Do efficiency and risk management top your generative AI roadmap?
While most law firms still stall over hallucinations, one attorney is
already billing more after automating his workflow to draft court ready
arguments before anyone's first coffee.
My name is Alexandre Nevski and this is Innovation Tales.
Navigating Change one story at a time.
We share insights from leaders tackling the challenges of today's digital world.
Welcome to Innovation Tales, the podcast exploring the human
side of digital transformation.
So who is the lawyer turning predawn coffee into billable hours?
Meet Dr. Don Ray Simmonds, an attorney with over a decade of experience
specializing in intellectual property and the owner of one of the oldest
trademark law firms in the UK.
With only a basic understanding of coding, he stitched a set of LLM prompts in drag
and drop tools like Make.com and n8n to spin up Bron AI, a SaaS that draft
arguments in minutes and earns revenue while he spends more time with his son.
In today's episode, we unpack Don's low-code blueprint, the guardrails
that keep hallucinations out of client documents and why documenting your prompts
now, could save an IP lawsuit later.
Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Simmonds.
Don, welcome to the show.
Hello, Alex.
Thank you for having me.
Oh, it's great to have you.
Now, I want to start with a story I know our audience will find fascinating.
A couple of years ago, if I'm not mistaken, you started an AI business.
Can you tell us what happened and what led you there?
Yes, and I hope they find it fascinating, but it's definitely changed my
life, so I can say that for sure.
I am a trademark attorney and I've been a trademark attorney for 10 years.
And for the last five years I was asked to do what we call office action
responses, which means give you, I'm gonna give you layman's sort of explanation.
Yes, please.
If you apply for a trademark and you get refused, you get sent a
notice, a letter or something.
This is called an office action response, and they're
telling you why you're refused.
And it could be because there's a trademark already that is the
same as the one you're registering or something along those lines.
Usually when that happens, depending on where you file, you argue, you have legal
arguments presented saying, Hey, this is why you should accept the trademark.
So clients usually will ask me to respond and say, Hey, argue in our
favor, and hopefully they will accept.
However, it got to a point that I was good enough that I was being
hired by another law firm to do their office action responses.
So not only I was dealing with mine, which wasn't that mine weren't, I
wasn't getting many, the idea is to hopefully get none when you apply.
But if you work with a bigger firm, they will have more clients and
thus they will have more responses.
So what was happening is I was getting a lot more of these and
my son was getting bigger, so I was spending more time with him.
And thus what was happening is I was not able to keep up with the amount of
office action responses I was supposed to draft, because my, I was spending
more and more time with my son during the summer and I figured, you know what?
I have to figure out a way make it so that I can spend time with him,
but yet at the same time respond to these ever increasing... Being good
at something has its own negative effects, even though it's good for you.
And that was, I was getting more know, work.
Yeah.
Good problems to have.
Definitely.
So the idea was, okay, in my head I was thinking, how can I make
this, how can I deal with this?
And this is when I noticed that Open AI had invited me or some groups of
people to join their beta accounts.
So I didn't know it was for, I did not know what they would be giving.
And this was like in September of the same year that they released
ChatGPT, and I think they released it in December or November.
So I applied, got in, didn't think anything of it, and I was still
racking my brain trying to figure out how to get it so that I did my
office action responses quicker.
Normally, it would take me a day.
Maybe a day and a half to draft a response.
These are legal arguments.
It takes time.
You gotta study.
Even if you have a template to work from, you still, it
still takes time to do, right?
So, lo and behold, December, November comes around and they release ChatGPT.
And of course you might know the story.
Everyone freaks out.
The highest subscription rate ever into I think a hundred million
people and the shortest time ever.
So I was one of the earliest people because I had an account with OpenAI.
And that's where the light bulb went off in my head, as they say.
After working with it, I realized that I could use it to draft
or help me draft arguments.
I just didn't know how.
It was like I couldn't, I had to do it in a way that it was automated.
And then I later realized there were other websites that allowed you to
connect to ChatGPT through an API.
One of them was Make.com.
There's all, there are others, like n8n, was Make.com and there was other,
there was another one, Zapier I think.
It was Make.com that gave me the most flexibility at the time,
and I was more, and I had a basic understanding of coding and JSON files.
I kinda learned myself, so I was like, okay, if I can use this platform, I
can actually create a beast that would help me draft even if, even if it
only helps me, I will be very happy.
So I set to work late nights, ripping my hair out, as you can see.
And it took months doing innovation after in different designs and trying to figure
out, and there were a lot of failures.
But by the third month I had something.
It was automating a draft fully some, and then I was like, okay, I can
use this draft personally for me.
And I started using it to see if it work, it would work as that I could send to
the office, the US or wherever the refusal came from, to see if they would respond
in kind and say, Hey, you know what?
Your arguments are valid.
We're going to accept them and register the trademark.
And I had to do this first just to make sure if it doesn't work, I can't use it.
Obviously.
If the arguments are not strong enough, then of course they would not accept them,
and then that would be the end of that.
I knew it should work because the arguments are the same that
I would normally write, but this time I did not write them.
It was done by the AI.
So, three months in I send them off, and during the summer of, that
was two years ago, I was using it.
It allowed me more time with my son.
And at the same time it was, it basically, it took what took a
full day down to about two hours.
So I really gained a lot.
And I was like, if this works for me, is it possible that I can make it so
it works for some other attorneys?
It took another couple of three months or so after that and I made a version that
is more, not so much for me, but more standard that almost any attorney can use.
And it's just to sort of summarize the story, from that moment on, I was using
it with the firms that were hiring me, and I was allowing another attorney to use
it as a beta tester because I just wanted to see was there any errors and all that.
So she used it for a while for free just to make sure it worked.
She was happy with it.
And now we're at that stage where, yeah, I have regular attorneys using
it and paying for it and I'm making nice income on the side with it.
And the idea is to expand it to other attorneys to use.
And it's been a whirlwind year but we are very happy and it was making
money from the start, like right away.
Wow, what a wonderful story!
I also wanted to ask you for more general overview of where the latest
wave of artificial intelligence tools, so mostly generative AI, is being
applied in the legal profession.
So the one that you've just described is, I guess drafting some of the documents
that you may file , that's clear one.
I guess it's also quite useful to stay abreast of evolving regulations.
The capabilities of the large language models with the latest ability to
ingest a lot of different documents and then give you a summary, that
is also a very useful use case.
And the other one I've seen is when you have a case and a lot of different
pieces that fit into the case: some evidence documents or whatever.
That it also helps the legal professional to save time in getting
a quick overview of these documents.
So is that like a fair summary of the benefits and the use cases?
Did I miss any?
There are more.
but yeah, that's a great summary of what is out there now.
We do focus mostly on what would happen is the attorney would fill
in a form then the AI would draft the arguments for the attorney.
But there is, the other thing that you've mentioned.
Let's focus on a case.
And the reason why cases are harder to draft is because each case is unique.
So evidence might be used in this, at this stage, or different evidence
might be used at this stage.
So you can't, there's no sort of specific, formula that works very well.
But you do have a platform like NotebookLM by Google, which has the ability to
bring in PDFs, bring in websites, and then you can ask it to draft arguments
based on the evidence that you bring it, which I think is perfect for cases.
And it's also perfect for, so let's say you're drafting agreements or
privacy policies or terms of service.
This, again, is good for platforms like Google, because you can have
a template and then you could say, using this template draft a new
policy, but this is the business information that I want you to take.
And apply to this template that you have.
And it will do it very quickly, much faster than using a paralegal by hand.
These are one of the cases you can use a differently.
And then there's just looking through large, like reading large cases.
Like getting information on an agreement or a case and you want it quickly.
I think one of the guests earlier in the season was also mentioning like
in a corporate environment to identify variations between standard contracts.
Contracts that are supposed to be standard, but then as a result of
business negotiations sometimes you, have to change a clause or two.
So then having an overview of how many differences there are in your contracts,
I think, that was another use case.
But you mentioned also that there might be others.
So I'm really keen to hear more use cases.
There's the one I'm working on right now that's, I think it's
even, yeah, much bigger or better.
The legal services business requires to get better at automating things because a
lot of things we do are very repetitive.
The idea is to have a paralegal that has access to your full database of
clients and your fees, your terms of service, and then also have access to,
if needed, case law, if you need it.
Sometimes you don't want it to do that.
Sometimes you just want it to be the administrative staff
that keeps you on top of cases.
So what would happen is this automated AI not automated, I'd
just call it a live paralegal.
If done right, you would basically have every person on your, in your law
firm able to communicate with her, it.
I call her, but it and
You're not the first one.
Ask questions 'cause I get a lot of questions as the top, the lead attorney
and it takes a lot of time out of my day.
If I have a, an AI paralegal that can answer all the questions that my staff
has and she responds, or it responds right away, that frees up my time.
And this day and age, yes, we have, n8n specifically has a format that
you could basically send the input via email or directly, but let's say email.
And then once it's received, the AI on that platform, if you set it up correctly,
will choose what is the best tool in order to respond to whatever question is asked.
It will be the one deciding.
You will not be.
It will say, oh, I have to send, I have to draft an email for this client.
Alright, this is the client.
This is their address.
I know where to find it.
Email address.
I know what type of email they would like because we have templates so
it's gonna do that, and then it's gonna send it right back to you.
That's what you want.
'cause then you're freeing up time.
It's quicker.
The client is happier because they're getting their responses right away.
So that is the next wave.
And I'm, this is something I'm working on.
And after that there's another step, which is you have that paralegal
AI interact with the internet.
There's many ways to do it.
Perplexity has a, what we call a node that you can connect through
n8n, but they also have MCP, which is this new communicative format for
AIs to interact with the internet.
And that would basically open up the world to this paralegal.
For a, a legal professional, you're awfully up to speed with all the
low-code options to build AI agents.
And there's now A2A, which is Google's new protocol for agents
communicating with each other.
So it's going fast.
Yeah, it is.
I don't really want to go into the technical side of things too much but
I do want to pick your brains about the more broader implication of all
this generative AI tech on IP law.
So what are some of the challenges that you see coming front
and center in the last year?
I think there, there are several in different areas at different stages.
First is that it's going to be required for any trainee attorney to know AI.
I do not see how any of them could get into this field without knowing it.
It's gonna be a standard requirement and we are having trouble finding
trainees right now that know even the basics of AI . That is not
something that should be happening.
But I guess the law schools are trying to catch up with that and
then maybe implement courses that will show them how to use it.
Like AI literacy, prompt engineering, and that sort of stuff.
Knowing how to use it, knowing how to prompt.
Why is it important?
Because a lot of law firms have subscription to AI platforms that
require the user to interface using you know, your standard AI
interface to research case law.
That brings me to the next potential issue and their conservative approach to things.
It's part of being in law.
You tend to not want to embrace the new and then instead embrace the old.
The old way of doing things is usually the best way, kind of way, attitude,
but it is, the one thing that is keeping a lot of law firms back
is that this AI technology is new.
It's not proven.
We know there's errors, there's hallucinations, there's all these
things, and thus, law firms tend to shy away from it, even though they
could reduce their time by 80%.
And the reason is they're afraid.
Like, I don't want a fake case law in my argument.
How do I prevent that from happening?
That's not so hard to do.
It's just that you definitely have to start doing some work
there and learn how to do it.
And what about the impact on specifically intellectual property,
whether it's trademarks or patents or something like that.
My very basic understanding is that there is like challenges I suppose,
I'm not sure how to call 'em, with tools like Midjourney, obviously,
or Dall-E or the newest model from ChatGPT to do text to image, which
raise a whole bunch of questions about who does a generated image belong to,
if it was then based on some inputs?
Where do we stand today?
All right, so what I recently heard is that the ruling, at least in the
US is that the creation of something by an AI can be attributed to the
person that created the AI, as long as it's proven that they had enough of
an input or influence in the creation of whatever it is they created.
What does enough mean?
That's what the courts are gonna have to decide.
But they're saying that yes, AI itself can't own anything.
And maybe there will be a time years down the road, I would
say, it might happen, who knows?
But right now, if you use AI to help you create something, you have to
show that you did enough in that realm to make it attributable to you.
I know that doesn't really clearly, but
No, of course, but this is where we are today.
And, yeah, it feels a bit disorientating I suppose.
How long do courts take to get to a position for people who
are going to be using these tools to know where they stand?
Are we talking about something that will unroll over just a year or two?
Or does that take 10 years?
How long, like in the past, how did it work?
There is no standard length, but it usually takes many years because of
the fact that you are learning how it affects different realms differently.
So it could be one thing to create artwork, another thing to create music,
another thing to write a book It affects so many different areas so differently.
You will not have a definitive and maybe never have a definitive
answer of how to attribute rights.
But, I guess it shouldn't stop people from creating for that reason.
Unfortunately, the legal field is very slow because all these things have to
percolate through the courts to finally get a judgment that everyone could
read and say, oh, this is how I react.
But it takes such a long time.
Yeah.
So it sounds like for people who are using these tools to create content
that is maybe published, there's gonna be gray areas, if I understood
you correctly, for a few years, may, maybe many years, and maybe forever.
If you are a content creator, what are the gray areas you need to be aware of?
If you're going to use AI, that is gonna be a gray area right away.
I would try and make it so that I am the one giving as much input as possible when
I create something and documenting it.
I did this part of this creation.
Try and be more specific when you're using it.
Get as much information in there when you're doing it, just to show how much
you've been a part of the process.
And not just say make me a photo of of whatever.
Yeah.
And would would a content creator, would they gain from doc that you said
document, make sure that they contribute as much as possible and that they
document their what their contribution.
Would you publish this?
Would you make it or send it to some office, or is it just
okay to keep it in your files?
Just keep it.
Yeah.
The whole point is to keep it just in case something comes up, somebody
goes, oh, this is not really yours.
You used AI to create and thus we can use it because AI doesn't have any rights.
We can use it on our website.
And then you would be the one trying to enforce your rights and
say, look, this is what I drafted.
This is what I used to make it, and if you don't stop, we'll go to court.
And that hopefully the court will side with you because you have
evidence showing that you did partake in most of the creative process.
Thank you.
I think it's a, it's very clear and practical advice that people can follow.
So what would be the key takeaway when it comes to the impact of
artificial intelligence on, on business and intellectual property?
Well, the word on the street is, nobody's going to be hired in the future
without some sort of AI background.
So I would try to at least learn about AI and understand how it's
going to impact my business.
You don't have to go back to school or anything, but you
should know how to use a prompt.
That's like the very basic of all things.
And believe it or not, the next wave of hirees or people joining
your company may not be technical.
They're likely going to be English majors.
People who know how to use the language.
That's really where it excels.
Understanding how to use the language.
And I did this with my son.
He's just seven years old, but we built an app using just words.
Because I knew how to prompt . And so there's an app online right
now, and I'll tell you a little anecdote why there's an app.
There's a lot of apps on Apple Store.
But a lot of these apps are, they're free and then they show you a video
every time you want to use, you know,
Yeah.
We love trivia and we were downloading these apps and, yeah, every 10,
15 minutes we'd get a video.
And these videos are not really nice for young kids.
So I got fed up and so did he.
You know what, I think we can create our own app right now with the way things are.
So we set it up used cursor and we just talked.
Well typed.
And we said we wanted a trivia app that we both can use and we could play.
And this is what, and we outlined it and blah, blah, blah.
And then it created it and now it's online.
And my son and I now use that app to have fun playing trivia.
And this is what I mean.
Anyone can make apps, anyone can make things now.
And so your business model might be disrupted by a kid in a room at
home, just talking to his computer.
Yeah, it's a great example and I'm glad you, you brought this
up that you described, that with Cursor and a bit of vibe coding,
everyone can do their own apps now.
It's, yeah, super.
And that kind of brings me to one of my two last questions.
So, what book, tool or habit has made the most impact on you in the last 12 months?
There's no question.
I would never have thought that you could do this with words, and
have an app in minutes running.
I was blown away by what it could do.
And this is still early.
I cannot imagine what's coming next.
So yes, Cursor is probably the most impactful.
Wow.
Super.
And the last question that I always ask is, obviously we've been talking about all
the things that are changing, but is there maybe one thing that you would expect
to remain the same in the next 10 years?
Nobody's replacing law attorneys.
You hear this a lot.
That is never gonna happen because a person has to be liable for the
decisions and advice that is given.
Legal advice.
And there's an impact if you get it wrong, whereas if an AI gets it
wrong, what are you going to do?
Shut it down.
You can't sue an AI.
No, that is not gonna change.
So accountability of professionals.
Would you apply this specifically to legal or any professionals?
Anyone who needs a license to operate.
Those jobs are gonna stay because you cannot apply that
to an artificial intelligence.
There's no impact for them to be sued.
Or maybe the company running them, yes.
But still, it will always be attributed to a person.
That's it.
That's the only thing I think is gonna be the same.
Fantastic.
With that, Don, thank you very much.
Thank you.
I had a great time.
Dr. Simmonds reminds us that enterprise transformation isn't reserved for coders.
With only basic coding skills, he automated around 80% of repetitive
trademark work, freeing, billable hours, and family time alike.
Equally valuable is his roadmap for scaling: built hard guardrails
against hallucinations, log every prompt for audit and treat prompt
engineering as a core legal competency.
Don is happy to swap war stories.
Find him on LinkedIn for a free consultation on AI or IP law.
The link is in the description.
What about you?
Are you ready for citizen developers to create revenue ready
AI services in your organization?
As always, we have more exciting topics and guest appearances lined up, so
stay tuned for more tale of innovation that inspire, challenge and transform.
Until next time, peace.
Thanks for tuning in to Innovation Tales.
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