Today I had the pleasure of attending a continuing legal education (CLE) class. For those of you that aren’t attorneys, CLEs are professional education courses required for attorneys and some other legal professionals to maintain their licenses to practice law.

These programs ensure, at least ostensibly, that legal practitioners stay updated on the latest developments in the law, legal ethics, and practice management. CLE requirements vary by state and jurisdiction, often mandating a specific number of credit hours to be completed within a set time frame.

Since the practice of law is not immune to hustle culture, every event is an opportunity for networking. During this particular CLE, held over Zoom, the folks putting the course on suggested that everyone could drop their LinkedIn profiles in the chat to connect with other users.

Quickly, as you might expect in a chatroom with ~500 folks, the chat become overrun with links and brief descriptions of individual practice areas.

Rather than scroll through the chat to pull out all of the links, I saved the chat as a text file and used a local LLM (for the sake of privacy) with a prompt asking for a list of all the LinkedIn links provided. After a few moments I had an easy list to work my way down from.

Had I wished to further narrow down which individuals I was interested in connecting with, I could have asked for a list of only those folks that indicated they were barred in New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, or practiced in an area relating to privacy and intellectual property.

These are the use cases for LLMs that excite me most.