¶ Initial Tariff Refund Outlook
times is is tariffs. I guess pre the preoffs going into Iran as of two what, two days ago. But um the tariffs got blocked by the Supreme Court if I'm not mistaken, what was it, a week or two weeks ago?
Yeah, I think uh a week ago Friday.
Okay. And then so there's been this chatter of of refunds on tariffs. What's your take on that and what might occur in the next three to six to twelve months?
Well the Supreme Court was I think intentionally vague as to how that would work. There wasn't really a reference to it in the main opinion and the only reference came in Justice Kavanaugh's dissent, which is essentially how would this work? uh with the Treasury Department. Uh before the decision had even been filed, we filed lawsuits on behalf of a bunch of different clients in the Court of International Trade. So those are all still pending
we we we're continuing to sign people up, you know, to try to seek those refunds. That seems to be the best course of action right now as we kind of seek guidance on it. The Trump administration has perhaps not surprisingly
not been extremely willing to just hand out refunds uh to everyone that that claims they want one. They've indicated that people are gonna have to file lawsuits for them. So that's that's what we're doing. Obviously we hope that you know, there is somewhat of a, you know, streamlined process for this, uh, you know, because people are going to be filing left and right, you know, to try to get
some type of recourse as to how exactly it's gonna play out. Obviously we're hopeful it's not something that's gonna take a number of years as, you know, President Trump suggested that it would. But right now that does seem to be the mechanism which is, you know, filing these lawsuits and trying to get a refund that way. But a as to how long it's gonna take and and what exactly that entails Yeah.
¶ Guest and Firm Introduction
Welcome to the AI Weekly Brief where we bring in business leaders that share practical AI tools and tips. Five and ten year predictions for how AI will shape their industry. Morning Michael. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.
Thanks so much for having me.
So you're based out on the east coast, I understand.
Yeah, I'm based right outside of Washington.
So Michael, could you share with the audience a little bit about your background and your story and what your day to day looks like today? Sure.
So, you know, my, you know, practice for the last, you know, almost twenty years now has been primarily in business litigation. So done a bunch of different type uh over the years, even did some criminal at one point. But with this crack firm, GKG, it It's a transportation based firm, largely. We still do other, you know, business matters, employment, contract negotiation, things like that. But the main focus of the firm, you know, is on transportation issues.
trucking, maritime, rail, things of that nature.
Love it. And what is kind of a typical week look like for you? Today we're Tuesday recording this. What does a Monday look like for Michael?
Well I was uh drafting some discovery requests yesterday, uh responding to some discovery requests this morning. We have a big case right now as well with the federal energy commission a an oil pipeline case. So we're getting ready for a conference for that. So, you know, reviewing materials, settlement proposals.
things like that. But you know, gen generally speaking, week to week, you know, it's just a litigation practice. So motions, discovery, contract review, negotiations, you know, things like that.
And how many folks uh work full time at?
We have twelve attorneys and then probably another six staff members that help us based all over the country and we even have a guy who's down in Argentina at this point. So For a small firm we're we're fairly spread out. He he does regulatory work. Um so he he's not so much into litigation. But you know, our litigation practice, you know, despite the fact we're based in D C, you know, really
does go all over the country. You know, I have a lot of cases in New York, you know, a lot of the shipping cases arise out of there. I have stuff down in Georgia, Tennessee, we have litigations in California. So, you know, what we typically do is if it's It's somewhere that we don't have an attorney that's licensed, we'll associate with local counsel and kind of split up the work that way, you know,'cause our clients, you know, depending on where their cargo is or is being held, you know, that
you know, require us to file something in, you know, Texas or, you know, Florida, really anywhere.
¶ Tariff Refund Litigation Strategies
So you're in the right area. So the topic du jour right now a lot of times is is tariffs. I guess pre the prefs going into Iran as of two what, two days ago. But um the tariffs got blocked by the Supreme Court, if I'm not mistaken, what was it, a week or two weeks ago?
Yeah, I think uh we could go Friday.
Okay. And then so there's been this chatter of of refunds on tariffs. What's your take on that and what might occur in the next three to six to twelve months?
Well the Supreme Court was I think intentionally vague as to how that would work. There wasn't really a reference to it in the main opinion and the only reference came in Justice Kavanaugh's dissent, which is essentially how would this work? uh with the Treasury Department. Uh before the decision had even been filed, we filed lawsuits on behalf of a bunch of different clients in the Court of International Trade. So those are all still pending
we we were continuing to sign people up, you know, to try to seek those refunds. That seems to be the best course of action right now as we kind of seek guidance on it. The Trump administration has perhaps not surprisingly
not been extremely willing to just hand out refunds uh to everyone that that claims they want one. They've indicated that people are gonna have to file lawsuits for them. So that's that's what we're doing. Obviously we hope that you know, there is somewhat of a, you know, streamlined process for this, uh, you know, because people are going to be filing left and right, you know, to try to get
some type of recourse as to how exactly it's gonna play out. Obviously we're hopeful it's not something that's gonna take a number of years as, you know, President Trump suggested that it would. But right now that does seem to be the mechanism which is, you know, filing these lawsuits and trying to get a refund that way. But a as to how long it's gonna take and and what exactly that entails That's something we're still trying to figure out along with everyone else.
Interesting. And I was talking to another individual in the in the shipping space and there was some interesting workarounds when tariffs were in place. Um like for example here in San Diego, there's this big Rolo ship, right? The the ship that bring cars from from I think Germany, it seems like,'cause there was a lot of B and Ws and Mercedes coming off of it.
But they would sit outside of like, I guess, US waters and then come in, it seemed like in in a new way. Are there any interesting kind of tidbits or or anecdotes that you can share with us on how folks were getting around maybe some of these tariffs and As they were kind of coming on and off, on and off.
Yeah, it's uh well you have to be very careful. know what we, you know, did encounter sometimes is that people were trying to get around the tariffs, not necessarily following all the rules, which obviously we had to uh strongly caution people against, because, you know, it was a main focus for this administration as
it would not be terribly surprising for everyone to learn. So, you know, you do have to be very careful about, you know, making sure that, you know, everything is declared properly because the penalties for avoiding it are
Very extreme.
You know, as far as the the type of timing stuff, you know, if you have that kind of flexibility where, you know, you could delay shipments or keep them on the water while, you know, things are going up and down, you know, that's that's certainly something that we've seen. The problem is, you know, that that requires a lot of cooperation, right? That from the carrier on down, everyone kind of has to be on board with that. And these large carriers in our experience typically
You know, that they dealt with that as this look, this is your problem. We're getting this thing into port. You know, you figure out what to do with it. So, you know, again, people did try to get creative and and delay certain shipments, but you know, with the the volume that you know even some of our smaller clients are are operating with, that just made it extremely difficult to do with any type of you know, certainty or or a kind of a pinpoint nature of it.
Gotcha. And when you said there were some that were gray area or maybe illegal in some senses, is it kind of in the lines of we're gonna pass it through a a different country that has more favorable tariffs kind of thing?
Yeah, there would be some of that where, you know, there would be questions as to what the real country of origin was. And, you know, that that was taking place internationally as well, right? That that folks, you know, in China were, you know, trying to circumvent the rules by, you know, sending their goods to
say Vietnam or another country that had you know lower tariffs at any given moment. You'd also see, you know, things where, you know, people were manipulating the price of Again, all of this is is very illegal. And actually carries criminal penalties as well, depending on the circumstances. But, you know, obviously some people felt that, you know, they needed to kind of take those risks because of the financial implications and it was
you know, putting people out of business, unfortunately, in in a lot of cases. Um yeah, I mean that's that's I don't know some of that tough type of stuff we seen. You saw, I mean, thankfully we were able to talk people out of doing that in in certain circumstances before that happened. But, you know, with anything it's just very important to
you know, be mindful of all the the customs rules. I I don't do a ton of customs work, but the the rules and the classifications are uh very specific and intense. So It's important that you you follow all of those, especially with an administration that's really focused on it.
¶ AI Tools and Confidentiality Concerns
Interesting. So taking the conversation out to another big topic that's been the last, I guess, three years, AI. We'd love to hear Michael on how, you know, what sort of tools you and your team use on a kind of week to week basis.
Yeah, so we have AI software within our legal research platform, you know, that we use for our clients. And, you know, it's something that we're trying to adjust to to keep up with the needs of our clients. So we have a, you know, AI software that assists with things such as legal research, you know, asking it questions and it'll, you know, come up with answers and cases and things like that.
And, you know, it's come along a bit from where it was, you know, certainly not through the software we use or the problems of the AI just creating cases uh out of whole cloth to support their points. But, you know, there still are real issues. You know, I had something recently where I was, you know, using it to try to search for something and it said, Oh yeah, this definitively
You know, create this case shows it it creates a fiduciary duty under these circumstances. When you go to the case, the words fiduciary duty are not in there at all. So, you know, it is a tool, but you know, for our purposes, it can be limited in getting that type of information.
But I think, you know, it is it is useful if you have, you know, certain documents, you know, if you want to compare two versions of a contract, right? Sometimes people aren't kind enough to red line it for you. You know, you can you can put those in. Um, you know, and kind of just compare what's different, things like that. So I think that's the most effective use of it at this point is, you know, that type of, you know, create a list.
help with preparing a certain, you know, interrogatory type question or document request that we do in discovery. You know, sometimes it it just can help, you know, the thought process along of, you know, what's the best way to word this or things like that. use Westlaw. I'd I'd rather not say that if we could cut this part out. I don't wanna no free ads, as I hear on so many podcasts, but uh so I I'd rather not say but it's Westlaw just for your
Yeah, yeah. I've heard that uh from a bunch of attorneys Westlide. It seems like they have a kind of an AI tool within that that's been getting better, which is useful. Yeah. Very interesting. And then do you use uh any of the kind of big five L LMs as well? Do you guys have licenses with like OpenAI or Anthropic or anything of that nature? No.
No, we don't and part of the issue with that is the confidentiality issue. There was a recent case out of the Second Circuit where a client was using Claude to kind of assist with this case. Right. Like uh helping him prepare communications to his lawyer, asking the AI to, you know, uh s comment on strategy. and things of that nature and the court found that it waived the attorney client privilege. So that really has us focused on this issue. We've sent client alerts about it.
We've talked to people that we have ongoing cases with that look these these more open AI things, you know, could constitute a waiver, you know, of the privilege. And, you know, for our purposes you know, we're concerned about just generally protecting the confidentiality of our clients information, you know, because with the services that we use, there are certain protections that we know are built in.
the data gets deleted after a certain amount of time, they agree not to use it for any other purpose, things of that nature, where with the AI ones it's a little bit more unknown. So we typically don't use those types of Of things, certainly not with any client information. Just again to to try to protect ourselves given our you know responsibilities to keep everything confidential.
bursting and so if I had followed that thread correctly. It was kind of an email back and forth that mentioned something like Claude, right? And then that opened the Pandora's box to okay, and now we c we get to bring in all of the material that was your kind of claude chats and whatnot, which is interesting. So
I guess uh perhaps uh it it could be interesting maybe to see and this maybe a segue to the last part of our conversation, but when we're talking about, you know, how law firms and and clients and and these alums might interact, I mean, if there's kind of a client attorney provided, you know, from your firm LLM that I can use as your as your client that will keep the client attorney privilege.
That would be hugely beneficial from from that vantage point. And perhaps it's got some kind of training and some things that you've kind of put in that's IP. that, you know, is special to GKG and perhaps it lets you serve more clients or kind of deal with some of those lower end questions that you might not want to answer over email over and over and over again that I'm sure you do.
¶ AI's Future in Legal Practice
So segueing the conversation, maybe that part, your predictions, how do you see maybe the, you know, AI change the legal space in the next like twelve months, the next three years, and then the next twelve uh maybe ten years?
Yeah, you know, I think it's just gonna be an ongoing evolution and and that's something we look at, you know, all the time. You know, typically folks in in our areas work by the hour, right? And that that is you know, while there's some kind of flat fee cases, the majority of things are done by the hour. And clients have a have a reasonable expectation that, you know, you're maximizing
uh your time in the most efficient way possible, which you know, of course, is our responsibility and something we take seriously. So, you know, if we were not incorporating some of these AI tools, you know, it would be a disservice to them and and that's a reasonable expectation on their part. You know, as these AI tools continue to get more and more effective, where you know, we think they are reliable and assuming there are, you know.
protections in place to to safeguard the information. You know, there's been some talk in the in the legal industry about shifting away potentially from, you know, doing things by the hour. You know, whether that's a shift to more flat fees. for certain projects, whether it's some type of subscription model, you know, the the legal industry is going to have to keep pace because, you know, especially those sophisticated clients in the in the business space, you know, they're using AI themselves.
Right. And in in their industries and in their work. And so we're gonna have to keep up as well. And you know, we're we're doing everything we can to kind of maximize the benefits from it while at the same time, you know, recognizing it's current limitations and you know the potential hazards that it poses.
Any any big hot takes for ten years down the line?
Ten years. like everyone else, you know, I think it will have potential implications on staffing. You know, are you going to need as much support in the future? I am concerned about, you know, associate younger attorney development, right? whether that's them actually learning how to write properly or research effectively, you know, how much of that is gonna be just turned over to AI.
That that I think remains to be seen. Again, we're not there yet, but look, these tools just keep getting better and better. So we're all gonna have to adjust and and keep up as we go. Well thankfully for right now there's there's there's still enough wrong with it that we still have to do that.
Right. And that hallucination's happening. If you had a magic wand and let's say, you know, in the next year, is there kind of one or two low hang free use cases within kind of your firm that you would love to solve with technology? And
You know, I think that's especially on you know, some of the larger cases with you know, massive amounts of discovery, right? Tens of thousands of pages. You know, the the increased use of AI is going to make it much easier to kind of find the the proverbial
you know, needle in a haystack for that, you know, versus that when I was a a young associate, I'd be locked in a conference room with a a wall full of binders and told, you know, look through look to the paper copies and find stuff that's relevant. You know, now we're you know, the the search functions and things like that, you know, are are are improving day by day.
So to me, you know, that's gonna be something that's very beneficial for us moving forward is just the kind of increased ability to use those tools to kind of pull out the the most relevant information, you know, key emails from certain people, you know, that that goes beyond just a, you know, PDS search, right? I mean, even that's not exactly AI, but that developed
in recent years has been beneficial. And if even you can get some level of analysis, you know, you're it's gonna save time because nobody nobody wants to and nobody wants to pay for someone to look through, you know, 35,000 pages of document. Which which happens in litigation.
Absolutely. That sounds like a nightmare. Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining me on the on the podcast. If folks want to work with you, where can they find you?
The best way to reach us is uh GKG Law dot com. You know, we have a a wide variety of of different practice groups. We've got again a lot of transportation based stuff, but just general business as well, you know, corporate formation, litigation. Um you know, nonprofit formation, things of that nature. So we're uh we're a pretty wide ranging firm for not having too many attorneys, but that would be the best way to find us.
Thank you for joining me, Michael. Have a great day.