will do if you think about it. AI. This could be your shield of protection because if you have the AI skills, whether your firm is using AI or not, you've got it so that when they do start using AI, you don't have anything to worry about.
All right. So, here it is. This is what you can do to protect your career. Start with this three-step plan. It's going to be easy because you're going to get off this webinar today and you're already going to have two of them done because I'm making you decide and commit right now, right here and now. So, the first step is going to be decide. What I'm going to ask you to do is to decide to futureproof your career by choosing career security over current job skills. And a lot of people I recognize a lot of your names. I'm going to take a drink and somebody jump in the chat. You guys have heard me talk about this on the on the podcast. You've heard me in videos on YouTube. You've seen it in my blogs. Jump in there and tell the new people what that means. You guys know I preach about it all the time. Is somebody writing fast? Yes, Adrien. What Adrien says is your company owns your job. You own your career. So whether you know maybe your company doesn't even h have Microsoft Word, right? That doesn't mean you don't learn Microsoft Word because your company could lay you off tomorrow. Your company could close its doors. Firms do that all the time. They close their doors and the attorneys go to another firm and they don't take you with them. You own your career. You invested in your your paralegal certificate or your college degree, whatever it is that got you to where you are today. You owe it to yourself to continue to invest in your career. And don't ever let your job skills stay flat with what your job requires you to do. Instead, you look at what do I have to do to make sure that my career is secure, that no matter what happens to this firm, to this organization, I can go anywhere. It's a blip on my screen if this firm closes its doors tomorrow.
So that's decide. And so that's decide that your career security over your current job skills. You're going to decide that your technology skills should never match the pace of the oldest partner in the firm. Give me a big thumbs up. Is the emoji thing on? Give me a big thumbs up. Oh, the emojis aren't on. Shoot. I'm sorry. All right. Jump in the chat. Oh, they are on. Okay. No more. the oldest partner in the firm, your technology skills. And this is what why I'm saying this because here's what I'm hearing, especially when we know this, right? They say, "Well, we're not going to we're not going to adopt the newest version." I went through this for so many years. We were working on versions of Microsoft Word that were five versions older than what was available because the IT people were like, "We got to make sure all the bugs are out before we put it in the firm." How many of you had that? Right? We were always working with something that was like five years old compared to what the real world was working in. Do not do that. It's because the oldest partner in the firm didn't want to invest in it because they were comfortable working with the old stuff. Do not let your tech skills match the oldest partner in the firm. And then finally, you're going to decide that even if your firm isn't using AI, it can be your secret weapon to be a better paralegal. Now, don't get me wrong. I am not telling you to secretly use AI to do firm work to do like work that is firm related. What I'm saying is you can do it, you can use it for things like, hey, so you've got it on your phone, right? You all know that chat GPT is an app. You can have it as an app on your phone. So maybe you're having a rough day and your attorney or somebody at the firm has sent you a nasty gram or an email that you're just like, yeah, you're sitting here struggling or maybe just communication is hard for you. you you type in there, act as my world-class career coach and advise me how to respond to an email from my attorney who says this and do it in a way that makes me sound cooperative and a team player, but also so that she understands I also work for other lawyers at the firm and I'm juggling their priorities as well as hers. I mean, my god, if I had that in the the mid '90s when I was like a few years into being a paralegal or heaven forbid, if I had it in the early '90s when I was just starting out as a paralegal. You guys who are just starting out, jump in the chat and tell me who is in their first one to four years of being a paralegal. Jump in the chat and share that. Me, me, me, I am, I am, I am. You guys have you guys are going to be rock stars. You You better be out there taking advantage of AI. You better be. You better be because you can be jumping into chat GPT and literally making your career skyrocket for stuff like this. You don't have to you don't have to guess what to do. You can literally I've even said um you know cuz I'm using it right now. I'm training chat GPT on some of my stuff and I've said wow I'm like chat GPT might be taking over some paralegal certificate programs here like literally okay so look it your firm's not using AI maybe you jump in there and say okay I've been asked to help out I'm a litigation paralegal and some the real estate somebody in the real estate department a partner came in and said hey I need you to help me on this closing my paralegal out sick Okay, jump in. Hey chat, act as a 20-plus year real estate paralegal and explain to me. I'm a litigation paralegal. Explain to me how to lead a commercial real estate closing when your firm represents the buyer. I've been asked to help out. You can read this, right? Walk me through step by step what to do and provide me with the checklists that the real estate paralegal would be using. Tell me, tell me in the chat, would you use something like this? Did you know that this was available that you can do? This is why it's so important. It doesn't matter if your firm's using AI or not. This is career-changing stuff once you learn how to use it, but you also have to learn how to how you shouldn't be using it as well.
All right, so this is step one. We're done with step one. jump in the chat and give me You can decide no, too. But you decide right now. You're going to commit. You decide yes or no. Yes or no. You can put a heck yes in the chat. But just be honest. You're going to decide that I am going to. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to decide. You don't have to do anything yet. You don't have to commit to anything. You're just going to decide yes or no. And then we're done with step one. Anybody who's been in any of my things will tell you that I like to have a step by step. I have to have a formula. I have to have a framework.
Step two, now you got to do something more. You got to commit because it doesn't do any good if you decide and then you don't turn your decision into action. So now you've got to commit. So when you commit, you got to schedule something. You've got to block out specific realistic time slots. 20 to 30 minutes a week. You've got to do it. This is not something that you can just say, "I'm gonna do it eventually." When you do this, you've got to protect your time. You got to make it nonnegotiable. And I know you're going to say, "Ann, I'm busy. I've got two young kids at home. I'm working a full-time job and sometimes more. Sometimes I even have to work late. You know, I'm doing this. I'm doing that." I am telling you, I have people in some of my courses who are raising three kids. Um, one of them is also in her free time um, going through breast cancer treatments. I literally just talked to her last week and she still is getting through the litigation boot camp, which is 16 plus hours. She's doing it. You know why she's doing it? because last year she was told she needs to like really ramp up her skills or she could be in trouble at work. You got to do it. You've got to set aside time. It is that important. You've got to be go back to the career security. And this is either once you decide right and then you schedule the time, you've got to say to yourself like if you don't do it now, when are you going to do it? When I when I did the January 20th cohort for the AI boot camp, it's only been 4 months since then. In the 4 months since then, Chat GPT has launched at least three three or four new models since then. In four months, Claude has had two or three. Um, gosh, the I mean, it's changing so fast. If all you do is just get the basics down, the rest is going to be so easy. The rest is going to be I'm going to I'm going to show you a couple of different testimonials from people who are in the course. The B once you get the the the regular stuff down and once you see how much it will help you in your day-to-day work, the time that it's going to save you alone, you're going to be like, "Oh, okay. committing to that 20 minutes a week or even if you could do a day is going to be nothing compared to the amount of time that it's going to save you in the long run. Okay?
So, do this. Take a post-it. Do or put it on your mirror at home or put it in your phone. Right? Write that down. My paralegal career is valuable. It's an investment in my future. This is what I want to tell you. So I I am 56. I'm give you some hard truths here. So I am celebrating in August will be 15 years that I have been in business that I've owned the paralegal boot camp. So yeah, I I went into business when I was 41 years old. That's crazy now that I think about it. When I did that, I did it as kind of like a well I so I had been in 20 almost 20 years, right? It's a paralegal. 17 20 Yeah, 17 years. I don't know. Anyways, I thought I've been doing this long enough and I'm smart enough, but I'm also young enough that if I that if I blow it and I run out of money, I can just go back to work. That was my thought. Um anyways the reason I say that to you is I have become very successful. I have met so many successful people who took their paralegal experience and either turned it into a business have gone and and gone and turned it into like they're into like cyber data security um hospital compliance like they've just not that you don't you can't stay at law firms right they are firmwide directors of big huge international law firms after like if you do this you invest the time like at the 20-year mark right it could be at the 10-year mark at the 10-year mark I was already a paralegal manager this is not just this is not just a job this is an investment that the time that you put into your school the time you're putting into your career this is an investment so write it down all right I'm going to stop sorry I can go on and on.
All right, step three implement the what I'm calling the career accelerator method. And yes, I put it into a framework. I always do that. So, the reason I say this, the career accelerator method is that it doesn't do you any good to just learn it, to just learn anything, right? You've got to leverage it. Whether you're learning it for you personally or you're learning it because your firm actually does use it. So here's what the what I call am the career accelerator method. So you're going to learn AI now, not later. But you've got to use it strategically to solve problems whether those problems or are yours for career growth or the firm's problems. And then you've got to demonstrate the value to decision makers. If they're personal, if they're career growth problems, then you know the value you're demonstrating it to yourself.
All right. So the CAM step one, the learn it now, not later. So that is go back to set the time on the calendar and if not now, when. So ask litigation paralegals from 2012 what happened. And yeah, maybe there are jobs out there that you can get without knowing e-discovery, but I can damn sure tell you, sorry for swearing, I can damn sure tell you that you are not going to a major metropolitan city working in a in big law. And maybe you don't want to, maybe you don't want to make $150,000 a year. You are not getting a job making $150,000 a year as a litigation paralegal without e-discovery experience. You're just not. Will that happen one day for paralegals? Now, see, that's the thing. That's litigation, right? At some point, is it going to be 2028? I don't know. I don't know when it's going to be. Will it be all par all law firms? No. It'll probably be the same as that. you will still be able to get a job. It'll just be that your opportunities will be limited. Maybe it could actually even be be the flip, right? There will be some solo and smaller firms. This is what I'm seeing right now. The smaller firms are actually willing and implementing AI quicker. They're more nimble. They don't have as many restrictions on them. So, they're actually implementing it quicker. Although I have I've seen a lot of the big firms are using Harvey and some of the others but um so I don't know I don't I can't predict it. I don't have a a globe but the way I see it is always the same. It's sure you'll be able to get a job but your opportunities will be limited and there will be it'll just be it'll look just like it does with some of the other things. It'll say AI experience preferred or it'll be on the, you know, in some listings it'll be under the required section instead of preferred. It'll just keep creeping up and up.
All right. So, next step, use it strategically to solve problems. So, what do I mean by that? I mean, it doesn't do any good to learn it and have it be sitting on your desktop or to just use it to mess around, to just use it to to replace Google. That does not and and that's what I did, right? When you saw that thing on my timeline, I was just using it to replace Google. Don't use it for that. Use it to find a problem and solve it. And that means what what's your career growth problem? Is it communication skills? Is it learning more like in in your particular practice area or to grow into another practice area? Is it entering your billable time? What is it in your career? Pick one problem and grow that area. find us the AI tool, use it, find the solution for it, and then move on to the next one. Don't just learn AI and then say, I'm going to use it for Google. And the same for the firm. What area, what pain point? So, let's say your firm does approve the use of AI and right now it's just a tool sitting on your desktop at the firm. Maybe they've done a little bit of training. You're allowed to use it. They've given you the restrictions and the guidelines and all of that, but you haven't really implemented it yet. Find the problem, the pain point. So, when you look for a pain point, it's what's the bottleneck in your workflow or the case, the firm, the client, and use AI to provide the solution for that. And then demonstrate the value, your value. How did you use that tool to provide the solution? And here's why. Because when you're keeping track of your results that you did, then it's not just about AI did it. AI didn't do it. AI couldn't do it without you, the paralegal. So, you're keeping track of the results. How much time are you saving? This is the key. Everybody is saying AI does this. AI does this. AI is not doing it without you. Without your input, without you training the model, right? All that stuff that you saw that Roi listed. Roby didn't do that. I trained Roi. I asked Roby. I was the one who knew that it needed to be done. Right? So, how much time are you saving the firm by you asking the robot to do that? Right? How much money are you saving? So, you've got to track the results. Everything that you do from this point forward, if it's firm related, track it. Put it in a log somewhere in an Excel spreadsheet somewhere. Track your results.
All right, now, I gave you your do-it-yourself workbook. You've got to choose one. You've got to choose. My course isn't open yet. So, you can't Well, you can choose that. You can choose that on Tuesday. So, the do-it-yourself option. Now, that's how I did it. I did it in 14 months, but it won't take you for 14 months. What I gave you in that workbook is not the whole thing. It's just to get you started because I didn't want to overwhelm you. But you'll see in there, I gave you the step one that will give you just the basics. It's got some ethics stuff in there. In fact, I know if you're home, you probably can't pull it up and print it out, but you'll see on there I've got and everything on there is free. It's all free. So, this isn't about I don't care if you purchase or start with my course. I don't care if I mean there may even be I don't know if Nala or Nifa has any any AI courses. I don't care what course you take. I don't care if you do the free. If you do the free one that I've got in here, you've got to go beyond just that. That is just to get you started. It's and it's to get you started so that it doesn't overwhelm you. All right, that's your DIY workbook.