LawDroid Manifesto Podcast

In this special panel recording, moderator Cat Moon sits down with three past American Legal Technology Awards honorees: Sarah Coffey Bowes, Nora Cregan, and Zoe Dolan, to talk through a year of building access to justice technology. From automating California’s clean slate record clearing process, to launching a coordinated intake platform in Maryland, to rethinking how self represented litigants interact with AI, this conversation covers real systems serving real people, along with the funding, court culture, and measurement challenges still standing in the way. For more conversations with legal innovators, visit www.lawdroidmanifesto.com.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lawdroidmanifesto.com/subscribe

Hey there Legal Rebels! 👋I’m excited to share with you the 88th episode of the LawDroid Manifesto podcast, where I will be continuing to interview key legal innovators to learn how they do what they do. I think you’re going to enjoy this one!
If you want to understand how a business background, an unconventional career path, and a refusal to accept “that’s not how things are done” can reshape legal aid and private practice alike, you need to listen to this episode. Jen is running a statewide legal aid organization and a lawyer coaching network at the same time, and she has a unique experience and point of view.
Building a Legal Career on Common Sense
Join me as I interview Jen Lee, the Executive Director of Legal Services of North Dakota and CEO of the Lawyer Success Network.
In this insightful podcast episode, Jen shares how she went from being written up in corporate America for having “too much common sense” to running a statewide legal aid organization and a coaching network for lawyers who want to build businesses that actually work. She takes us through her path from small-town North Dakota to insurance and financial services, then law school, then twelve years running her own bankruptcy firm in California, and back home to North Dakota during COVID.
Her stories and insights underscore how business thinking, technology, and a willingness to ask “why do we do it this way” can transform both legal aid delivery and private practice. This episode is a must-watch for anyone interested in access to justice, law firm management, or simply building a legal career that doesn’t require burning out.
The Skinny
Jen Lee grew up in a tiny farming town in North Dakota before an unconventional path took her through an au pair stint in Germany, work in financial services and insurance, and eventually law school, mostly because it sounded fun. She built her own bankruptcy law firm in California from scratch, growing it to four attorneys and doubling revenue year over year for five straight years, all while marketing herself not as a bankruptcy attorney but as someone who helps people with debt and credit problems. Along the way she founded the Lawyer Success Network after getting tired of hearing “you can’t do that” from other lawyers, and started teaching attorneys how to run their practices like real businesses. When COVID sent her home to North Dakota, she took over Legal Services of North Dakota with a mandate to modernize it, and has since grown the team from six attorneys to fifteen while overhauling its technology and culture. Throughout the conversation, Jen returns to a consistent theme: lawyers get stuck thinking about their practice areas instead of the problems their clients actually have, and organizations get stuck refusing to change simply because change is uncomfortable.
Key Takeaways
* Market what you solve, not your practice area. Jen never called herself a bankruptcy attorney; she said she helped people with debt and credit problems, which made her services instantly understandable to potential clients.
* A business background changes how you run a law firm. Jen’s experience in financial services and insurance gave her the marketing, cash flow, and problem-solving instincts that shaped how she built and scaled her own practice.
* Feedback loops beat perfectionism. Whether it’s an AI tool, a new workflow, or a marketing message, Jen argues the work is never “done,” it has to be checked, adjusted, and improved continuously.
* Listening to frontline staff is a management superpower. When Jen took over Legal Services of North Dakota, she found a team that had never been asked for its opinions, and simply asking why things were done a certain way unlocked real change.
* Remote and flexible work is a competitive advantage. Firms and organizations that resist remote work or rigid 9-to-5 structures are struggling to attract and keep good people, while those that adapt are winning.
* Career choices are not permanent sentences. Jen pushes back hard on the idea that once you pick a legal path out of law school, you are locked into it forever.
* Collaboration beats competition in access to justice. Jen sees legal aid and private practice as natural collaborators rather than competitors when it comes to expanding access to legal services.
Notable Quotes
* “I got written up one time for having too much common sense.” Jen Lee [16:57 to 17:06]
* “It’s not about what you think you do. It’s about what problem your client thinks they have that you solve.” Jen Lee [26:31 to 26:49]
* “I think your choices can be different tomorrow than they are today.” Jen Lee [23:04 to 23:22]
* “The best thing a manager and management levels can do is talk to their employees, ask them why they do things and what would make their jobs easier, and listen to them and actually do those things.” Jen Lee [36:26 to 36:59]
* “I think we fall into things that we enjoy when we let ourselves.” Jen Lee [22:08 to 22:09]
Clips
Written Up for Too Much Common Sense
The Unexpected Path to Bankruptcy Law
Your Career Choice Isn’t a Life Sentence
Helping Lawyers Build Happier Firms
Jen Lee’s path from a seven-mile-spaced farming town in North Dakota to running a statewide legal aid organization and a lawyer coaching network shows what happens when someone refuses to accept industry defaults simply because they are defaults. Her insistence on speaking to what clients actually need, her comfort with constant iteration over one-time fixes, and her willingness to ask frontline staff why things are done a certain way all point to the same underlying philosophy: good ideas do not require permission, and the discomfort of being told “you can’t do that” is often the surest sign you are onto something worth pursuing.
Closing Thoughts
What strikes me most about this conversation with Jen is how consistently she reframes problems that most lawyers treat as fixed. Bankruptcy becomes “helping people with debt and credit problems.” A slow-moving legal aid organization becomes a place where fifteen attorneys now do the work six used to handle. A career path becomes something you can walk away from tomorrow if it stops serving you. None of this is complicated advice, but it takes real conviction to act on it inside a profession that prizes precedent and how it’s always been done as much as ours does. Jen’s story is a reminder that the tools and technology we talk about so often on this show only matter if the people using them are willing to ask why things are done a certain way in the first place. That is the real rebel move, and it is one every legal innovator listening to this show should take to heart.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lawdroidmanifesto.com/subscribe

Hey there Legal Rebels! 👋I’m excited to share with you the 87th episode of the LawDroid Manifesto podcast, where I will be continuing to interview key legal innovators to learn how they do what they do. I think you’re going to enjoy this one!
I’ve known Shannon Salter for years as the Founding Chair of the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal, Canada’s first online tribunal. She’s always impressed me as one of the smartest, humble, and most effective people that I know. She approaches legal innovation not from a tech-first standpoint, but with a people-first commitment. Now, as Deputy Minister to the Premier of BC, she can effect positive change for the people who need it at a whole new level. That’s why I’ve dubbed her, “The People’s Deputy.”
If you want to understand how a government can rebuild its relationship with citizens from the ground up, you need to listen to this episode. Shannon is at the forefront of reimagining public service delivery in British Columbia and brings a unique perspective shaped by her years transforming access to justice.
LawDroid Manifesto is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

From the Civil Resolution Tribunal to Government 3.0
Join me as I interview Shannon Salter, Deputy Minister to the British Columbia Premier, Cabinet Secretary, and head of the BC Public Service. Shannon previously served as Deputy Attorney General and Deputy Minister responsible for housing, and before that spent almost eight years as founding Chair of the BC Civil Resolution Tribunal, Canada’s first online tribunal.
In this insightful episode, Shannon walks through her path from a homeschooled childhood on Salt Spring Island to the highest levels of BC government. She explains how she built the Civil Resolution Tribunal from a piece of legislation with no staff and no office into a system that resolves small claims, strata, and motor vehicle accident disputes by designing every step around the person with the most barriers to access, not around the technology itself.
Shannon also shares how those same lessons now inform Connected Services BC, a government-wide initiative aiming to give citizens one front door for every interaction with the state by 2030. She discusses the promise and the risks of AI in closing the information gap between ordinary people and expensive professional expertise, and reflects on what has kept her going through decades of public service work.
The Skinny
Shannon Salter has spent her career proving that justice and government systems work best when they are built around the people who use them. As founding Chair of BC’s Civil Resolution Tribunal, she took an empty piece of legislation and turned it into Canada’s first online tribunal, one designed for plain language, accessibility, and asynchronous use rather than the pomp and formality that keeps ordinary people at arm’s length from the legal system. That same philosophy now guides her work as Deputy Minister to the BC Premier, where she is helping lead Connected Services BC, an effort to consolidate government services around life events so citizens stop having to repeat the same information to different ministries. Along the way, Shannon reflects on her unconventional homeschooled upbringing on Salt Spring Island, her early disillusionment in law school, and how AI could help close the long-standing information asymmetry between everyday people and expensive legal or financial expertise, if it is built responsibly.
Key Takeaways
* Design justice and government systems around the person with the most barriers to access, and everyone else will be served well too.
* The BC Civil Resolution Tribunal succeeded because it treated continuous improvement as an enduring obligation, not a one-time project, publishing participant satisfaction surveys month after month.
* People’s subjective sense of fairness, whether they felt heard and treated with respect, matters as much to access to justice as the substance of a decision.
* Connected Services BC aims to give BC residents one login and one front door for government services by 2030, inspired by the Dutch “life events” model.
* Government already holds most of the information it repeatedly asks citizens to provide, and reducing that administrative burden builds trust.
* AI has real potential to correct information asymmetry by giving ordinary people access to legal and government knowledge they could otherwise never afford.
* A homeschooled, unstructured childhood exposed to people far outside her peer group shaped Shannon’s capacity to empathize across different walks of life.
* Law school tends to erode the optimism and sense of agency students arrive with, and Shannon encourages students to hold onto their own definition of success.
* Sustainable, energizing work comes from aligning your career with your purpose, not from chasing a conventional definition of success.
* Legal professionals need to rethink their value proposition and regulatory model, because AI will force that reckoning quickly.
Notable Quotes
* “It’s about bringing the justice system to where people are, building it around their lives, accounting for the bundle of skills and abilities and challenges that people have and offering them fluidity and flexibility and respect and dignity in how we help them solve their problems.” Shannon Salter [26:17 to 26:48]
* “Design for the person who has the most barriers to accessing justice and assume that if you do that, it’s going to work for everybody else.” Shannon Salter [28:51 to 29:08]
* “Continuous improvement is not a one time commitment. It is an enduring obligation.” Shannon Salter [31:53 to 32:07]
* “People’s subjective views of fairness are kind of the biggest thing that informs their perception of the administration of justice.” Shannon Salter [33:10 to 33:20]
* “There is a special kind of exhaustion that comes from spending your days doing things that are not aligned with your purpose.” Shannon Salter [44:26 to 44:50]
* “AI is going to be the brute force that makes that happen in a hurry.” Shannon Salter [42:56 to 43:15]
Clips
One Front Door For Government
Push Services Before You Ask
Why Law School Crushes Idealism
What Judges See Behind the Curtain
Shannon Salter’s career traces a clear line from a self-directed childhood on a small Gulf Island to reshaping how millions of British Columbians experience their government. Whether she was building the Civil Resolution Tribunal from nothing or now leading the effort to give citizens one front door to government services, her guiding principle has stayed the same: design for the person with the fewest resources and the most barriers, and trust and access will follow for everyone else. As AI reshapes how people find legal and government information, Shannon’s decades of hands-on experience offer a grounded, human-centered blueprint for what comes next.
Closing Thoughts
Talking with Shannon always reminds me why I got into this work in the first place. Long before “generative AI” became part of our everyday lexicon, Shannon was already proving what it actually takes to close the access to justice gap between people and the systems that are supposed to serve them: humility, relentless iteration, and a willingness to ask people directly whether they felt heard. What strikes me most about her is how she describes the Civil Resolution Tribunal not as a technology project but as a people project that happened to need technology. That distinction matters more than ever as AI-first tools flood into legal and government services. The tools will keep changing. The discipline of designing for the person with the least access, and then measuring whether you actually helped them, is the part that lasts. Shannon has lived that discipline for over a decade, and BC is all the better for it. I hope this conversation gives you as much to think about and act on as it gave me.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lawdroidmanifesto.com/subscribe

Hey there Legal Rebels! 👋I’m excited to share with you the 86th episode of the LawDroid Manifesto podcast, where I will be continuing to interview key legal innovators to learn how they do what they do. I think you’re going to enjoy this one!
If you want to understand the real difference between a chatbot and an AI agent, and where the risk actually lives when you hand your files over to one, you need to listen to this episode. Sateesh and I ran this as a live workshop at the third annual LawDroid AI Conference, walking through the architecture, the security tradeoffs, and the practical rules of thumb for building agentic workflows into your practice.
LawDroid Manifesto is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

From Chatbots to Autonomous Agents: A Workshop on AI Agents in Law
Join me as I sit down with Sateesh Nori for a hands-on workshop recorded live at LawDroid’s third annual AI conference.
In this session, Sateesh and I break down the real difference between the AI chatbots most lawyers already use and the autonomous agents now emerging, agents that can read and write files on your own computer, follow a playbook built from your own expertise, and even spin up sub-agents to divide up a task.
We cover the security tradeoffs of giving an agent access to your local files, when a simple deterministic workflow beats a full agent, and the five golden rules for automating legal work responsibly.
We also demo a legal-aid specific AI agent, and a small preview of what an AI “workforce” of named agents handling research, scheduling, and reporting might look like day to day. This episode is for any lawyer trying to figure out where agents actually fit into a real practice, not just the hype.
Key Takeaways
* AI agents differ from chatbots in three key ways: they can read and write local files, retain memory across sessions, and act on an encoded “playbook” of a person’s skills and experience
* Security matters more with agents than chatbots because they touch local files; use a paid plan to opt out of training, and keep a backup (like a synced Dropbox folder) of anything an agent can access
* Not every task needs an agent; workflows offer more predictability and control, and Tom’s rule of thumb is to “choose the dumbest model that gets the job done”
* A simple rubric helps decide agent versus workflow: is the problem ambiguous enough to justify it, does the task value justify the token cost, can critical risk be reduced, and is the cost of an error low and easily caught
* Sub-agents let one orchestrating agent divide a dense document among multiple “workers,” which can improve both accuracy and cost by keeping each sub-agent’s context smaller
* The METR time-horizon chart shows how long a model can stay coherent on a task; newer models can now operate coherently for many hours, a meaningful marker of agent capability
* AI use has moved from “reductive” work, summarizing, condensing, cross-referencing, to more “enriching” and constructive work, building new documents and analysis from a base of skills and tools
* Building a skill can start as simply as talking through a task with Claude, having it structure that knowledge, then refining it, creating a recursive feedback loop that mirrors how people learn by doing
* Five golden rules for legal AI automation: describe the outcome rather than every step, batch similar documents together, manage sub-agent limits, cut losses quickly on unproductive paths, and always keep a human in the loop
* Recording a walkthrough in a tool like Loom and having AI turn it into a standard operating procedure is a fast way to capture institutional knowledge into a skill
Notable Quotes
* “My maxim is choose the dumbest model that gets the job done.” Tom Martin ([07:02 to 07:09])
* “It does become a little unwieldy to have a human in the loop, which is kind of like putting us down for our intelligence if we get a million different documents coming in.” Sateesh Nori ([08:51 to 09:09])
* “One analogy that I like is a custom agent or even a chat is reductive. It takes a lot of information and maybe brings it down, boils it down into bullet points, into a slide deck, into a haiku, into whatever you want. But it’s ultimately reductive. Whereas with skills you can actually build new things.” Sateesh Nori ([17:11 to 18:16])
* “We want to help more people. We want to bridge the gap. We want the legal system to actually work. We want our democracy to be upheld. We want the rule of law to be followed.” Sateesh Nori ([33:05 to 33:15])
* “It’s important to have that control, just as it is with anything.” Sateesh Nori ([42:09 to 42:17])
Clips
Choose the Dumbest Model That Works
When Agents Start Hiring Humans
Meet Casey — An AI Workforce
AI as Compound Advantage
Agents and chatbots are not the same, and treating them as interchangeable is where most of the risk and most of the wasted spend comes from. This workshop lays out a practical way to think about the choice: what an agent actually is under the hood, when a deterministic workflow beats one, how sub-agents can make document review both cheaper and more accurate, and the golden rules for keeping a human genuinely in control while still getting the efficiency gains. It closes with a sneak peek at Ally and an AI “workforce” already running in production for the show itself.
Closing Thoughts
We used to talk about AI as a reductive tool, something that condenses, summarizes, distills. What Sateesh and I got into here is the enriching side: agents that build on top of your own expertise rather than just compressing it. That’s a real unlock, but it comes with real responsibility too. The five golden rules we walked through aren’t abstract; they’re the difference between an agent that saves you hours and one that quietly deletes something you needed. If you’re experimenting with this in your own practice, start small, keep a human on the loop, and remember that the goal was never to build the fanciest agent. It’s to bridge the gap for the people the legal system was supposed to serve in the first place.
By the way, if you would like to meet other superlative legal innovators in person, and enjoy an exceptional awards gala celebration, don’t miss the Oscars of Legal Innovation: the American Legal Technology Awards, this October 25, 2026, in Boston. Reserve your Early Bird tickets today and save $100.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lawdroidmanifesto.com/subscribe

LawDroid Manifesto brings you conversations with the people rebuilding the legal profession around AI, one honest conversation at a time. In this episode, Kat Moon of Vanderbilt Law School moderates a live panel with Anastasia Boyko, Heidi Brown, and Sharon Crane, unpacking the "women are falling behind in AI" narrative, what real competence with these tools looks like, and the risk of automating the profession's worst habits instead of its best ones. For more, head to www.lawdroidmanifesto.com.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lawdroidmanifesto.com/subscribe