At Legalweek this year, we announced our third class of AI Visionaries, who join an impressive alumni network of tech-forward titans in the legal industry. These days, there's no escaping AI—it’s in every LinkedIn post, article, and it’s even creeped into my Spotify daylist.
Our AI Visionaries foresaw this technology boom. While they’re not currently available for fortune-telling appointments (trust me, I’ve tried), they have graciously agreed to catch up with us and provide a sneak peek into their last year!
I sat down with Daniel Gold and Michelle Six, both from our 2023 AI Visionaries class, to see what they have been up to, hear their thoughts on the state of artificial intelligence, and discuss what lies ahead.
Michelle Six
It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since we first connected with Michelle Six for her photoshoot in a loft in Brooklyn. The past several months have been an exciting whirlwind in both Michelle’s life and the legal technology world.
“We are fully in the renaissance of e-discovery,” Michelle said to me recently, “where new-age thinkers are embraced, rather than shunned.”
With any type of renaissance, there are people who reject the shift—no matter the cost—and those who embrace new innovations and opportunities with open arms. Michelle’s new firm, Gunster, a Florida-based law firm, falls into the second category.
“I feel incredibly lucky to have joined a practice that has given me the opportunity to help build a team that views information governance and e-discovery advice as its own critical practice area in the legal profession, as opposed to an ancillary offering and support structure.” She explains, “When litigation and trial strategy are paired with e-discovery strategy and counsel, it creates a winning model for our clients.”
Gunster is uniquely positioned for this new age of discovery with Michelle on the team. Though she’s taken on a new endeavor in her career, her views on the role of artificial intelligence remain the same: “If you’ve been specializing in e-discovery for as long as I have,” she chuckles, “you already know what it’s like to be the disruptor. We’ve always been ahead of the curve with adapting new technology, and this additional generative component makes our data mining and analysis so much richer and interesting.”
In the realm of giants, Gunster stands out as a modern-day David. They are uniquely positioned to harness the power of AI in a distinct way—embracing the human element rather than overlooking it.
“Utilizing these tools in a thoughtful and strategic manner allows our team to focus on substantive, exploratory work,” Michelle told me, “which makes the work more creative and exciting, which inevitably leads to a better output from the team.” Gunster is building a dynamic team, largely comprised of (stellar) women who have an exciting vision for the future.
“It’s unlike anywhere I’ve worked before,” said Michelle. “We all are dedicated to a team model that prioritizes kindness and compassion to our workplace.” She explained how she feels Gunster is breaking the mold of a “typical” law firm: “We find a lot of value in junior and senior members of the team collaborating. We’ve not only built an insanely productive and talented team, but a community that celebrates each person. We emphasize the pivotal role that’s played by everyone—from the technologist to the lawyer to the receptionist—to make Gunster successful.”
If you read or watched Michelle’s AI Visionary profile, you know she has a background in the arts and is no stranger to creativity. In September 2023, Michelle had a major impact as a panelist on the session “What the Arts Taught Me About e-Discovery” during Relativity Fest.
She also participated in several other Fest events. For example, every year, our team at Relativity jumps at the opportunity to bring students from Corliss High School (a local STEM-focused school in Chicago and Relativity’s most recent CPS Technology Grant recipient school) to our annual user conference to learn about our industry. I know you’ll have a hard time believing this, but in a room full of high schoolers, you could hear a pin drop. Nevertheless, Michelle gave our students a peek into the dynamic world of e-discovery and showed them that you can come from any background and thrive in this space. Michelle and I also had some fun during her Fest Desk appearance, which you can check out here.
Michelle got candid, too, as a speaker at our 2023 Women in Law: AI Bootcamp. And while we have a Vegas “what happens here, stays here” mentality at those bootcamps, I do want to share how Michelle inspired me—and a room full of women from legal technology—as she got real about navigating our industry as a woman: “While I can struggle with mom guilt, I love that I can show my kids that their mom is hitting major milestones in her career.”
And finally, Michelle also took this industry's rising burnout problem head-on in 2023 by serving as a panelist on the “Prioritizing Professionalism and Mental Health: Building a Resilient e-Discovery community” session at Georgetown Law Advanced e-Discovery Institute last year.
“After the panel, so many people lined up to talk and ask questions that it quickly became one of the most discussed panels,” Michelle said, “so we knew we had to continue the conversation beyond the session.” The response from the community prompted Michelle to become involved in The Mind-Budget Connection, a volunteer group of attorneys, e-discovery professionals, and researchers who are looking to address burnout in the legal technology industry. (You can learn more about this group and ways you can get involved here.)
I know: my head is also spinning from Michelle’s year. But I already can’t wait to see what she has in store for us in 2024!
Daniel Gold
Daniel Gold starts his day at 4:30 a.m. Yes, you read that right: 4:30 a.m. After seeing the year he’s had, I may start taking up the habit!
Since being named an AI Visionary in our 2023 class, Daniel has had some major moments—like being named principal at BDO.
“This was a milestone that validates the work I’ve done for over 20 years in this space,” he reflected.
It’s been amazing to see that the Daniel Fan Club (president: me) represented throughout the Midwest, with the announcement making both Kansas City and St. Louis-based business journals and being cited in the “Who’s Who in Legal.” But Daniel views this as a win for not only himself, but for his team.
“There’s no way that this happens in isolation,” Daniel said. “This promotion reflects the teamwork and what we’ve been able to achieve together as a team in these last four years.”
Chances are, if you've worked with Daniel in the past, you’ve gotten a “hey, I’ve got a crazy idea...” text or email. This move to principal enables Daniel to be at the table, ready to make decisions that help BDO focus on innovation and expansion—and take each crazy idea to action, quicker.
Here’s an example. If you tuned in when BDO’s Jared Crafton graced the Fest Desk this year, then you’ve privy to BDO’s different innovations. When I sat down with Jared, I learned about BDO’s in-house AI chatbot for organization: ChatBDO. Daniel immediately took notice of this application and wanted to collaborate with Jared.
“ChatGPT was a huge disruption to not only the legal tech industry, but the world. I immediately started wondering if we could take the success of ChatBDO and BDO’s implementations of in-house GPT large language models that sits behind our clients' firewalls and put it behind our firewall to ensure it’s highly secure and is only learning from the company’s Relativity data, rather than the world’s,” Daniel explained to me. Being the visionary he is, he couldn’t stop visualizing dropping ChatBDO in Athenegy.
“I kept imagining this little box on the Relativity dashboard,” Daniel said. “A box where our clients could just ask ‘what custodian has most of my data?’ and they would be given an answer. When I told the team, they immediately jumped at the idea and started building out the project plan.”
Ultimately, an integration with OpenAI’s GPT model was added to Athenagy—BDO’s customized application—and is a first-of-its-kind solution that provides legal professionals with transparency and detailed analytics throughout the data lifecycle. This innovation has had an immediate impact for BDO’s clients, which fuels Daniel’s “why” for his work.
“It’s easy to get caught up in or distracted by the tech, especially during this boom we’re experiencing with artificial intelligence,” Daniel told me, “but I always ground myself with our core values: helping people thrive every day. Putting people first, embracing change, and empowerment through knowledge.”
Daniel (somehow) finds the time to dive into the human side of legal technology by co-hosting BDO’s Legal Tech Talk podcast. Daniel and Jared have sat down with some Stellar Women favorites—like Nicole Tineo, Justice Tanya Kennedy, and Gunster’s Christine Pain, to name a few.
“We’re able to have such rich and exciting discussions about the technology because of the talents that the people bring to the tech,” Daniel said. “Even when we’re in the weeds, it always goes back to the human experience. We talk DEI, burnout, and how people can make the most of technology they work with.”
Daniel has a passion for making technology digestible and understandable: “By the end of 2023, we got back up to speed on getting back to connecting with people in-person,” Daniel said, “so I’m excited to bring back the ‘old school’ lunch-and-learns and hit the road in 2024.”
After hearing about everything Daniel accomplished in 2023 and his plans for 2024, the 4:30 wakeup time makes a lot more sense; he needs the extra four hours to work. But while I envisioned Daniel waking up at 4:30 and immediately logging in, Daniel shifted my vision: “I start my day with a minimum of 10 minutes of meditation, followed by journaling on gratitude.”
“It’s not just training my mind to be more aware and focused, but I’m working to reduce my overall mental load, so I can be fully present during the day,” he shared.
In a world where it’s too easy to get distracted by the buzzes and dings, Daniel’s perspective gave me the “permission” to slow down and take stock of what’s around me. In the (painful) 10 minutes of meditation I did, I was left filled with gratitude, excitement, and inspiration—and thanks to the community around me. I hope you’re able to take a page from Daniel’s book and do the same.
While I plan on taking up some meditation in 2024, Daniel still has some convincing to do to get me up at 4:30 a.m. But, if I’m guaranteed to have a quarter of the success that Daniel had in 2023—I may just have to change the snooze setting on my alarm clock.
Recommended for you
