Hands-On AI Skills Every Legal Team Needs

Intro 0:01  

Welcome to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security podcast, like any good marriage, we will debate, evaluate, and sometimes quarrel about how privacy and security impact business in the 21st Century.

 

Jodi Daniels  0:21  

Hi. Jodi Daniels, here, I’m the founder and CEO of Red Clover Advisors, a certified women’s privacy consultancy. I’m a privacy consultant and certified informational privacy professional providing practical privacy advice to overwhelmed companies.

 

Justin Daniels  0:36  

Hi. I’m Justin Daniels, I am a shareholder and corporate M and tech transaction lawyer at the law firm, Baker Donelson, advising companies in the deployment and scaling of technology. Since data is critical to every transaction, I help clients make informed business decisions while managing data privacy and cyber security risk. And when needed, I lead the legal cyber data breach response brigade. And this

 

Jodi Daniels  0:59  

episode is brought to you by Red Clover Advisors. We help companies to comply with data privacy laws and establish customer trust so that they can grow and nurture integrity. We work with companies in a variety of fields, including technology e-commerce, professional services and digital media. In short, we use data privacy to transform the way companies do business together, we’re creating a future where there’s greater trust between companies and consumers to learn more and to check out our best selling book, Data Reimagined: Building Trust One Byte at a Time. Visit redcloveradvisors.com Before we started and I hit record, you called me funny. You never think I am funny. You thought I was funny. I have now shared this with everybody. Well, yes, you have moment. I have moment. Once or twice a year, you have moments. Well, I’ll take what I can get, indeed.

 

Justin Daniels  1:59  

Well today we have a friend of mine, Mariette Clardy-Davis, Assistant General Counsel at Primerica, providing strategic guidance on securities business. However, what we’re going to talk about is how I know her, which is her recognizing AI competence as a professional duty. She launched unboxing generative AI for in House lawyers, virtual workshops and online directory empowering lawyers to move from AI overwhelm to practical application through hands-on learning. Hello, Mariette,

 

Jodi Daniels  2:35  

hello, hello, everyone. Well, I can’t wait to learn more about this. This sounds fun. I’m not even a lawyer. One per family. People always ask, one per family, we’re good.

 

Justin Daniels  2:44  

But when people disagree with you, they think you were a trial lawyer.

 

Jodi Daniels  2:49  

To survive Here is what I’ve had to learn to do. Okay, back to Mariette. Mariette, please tell us a little bit about your career evolution to what you’re doing today.

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  2:59  

So first of all, I feel like there are days where I just play a lawyer on TV, but we’ll start at the beginning, and then we will quickly fast forward. So my path to in-house counsel was very non-traditional. My actual career goal was to become an opera singer. You wouldn’t tell that by me getting my voice back, but that was kind of where my Genesis was. But the two things that got me in house was my focus on creating a small online business, and then once I got into the online business world, understood sales, marketing, etc, I was able to connect how my 15 years of compliance consulting experience, where I not only helped CCOs and other leaders in a consulting capacity, but that connected to me. Learning these entrepreneurial skills helped me to bridge the gap on how to create a narrative that would help me sell to companies, why and how my value and skill set could provide value to the company at large. So that really is a big picture way of how a non-traditional person goes in the house.

 

Jodi Daniels  4:22  

Very fascinating. So I’m curious where did Law School fit in, because I heard compliance consulting online business and obviously in house.

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  4:32  

Now, yes, so I went to law school at night. So for 15 years, I worked as a compliance consultant before law school, during law school and even after law school. So for four years, went to school in the evening, but during the daytime. I had a full time job.

 

Jodi Daniels  4:53  

Well, I went to school full time when I got my MBA, you also went to school. Little at night. So we are the night owls. We are, well, actually, no, see, I knew I couldn’t do the night program, which is why I specifically found a Weekend MBA program that I could do, because I would fall asleep in class and learn nothing. All right, you’ll be the weekend owl. Then we go. I was the weekend owl. Okay,

 

Justin Daniels  5:17  

so, Mariette, what first sparked your interest in using AI to help in house attorneys?

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  5:25  

So I had to really think about this. But what I would say is my looking at what was there for in House lawyers, and seeing a gap and because going back to the mindset that I had when I was working with other online business leaders, and just being in that space, there was no thought in my mind that said I couldn’t close the gap. So I saw a particular gap where I personally learned a generative AI skills outside of law. Specifically, I joined communities on Twitter and x, I guess you would call it. And these were communities of creators, educators, builders, and these communities really enforce hands on creative approaches to learning the foundations. So I joined those communities. I dove head first, I explored and I experimented and made mistakes. Learned a lot, and then look back. So it’s kind of like each one teach one. After you learn, you go back. So I went back into the legal space and recognized that the type of training that we were offered was, in my opinion, very one dimensional, and so I sought to close that gap by creating things that I thought would be a value to my peers. So I’d love to hear a

 

Jodi Daniels  6:58  

little bit more about what you’ve created in these AI playbooks and what you are finding to be most helpful for these in house legal teams.

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  7:07  

Okay, so when it comes to, I guess, closing the gap and what I built, I wanted to think of supporting in house counsel in a very creative container. So I thought what would be a way that I could teach the skills that I’ve learned, but do it in a way that was fun. And so I’m a fan if you’ve watched severance on Apple TV of kind of those, these stories, these mysterious stories. So I would create severance like or fantasy like narratives, and in the container of the narrative, I would put the skills. So whether it was learning prompting frameworks, whether it was tips on how to improve your prompts, whether it was how to create styling guides or instructions that you can put in a universal tool to help align your outputs. So I wanted a new that in house, needed certain skill sets from what my peers told me, and even my own work tasks that I do day to day, and I felt like a creative scenario, hands on, based approach, would help lawyers learn in a way that was more sticky. So it’s not that lawyers don’t learn, but it’s your ability to retain and then your ability to actually use that so that sparked the what I call unboxing, AI, because as a theme, I sought to unbox what many in House lawyers felt was unapproachable, and I created on Eventbrite. One day, I put up a meeting invited in house counsel that I knew on LinkedIn, and the story took off from there.

 

Jodi Daniels  9:02  

Well, that’s so exciting. I love that. Started with a meeting.

 

Justin Daniels  9:07  

Yes, indeed. Did you go to the meeting? I was not at that. You weren’t invited. Well, I wouldn’t be, but we’ve done stuff together, and she’s a wonderful public speaker. So Mariette, given all of these workshops and things that you’ve done for right now, what do you think the biggest misconception you see with in House lawyers have about AI?

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  9:35  

So there’s two things, but one thing for the purpose of today that I think I want to focus on is that when you’re learning and you’re doing prompts, one of the big things that I see, and I think Justin this came up in a session we were doing, there is generally frustration when you get an output you like, and then. Try and get that same output, you don’t get the same output. And there’s this frustration, like I’m giving it the same instructions, why am I not getting the same output? And it really stems from how the actual foundation of the tool. So going back to the basics, it creates, it’s not a copy machine. And so understanding kind of the back end of how it’s putting together the output through the patterns, etc, it has the liberty and the flexibility, even if you add guard rails and you give it examples with how it produces the output. So I was saying that’s the one of the misconceptions most recently that keeps coming up.

 

Jodi Daniels  10:49  

I’m curious if there’s an example, or what you would offer of how someone does it differently, so that, because you mentioned the foundation, because I do think many people think, well, I did it this time. Why aren’t you going to give it to me the next time you’re supposed to learn? And even while it might not be copy for copy, like the copy machine, it’s supposed to learn, and so you’re kind of expecting to get something similar. What would you offer or suggest to someone to help make sure that they’re getting as close to similar as they’re hoping for.

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  11:22  

That’s a good question. So I would say it starts with a concept that I like to affectionately call your role. So your role is to be a guide, and whether you’re a guide to a tool or a guide to a human, your ability to give instructions as a leader is going to dictate the output. So depending on the instructions and your depth of instructions, and what you use to provide the instructions, it is going to either get you closer or further from your goal. So one example that I like to use, the most powerful, is to give it an actual example. So let’s say this is what I do quite often. I do regulatory updates to the business, and so I have a template of a update that I personally think gives a strong update to the business. And I with, along with a good set of instructions, I add that example as a reference document or reference tool, so that the tool can understand the style, the tone, the nuances, the structure and the flow of that particular request. So now, in addition to me providing background and substantive information, I’ve given it one of the strongest things that I can which is an example of what I call an gold product. So it’s going to learn from that gold product, and then me as a guide, telling it to stick to that gold standard as closely as possible helps me to get, not exactly, but to get as aligned as I Can with it, replicating that across different other regulatory update.

 

Jodi Daniels  13:23  

All right now I’m super curious. Do you think all tools take those instructions the same? Or is there some that do a better job? So the answer is

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  13:33  

no, and it depends. So depending on the tool, there are some tools that do a better job than others in my personal, let’s say non enterprise life, I like Claude. Claude, for me, writes more closely to my writing style outside of work than, let’s say ChatGPT or copilot Gemini I often use with my unboxing AI workshops for those who don’t have an enterprise tool or don’t want to use an enterprise tool, because I find for some of the tasks that we’re doing, it’s a good overall overall, but then you have What I call your enterprise tool, and in many cases, you don’t have a choice. Do we have one enterprise tool? So what’s important is, what can you do with the tool that you have? And the goal is to create as a guide, instructions that give that depth one trick that I think I want to add to our to the, I guess, audience in general, if I start running into blocks, one of the things that I do after I started new session once it kind of figures out what I want, or, let’s say it doesn’t, and I do it myself. So. I will go back to the tool and I will give it the document and say, this is actually what I wanted you to produce. Can you help me understand how, or what instructions can I give you to get to this final document? So that’s kind of a cheat code that I do, which continuously helps whatever tool I’m using me to be a better guy, because in the end, it really is about my ability to guide whether it is a tool or a human. And all humans are different, and all tools

 

Jodi Daniels  15:33  

are different. That’s a really good comparison.

 

Justin Daniels  15:36  

See, for those who may not be seeing it the Jodi whisper. Heard the look on her face was one of that was insightful. It was yes, because part of what this conversation is about with AI and Marriott, and I’ve done this before, is part of the way you learn the chief skill, which is prompting, is to talk to a lot of different people, because there’s no one right way to do it, but there’s certain kinds of underlying principles, and one of the things I really learned from Mariette when we work together is she’s very good about a precise set of instructions, or putting good guard rails around what the AI is going to get for you, because the more general your instructions, the more general an answer you’re going to get, the more specific your instructions, the more specific. But the challenge is, Mariette, and you’ve probably seen this is, if you’re a busy in house attorney and you’ve got a deadline, taking the extra time to do those instructions seems like a bridge too far, when you can just say, I’ll just go and

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  16:38  

do it. Yes, and you bring up, then another good bridge, which was another gap that I saw, and that led to me creating the directory so similar to what you were saying. One of the challenges is that, after the workshops, people learn the skills, the foundations, but there was still that gap, which was, how do I then take this to the task that I use every day? And so the way that I built that gap was to create, instead of creating another PDF swipe file or something that I felt like people would put in a drawer or download and not use, I said, let me create an online directory that’s actually based on the task. So here’s a task, here’s the framework, which also teaches you, kind of the depth, but then also, here is a Custom Prompt, instead of instructions that you can use with some placeholders that you would fill a couple things in to kind of give you that starting point, and then once you have that starting point, I always recommend for in house counsel, if you get it what you want the first time, copy that, put it into one note or a Slack channel or something, and build a library of prompts that you can use and deploy at your disposal. And that’s what I believe, creates that leverage. So it’s not just a tool, but it’s a tool layered with these other things that help to reduce overall time. Makes sense, indeed.

 

Justin Daniels  18:16  

So Mariette, using your crystal ball, which in this industry is pretty hard. How do you think AI will change the day to day workflow for in house counsel or just attorneys in general, over the next few years? Because it’s just in the time you and I have been working on this, it’s highly disruptive.

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  18:38  

I actually had to think about that when you sent me that question, because I think that there is a split, I’ll kind of Rewind. My cousin sent me the NVIDIA keynote. I think it happened last week where they were talking about, I think it was like the head of perplexity and video, like there was this. It was almost a panel of these innovators talking about different ways that AI is disrupting different professions. And I missed this part, but my cousin was saying that, Oh, the legal profession is being so disrupted, and there’s so much going on. And my answer is yes, and depending on what part of the legal sector you’re talking about, not really. So when it comes to in house, they’re often more constrained and constricted by the enterprise tools that they have the authorization to use. So if there’s 15 tools out there, they don’t have the luxury of getting, you know, $15 a month SaaS subscription to the newest thing. But you also have some of my other colleagues who are solos or small firms and are business owners who I believe are really embracing AI and workflow. Those in automation so specific to in to in house counsel, where I will see where I believe progress is will be more in house counsel being comfortable using it more consistently, and then two more in house counsel understanding the capabilities of how to create leverage any follow ups. Mr.

 

Justin Daniels  20:27  

Justin, the one I’ve been grappling with is, how do we go from efficiency use cases to truly strategic ones? So a faster red line, or, you know, faster diligence, if you just do something faster to be average, that doesn’t really it’s motion without progress. So how do you then transform using AI for negotiation prep to tailor your arguments to the negotiation style of your counterpart? That’s what I want to see. That’s what I want to start seeing. Because you want AI to create better outcomes and transform the role of attorneys and not just be considered the office of no and I think that’s where I’m thinking things may start to head as it gets better, because I don’t think Mariette, in the next few years, they’re going to come out with tools that are so good you won’t have to prompt as much. They’re going to automate it for you. But the prompting skill is critically important, because that’s as we speak today, that’s how you interface with the LLM through the API. So I

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  21:33  

would say Justin, I agree with you, thought a use case where you have that substantive I call it collaboration. And strategy is leverage. So I think it depends. Always start off when I’m talking to in house counsel or teams. What is the actual problem? Because some things can be solved with AI or some parts of it, but some is more of a what is your strategy? What is your workflow behind the actual solution? Because AI may not be the problem. May not be the solution to start, but it may require you to really think through your processes, your workflow, and what is it you actually want to accomplish and get leverage for and then backing into what pieces or parts of that can you use AI to leverage? And, as you said, thinking not just as a red line or creating an email, but an actual collaborative tool. But the biggest thing, and that kind of goes back to misconception, is it? Is it? Is there to compliment and supplement, but if you put, you know, cake on top of trash, it’s still trash. You just have cake on top of trash, but generally, that’s still trash. No one wants to eat piece of cake that has trash on top of it. I just thought about that on the fly, so I’m hoping it makes sense.

 

Jodi Daniels  23:05  

Well, we ask everyone, since this is the Privacy and Security Podcast meets AI these days, what is your best privacy or security tip you would offer someone

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  23:18  

two things. Number one, if you have a enterprise, privacy, security compliance policy, follow it, oftentimes, especially those who are curious and learning they don’t often realize what are the layers of potential risks that other people have spent months looking at so I would say that would be my number one tip. But if you are the person in charge of creating a policy, or your organization doesn’t have a policy, my number one tip would be to understand broadly what type of data could be or is a risk to your organization. So if it got on Facebook or got on LinkedIn or just got on the web, what on the spectrum of risk from low to high, what would that fall under as you start thinking about ways that you can put guard rails or restrict what type of data goes in the tool. Good idea. Thank you for sharing

 

Justin Daniels  24:25  

So Mariette, when you’re not unpacking AI from its container or sifting the cake from the trash, what do you like to do for fun?

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  24:38  

Okay, this also was hard for many reasons, because this is a season of my life where I’m taking big hits and falling on my face and very goal oriented. But that being said, I have two activities. The first is I do Dragon Boat Racing. So in particular. Or I train on a dragon boat racing team. You don’t know what that is. It’s like rowing, but not look it up. But I’ve on. I’m on year two of doing that, and so it is equal parts intensity and fun in open water and nature. And I’m a water person, but I’ve never said this. So this is breaking news. One of the things that I started doing back in college was watching SpongeBob SquarePants, sometimes on the weekends. So those people who have kids may be familiar with SpongeBob SquarePants. I do not have kids, so people would ask, why are you watching it? But it’s always a reminder of the ability to be able to pull yourself out of the adulting world and really look at life through the lens of something more creative and fun. So that would be what I do for fun.

 

Jodi Daniels  25:53  

I love the the idea of trying to look not only adulting, but through the lens of fun, because I think we should all have more fun. Mariette, if people would like to connect and learn more, where should they go?

 

Mariette Clardy-Davis  26:09  

LinkedIn is my number one place to hang out. And on my LinkedIn profile, you’ll have my link tree, and that allows you to learn more about me, articles, directories, upcoming workshops, etc. But I always say I’m a person who loves to connect. So if you feel like I just want to chat for five minutes, just send me a DM.

 

Jodi Daniels  26:36  

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming. We really appreciate it. Thank you.

 

Outro  26:46  

Thanks for listening to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security Podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes and check us out on LinkedIn. See you next time.