The Geek in Review closes 2025 with Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer welcoming back Sarah Glassmeyer and Niki Black for round two of the annual scorecard, equal parts receipts, reality check, and forward look into 2026. The conversation opens with a heartfelt remembrance of Kim Stein, a beloved KM community builder whose generosity showed up in conference dinners, happy hours, and day to day support across vendors and firms. With Kim’s spirit in mind, the panel steps into the year-end ritual: name the surprises, own the misses, and offer a few grounded bets for what comes next.

Last year’s thesis predicted a shift from novelty to utility, yet 2025 felt closer to a rolling hype loop. Glassmeyer frames generative AI as a multi-purpose knife dropped on every desk at once, which left many teams unsure where to start, even when budgets already committed. Black brings the data lens: general-purpose gen AI use surged among lawyers, especially solos and small firms, while law firm adoption rose fast compared with earlier waves such as cloud computing, which crawled for years before pandemic pressure moved the needle. The group also flags a new social dynamic, status-driven tool chasing, plus a quiet trend toward business-tier ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude as practical options for many matters when price tags for legal-only platforms sit out of reach for smaller shops.

Hallucinations stay on the agenda, with the panel resisting both extremes: doom posts and fan club hype. Glassmeyer recounts a founder’s quip, “hallucinations are a feature, not a bug,” then pivots to an older lesson from KeyCite and Shepard’s training: verification never goes away, and lawyers always owed diligence, even before LLMs. Black adds a cautionary tale from recent sanctions, where a lawyer ran the same research through a stack of tools, creating a telephone effect and a document nobody fully controlled. Lambert notes a bright spot from the past six months: legal research outputs improved as vendors paired vector retrieval with legal hierarchy data, including court relationships and citation treatment, reducing off-target answers even while perfection stays out of reach.

From there, the conversation turns to mashups across the market. Clio’s acquisition of vLex becomes a headline example, raising questions about platform ecosystems, pricing power, and whether law drifts toward an Apple versus Android split. Black predicts integration work across billing, practice management, and research will matter as much as M&A, with general tech giants looming behind the scenes. Glassmeyer cheers broader access for smaller firms, while still warning about consolidation scars from legal publishing history and the risk of feature decay once startups enter corporate layers. The panel lands on a simple preference: interoperability, standards, and clean APIs beat a future where a handful of owners dictate terms.

On governance, Black rejects surveillance fantasies and argues for damage control, strong training, and safe experimentation spaces, since shadow usage already happens on personal devices. Gebauer pushes for clearer value stories, and the guests agree early ROI shows up first in back office workflows, with longer-run upside tied to pricing models, AFAs, and buyer pushback on inflated hours. For staying oriented amid fractured social channels, the crew trades resources: AI Law Librarians, Legal Tech Week, Carolyn Elefant’s how-to posts, Moonshots, Nate B. Jones, plus Ed Zitron’s newsletter for a wider business lens. The crystal ball segment closes with a shared unease around AI finance, a likely shakeout among thinly funded tools, and a reminder to keep the human network strong as 2026 arrives.

For decades, “the record” has meant one thing: a text transcript built by skilled stenographers, trusted by courts, and treated as the backbone of due process. In this episode of The Geek in Review, Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert sit down with JP Son, Verbit’s Chief Legal Officer, and Matan Barak, Head of Legal Product, to talk about what happens when a labor shortage, rising demand, and better speech technology collide. Verbit has been in legal work since day one, supporting court reporting agencies behind the scenes, but their latest push aims to modernize the full arc of proceedings, from depositions through courtroom workflows, with faster turnaround and more usable outputs.

A core tension sits at the center of the conversation: innovation versus legitimacy. Marlene presses on whether digital records carry the same defensibility as stenographic ones, and JP frames Verbit’s posture as support, not replacement. Verbit is not a court reporting agency; their angle is tooling that helps certified professionals and agencies produce better outcomes, including real-time workflows that once required heavy manual effort. The result is less “robots replace reporters” and more “reporters with better gear,” which feels like the only way this transition avoids an industry food fight in every courthouse hallway.

From there, the discussion shifts into the practical, lawyer-facing side: LegalVisor as a “virtual second chair.” JP describes it as distinct from the official transcript, a real-time layer built to surface insights, track progress, and support strategy while the deposition is happening. Matan adds the design story, discovery work, shadowing, and interviews to build for what second chairs are already doing, hunting inconsistencies, chasing exhibits, and keeping the outline on track. A key theme: the transcript is not going away, because lawyers still rely on it for clients, remote teammates, and quick backtracking, but the value climbs when the transcript turns into a live workspace with search, references, and outline coverage in front of you while testimony unfolds.

Accuracy and trust show up as recurring guardrails. Greg pokes at the “99 percent accurate” claims floating around the market, and Matan makes the point every litigator appreciates, the missing one percent contains the word that flips meaning. Verbit’s “human in the loop” posture and its Captivate approach focus on pushing accuracy toward the level legal settings require, including case-specific preparation by extracting names and terms from documents to tune recognition in context. The episode also tackles confidentiality head-on, with JP drawing a hard line: Verbit does not use client data to train generative models, and they keep business pipelines separate across verticals.

Finally, the crystal ball question lands where courts love to resist, changing the definition of “the record.” Marlene asks whether the future record becomes searchable, AI-tagged video rather than text-first transcripts. JP says not soon, pointing to centuries of text-based infrastructure and the slow grind of institutional acceptance. Matan calls the shift inevitable, arriving in pieces, feature by feature, so the system evolves without pretending it is swapping the engine mid-flight. Along the way, there are glimpses of what comes next, including experiments borrowing media tech, such as visual description to interpret behavior cues in video. The big takeaway feels simple: the record stays sacred, but the work around it no longer needs to stay stuck.

Listen on mobile platforms: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

[Special Thanks to ⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠