The Oklahoma Bar Journal April 2023

L aw P ractice T ips

Takeaways from ABA TECHSHOW 2023

By Jim Calloway and Julie Bays

A BA TECHSHOW WAS HELD March 1 in Chicago. After 2021 resulted in a virtual TECHSHOW and 2022 was a hybrid show, the consensus among attendees was that it was great to be 100% in person again. For us, the ABA TECHSHOW began on Wednesday. We attended a day-long retreat with practice management advisors from across the U.S. and Canada. This year, there were at least 22 PMAs attend ing our retreat. We spent the day learning about new technologies available on the market. Julie demonstrated Descript, an all-in one video editor. If you haven’t heard of this product, she wrote about it in the January/February issue of the ABA’s Law Practice magazine. 1 Videos are a great way to connect with people, and this text-based editor for videos is a good way to create them. There seemed to be more Oklahomans than usual attend ing this year. Although, that could be because Kenton Brice of the OU College of Law and the ABA TECHSHOW Planning Board had red Oklahoma ribbons printed so that he could add them to our badges. Surprisingly, they turned out to be quite the conversation starters. All three of Oklahoma’s law schools had faculty attending the ABA TECHSHOW, with two of

Gmail using Chat GPT, Alex and Trevor walked the entire audience through a how-to workshop; they combined the use of Zapier with Gmail and Chat GPT to create a Zap in this fashion. While much was above some of our heads, the concept was analogous to all kinds of use-case workflows and its practicality after the front-end work was illuminating. While Alex focused on the Google steps, Trevor complemented [ sic ] the same workflow on the Microsoft side. 2 Mr. Riddle will also be speaking at the OBA Solo & Small Firm Conference. His presentation is titled “Law Firm Efficiency Overhaul: Optimize Your Technology for Maximum Performance.” Artificial intelligence and ChatGPT were on the mind of many speakers and attendees, given the explosion of ChatGPT in recent months. Many vendors’ displays had a ChatGPT reference on their booth background. We were impressed with how they got those items printed so quickly. Our thought is that they should have named ChatGPT “First Drafts.” If you know how to do something, ChatGPT lets you do it faster and sometimes better. But if you don’t understand something

them represented on the organi zation’s planning board: Kenton Brice and Darla Jackson from the TU College of Law. Ms. Jackson will reprise her TECHSHOW pro gram “I Didn’t Know PDFs Could do That” for our OBA Solo & Small Firm Conference this summer. Mr. Brice will speak on several programs at the conference, includ ing one Jim will co-present with him about lawyers’ use of ChatGPT. Julie’s focus at ABA TECHSHOW was on the marketing track. As we frequently point out, people law requires a constant flow of new business, and active marketing is required to accomplish this. She will teach “Legal Marketing Design: Crafting a Standout Strategy” at the Solo & Small Firm Conference and wanted to hear what experts in the field are saying today. Tulsa attorney Trevor Riddle was a co-presenter on two TECHSHOW sessions on opti mizing your law firm efficiency through automation, discussing the tools he uses in his estate plan ning practice. Texas attorney and veteran legal technologist Mark Unger said of one of his sessions: In what I previously termed a “mind-bending creation” of spreadsheet backups while pulling via keywords from

58 | APRIL 2023

THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL