Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast: Recent Episodes
Percipient - Chad Main
Technically Legal is a podcast about legal tech, legal innovation and the impact of tech on the law and legal industry.
In each episode we interview an innovator in the legal industry. Guests discuss how technology is changing the practice of law and how they are implementing legal technology and innovation into their legal departments and law firms.
The podcast is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled legal services provider. Chad launched Percipient on the belief that when technology is leveraged correctly, it makes legal teams more effective.
In this episode April Miller Boise, with stints as Chief Legal Officer at Intel and managing partner at Thompson Hine, shares insights from her career. The conversation explores the shifting dynamics between corporate legal departments and outside counsel and the necessity of embracing legal technology. April also provides advice for junior lawyers on developing long-term expertise and trusted relationships in an AI-driven environment.
Things we Talk About in this Episode * Career progression: From Wall Street M&A partner and law firm managing partner to Chief Legal Officer. * The fundamental differences between driving P&L at a law firm versus serving on an executive leadership team in-house. * Addressing the widening gap between corporate expectations and traditional law firm service delivery models. * Experience navigating global manufacturing, innovation, and supply chain transformations at Eaton and Intel. * Practical approaches to generative and agentic AI adoption in legal departments and outside counsel. * Key attributes for modern legal talent: Intellectual curiosity, agility, and comfort with calculated risks. * Career advice for young lawyers: Balancing AI efficiency tools with the 10,000-hour principle of skill-building. * Why historical legal tech struggled to scale and how current enterprise AI investments are fundamentally altering the legal landscape.
In this episode, theoretical neuroscientist Vivienne Ming discusses her new book, Robot Proof - When Machines Have All the Answers, Build Better People. The conversation examines the intersection of artificial intelligence and knowledge work, exploring how professionals can adapt to an increasingly automated economy.
The discussion contrasts the limitations of basic AI task automation with the advantages of human-AI collaboration—the "cyborg" model—for solving complex, ill-posed problems. Ming highlights her research on forecasting market outcomes, the critical role of endogenous motivation, and how the legal industry and other elite professions must rethink entry-level training.
Key Topics Discussed * Theoretical Neuroscience and Early AI: Ming's background and the evolution of machine learning models from early academic research to modern agentic AI. * The Polymarket Experiment: An analysis comparing the forecasting accuracy of standalone AI, unassisted humans, and human-AI collaborators, revealing the superiority of deep human-machine integration. * Automation vs. Augmentation: The pitfalls of the traditional "human-in-the-loop" model and why replacing menial tasks often neglects essential human problem-solving skills. * Well-Posed vs. Ill-Posed Problems: Identifying the specific areas where AI excels (algorithmic, factual answers) and where human intelligence remains superior (navigating uncertainty and undefined parameters). * Labor Disruption and Economic Shifts: Examining historical technological revolutions, the Jevons paradox, and the future demand for specific, highly adaptable human skill sets. * Endogenous Motivation: How internal drivers like curiosity, resilience, and perspective-taking predict professional success more accurately than standard extrinsic incentives. * Practical AI Strategies: Actionable methods for professionals to refine their skills, including using AI as a critical "nemesis" to challenge assumptions and encourage deep, effortful processing. * The Future of Elite Professions: The macro-level challenges facing organizations in developing junior talent—such as associate attorneys—when the entry-level tasks traditionally used for training are automated.
Things We Talk About in this Episode
- Socos: Vivienne Ming's philanthropy and research newsletter (socos.org).
- Thinking, Fast and Slow: Authored by Daniel Kahneman.
- Anthropic Research: A study published in Science detailing the productivity of AI-assisted programmers.
- BCG AI Study: Research analyzing AI integration and performance among management consultants.
- Raj Chetty: Economic research regarding peer role modeling, education, and socioeconomic mobility.
This episode features a discussion between host Chad Main and Rebecca Anderson, Head of Legal EMEA, Associate General Counsel at Microsoft, regarding the integration of artificial intelligence in corporate legal departments. The conversation covers Rebecca's career progression from a law firm associate to an international in-house counsel role. The core of the discussion examines Microsoft's internal AI deployment strategies, including the shift from personal productivity to intent engineering. Additionally, the episode addresses changing expectations for outside counsel regarding AI adoption and outlines the necessary skills for future legal professionals.
Episode Highlights
- AI Deployment Phases: AI integration in legal departments progresses through three stages: personal productivity (prompt engineering), context engineering (curating institutional knowledge), and intent engineering (autonomous agents operating with human guardrails).
- Scaling Legal Support: Corporate legal teams can manage high volumes of client requests by utilizing AI-driven triage systems overseen by paralegals, which allows senior lawyers to focus on complex, high-value legal work.
- Expectations for Outside Counsel: Corporate clients expect law firms to implement AI strategies to improve efficiency, which will likely shift the industry's economic focus from billable hours to value-based billing.
- Future Legal Skills: While AI literacy and data curation are critical, foundational skills such as human judgment, emotional intelligence, and strategic business context remain essential for legal professionals.
Things we talk about: Copilot for Legal
In this episode of Technically Legal, veteran patent lawyer Laurence Brown and Partner at the UK-based intellectual property firm EIP discusses the evolving concept of the "AI-native" law firm and how EIP is actively navigating this transition through their hybrid intelligence service, Visser AI.
Laurence shares insights from his 25-year career, discussing how EIP uniquely integrates litigators and patent attorneys to provide comprehensive IP services. The core of the conversation centers on Visser AI, named after the renowned European patent attorney Derk Visser, which leverages specialist AI tools to accelerate patent drafting and prosecution. The discussion covers the shifting economics of legal billing, the transition from billable hours to fixed fees, and how AI is actively redesigning traditional, linear patent workflows. Laurence also believes AI not only delivers faster, more cost-effective results for clients without compromising quality, but also makes the day-to-day work of attorneys more engaging.
Things We Talk About in this Episode Defining AI-Native: A true AI-native firm goes beyond simply prompting a frontier model; it involves fundamentally redesigning workflows to fully leverage AI technology.
The Economics of AI: The efficiency gained through AI allows firms to offer competitive fixed fees, providing cost reductions for clients while maintaining law firm profitability.
Redesigning Workflows: AI tools enable parallel workflows in patent drafting, such as senior attorneys structuring claims while juniors draft the description, breaking the traditional linear process.
Specialist vs. Generalist AI: When it comes to complex patent law, purpose-built platforms like Patently significantly outperform general-purpose LLMs in quality and contextual understanding.
European AI Regulation: The European patent industry's conservative nature has led to risk-centered AI guidelines, but the conversation is shifting toward the potential disservice of not utilizing these tools to assist clients.
Tyler Foreman, the Vice President of AI at Rocket Lawyer, joins the show to discuss the intersection of artificial intelligence and the legal industry. Foreman shares his untraditional legal tech career path, spanning engineering at Intel, drone data analytics, and ultimately making the move to legal via contract lifecycle management (CLM) at DocuSign, before diving into his current work at Rocket Lawyer helping to provide legal resources for small-to-medium businesses and individuals.
The conversation focuses on how modern generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a legal operating system to simplify contract reviews, document drafting, and client intake, while maintaining essential connections to human attorneys.
We catch up with legal tech entrepreneur Nathan Wenzel to discuss his journey from founding and exiting SimpleLegal to launching his newest venture, LegalOperator.ai (formerly Lexiomatic). Nathan shares insights on the evolution of private equity (PE) structures, the shifting economics of the enterprise software market, and how artificial intelligence is disrupting traditional software development and corporate legal operations.
Key Takeaways * The Reality of Private Equity: Nathan breaks down the differences between growth PE, transition PE, and dividend-focused PE, highlighting his experience with operational scaling post-acquisition. * The Death of Overpriced SaaS: With AI lowering the barrier to entry for building software, traditional $100,000+ enterprise software pricing models are facing immense pressure to become lean, affordable, and transparent. * The "Vibe Coding" Phenomenon: While "vibe coding" (loosely describing an app to an AI) works for quick prototypes, building enterprise-grade software still requires meticulous specifications, security infrastructure (like SOC 2 compliance), and robust edge-case testing.
Jamie Tso and Ray Sun, the founders of LegalQuants, discuss a fundamental shift in the legal profession: the transition from legal engineering to "legal quant" work. The conversation explores how technically fluent lawyers are using vibe coding, frontier AI models, and first-principles thinking to move beyond mere efficiency and toward the complete redesign of legal services.
Jamie and Ray share their backgrounds in Big Law and their journeys into building custom legal tech tools. They delve into the origins of the LegalQuants community—an exclusive, invitation-only network of "builders"—and discuss the future of the billable hour in an era where AI can automate routine intellectual labor.
Episode Highlights * Jamie and Ray's origin stories: From annotating mutual fund prospectuses to early experiments with machine learning and TensorFlow. * Ray's background as one of the world's first Legal Engineers and the creation of his Global AI Regulation Tracker. * Defining the Legal Quant: How they differ from traditional Legal Engineers by seeking "alpha" and redesigning legal workflows from first principles. * The growth of the LegalQuants community: From a small WhatsApp group to a global network of elite lawyer-builders. * The "Unicorn Talent" gap: Why the next generation of elite legal work is defined by the operator, not the tool. * The death of the friction-based pricing model and the future of value-based billing. * Stress-testing Claude and Anthropic's Legal Plugin: Why the "ceiling" of AI utility is set by the lawyer's ability to design custom skills.
Things We Talk About in this Episode * LegalQuants Substack: legalquants.substack.com – Weekly digests and deep dives into legal AI strategy. * Global AI Regulation Tracker: techieray.com – Ray Sun's interactive map of worldwide AI laws and policies.
We welcome back Sabastian Niles, President and Chief Legal Officer at Salesforce, to discuss his recent "Open Letter to Law Firms." As the legal industry hits a critical inflection point, Sabastian argues that the era of "AI theater" and small-scale pilots is over.
The conversation dives deep into the Innovator's Dilemma facing law firms, the shift toward agentic AI, and how firms must reimagine their business models to remain competitive. Sabastian highlights that legal professionals are uniquely positioned to lead the charge in trusted AI transformation, provided they embrace transparency, data integration, and shared efficiency gains with their clients.
Specifically, he offers four systems law firms and other service providers must establish if they want to succeed in the AI era:
- System of Engagement: A unified digital interface that replaces fragmented tools with seamless, real-time collaboration between firms and clients.
- System of Agency: An ethically governed AI framework that scales firm capacity and reimagines service delivery while maintaining strict human oversight and compliance.
- System of Work: A trusted, enterprise-grade platform that integrates daily professional applications into a cohesive, high-performance workflow.
- System of Context: A secure "single source of truth" for client data that ensures strategic counsel is grounded in history while protecting attorney-client privilege.
Other Things We Talk About in this Episode * The End of the Pilot Era: Moving beyond experimentation to integrated, unified AI platforms is no longer optional—it is a prerequisite for competitiveness. * The Relationship Challenge: AI should be used to break down internal silos, allowing firms to bring their "tribal knowledge" and collective intelligence to every client engagement. * System of Agency: A shift from manual workflows to "agentic" systems where AI agents handle triage, research, and routine queries (e.g., Salesforce's Outside Counsel Support Agent). * Value-Based Evolution: Law firms must navigate the friction between the billable hour and AI-driven efficiency by focusing on superior outcomes and shared savings. * Trust as Propulsion: In legal services, trust isn't just a guardrail; it's a growth lever. Mastering "Trusted Agentics" ensures human-aligned AI that respects privilege and confidentiality.
Ayana Dow, Senior Counsel at the DeFi Education Fund (DEF) shares her unique career trajectory from Big Law and Capitol Hill to the forefront of decentralized finance policy. The discussion centers on the critical need for regulatory clarity in crypto, the distinction between decentralized protocols and centralized entities, and the ongoing efforts to educate lawmakers on blockchain technology.
Key takeaways include an analysis of how current market structure bills might shift oversight to the CFTC and the importance of protecting software developers to ensure the continued innovation of DeFi systems.
Episode Highlights * From Big Law to D.C. Policy: Dow discusses her transition from traditional M&A and regulatory work to policy-focused roles. * Experience on the Hill: Insights from Dow's time as a policy fellow for Congressman Jim Clyburn and her internship at the CFTC. * The Tennis Connection: How the real-time problem-solving skills learned as a collegiate tennis player apply to navigating shifting SEC guidance. * The Crypto "Genesis Block": Why the potential for financial inclusion and "debanking" issues drew Dow to the crypto industry. * Mission of the DeFi Education Fund: An overview of DEF's role as a nonpartisan advocacy group focused on sound policy and judicial education. * Law Firm vs. In-House Policy: The structural challenges of conducting long-term policy work within the billable hour model of a traditional law firm. * Why Focus on Developers?: Understanding why the DeFi Education Fund prioritizes the protection of software developers over specific tokens or protocols. * Market Structure & Regulatory Harmonization: A breakdown of recent SEC and CFTC guidance and the future of congressional legislation. * The Impact of Chevron Deference: Discussion on how the removal of Chevron deference changes how agencies and judges interpret financial laws.
Resources Mentioned * DEF's Myth v. Fact Sheet on the BRCA (Link) * A DEF blog post on the Promoting Innovation in Blockchain Development Act of 2026 * A DEF Letter to the SEC in response to Citadel Securities
Kara Peterson and Richard DiBona, the husband-and-wife co-founding team behind Descrybe, discuss the legal research platform they built designed to "democratize access to the law." The discussion explores the unique dynamics of married cofounders and how they are leveraging Generative AI to disrupt a landscape long dominated by high-cost legacy providers.
Richard, a software engineer, and Kara, a marketing expert, share their journey from a personal legal issue to building a platform that processes over 100 billion tokens of legal data. They explain why they chose to build an AI-native system from the ground up rather than simply layering a "wrapper" over existing models—a decision that allows them to offer professional-grade tools at a fraction of the traditional cost.
In this episode, they discuss:
🔷 Why legacy legal research platforms have maintained such strong moats—and how AI changes that
🔷 The difference between "wrapper" AI tools and building a system from the ground up
🔷 How their structured, multi-step reasoning process improves accuracy and reduces hallucinations
🔷 What benchmarking against the Bar Exam reveals about legal AI performance
🔷 Where Descrybe is headed as they expand their toolkit
The legal industry is not confronting a single disruption but a redistribution of work, capital, and regulation across a system under stress.
The boundaries of Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL) in the near term may be defined more by what regulators must allow than what they restrict.
These are just a couple of conclusions from author and legal business strategist Ken Crutchfield in a recent trilogy of articles he penned about the pressure artificial intelligence is placing on legal service delivery and regulations barring the unauthorized practice of law.
In this episode, Ken is joined by Indiana University Mauer School of Law Professor, Bill Hendersonand ethics attorney Jim Doppke to discuss how Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are disrupting the legal industry.
The conversation focuses on the shifting boundaries of UPL regulation and how technology is redistributing legal work from traditional law firms to consumers and Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs).
The panel explores the "Uberization" of UPL rules—where technology precedes regulation—and the tension between protecting the public from "bad" AI advice and yet leveraging these tools to bridge the massive Access to Justice gap.
Things We Talk About in this Episode * The ROI of AI: Significant investment in legal tech is driven by the potential to replace labor with technology, rather than just replacing older software. * Defining the Line: Regulators are struggling to distinguish between providing "legal information" (permissible) and "legal advice" (restricted). * The "Whole Product" Solution: While AI can generate drafts, it often lacks the "tacit knowledge" and human trust required to navigate the Byzantine court system. * Regulatory Shift: Rather than banning LLMs, regulators are increasingly focused on holding individual lawyers accountable for the "wrong" use of technology (e.g., failing to verify AI-generated citations). * Allied Legal Professionals (ALPs): Emerging roles, like those being piloted in Indiana, may serve as a human bridge between AI-driven tools and underserved populations.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
Donald Beshada, former litigator turned legal tech entrepreneur and CEO of Covalynt shares his journey from big-law to the forefront of using data science in litigation. Specifically, to address systemic fraud in class action settlements.
The conversation explores the evolution of claims administration—from the traditional "People Magazine" notice era to the current digital landscape dominated by targeted advertising and sophisticated fraud bots. Donald explains how his company uses data science and identity resolution to bring "scientific rigor" to ensure class action settlements reach legitimate claimants while filtering out fraudulent activity.
Key Takeaways: * The Shift in Fraud: How class action fraud evolved from "couponing" websites to sophisticated, non-US-based bot attacks. * Defensible Clarity: Why "gut feelings" about fraud don't hold up in court, and the necessity of providing an evidentiary framework for disqualifying claims. * Data Science vs. Traditional Settlement Administration: A look at how the Apple Antitrust case served as an inflection point, proving that old-school matching methods are no longer sufficient for class certification or ascertainability. * The Future of Notice: Moving toward a world where data science can connect retail purchases directly to individuals, potentially eliminating the need for expensive, broad-market advertising.
Akshay Verma, COO of SpotDraft explores his non-linear journey through the legal industry. From his early days as a big-law paralegal to lawyer to a business development role to leading legal operations at tech leaders like Facebook and Coinbase, Akshay shares his unique perspective on why the most successful legal departments prioritize process over technology.
The conversation dives deep into the realities of Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), the evolution of the "agentic" legal tool, and why change management is the biggest hurdle for legal innovation. Akshay also discusses the "underdog mentality" that drew him to the startup world and the future of AI in legal workflows.
Key Takeaways:
- Process First: Technology is not a "magic pill" for broken workflows; centralized repositories and defined approval chains must come first.
- The Power of BD: Business development skills (evangelism and resilience) are critical for successful legal operations leaders.
- The "Holy Trifecta" of Legal Tech: Every department needs a CLM, a Spend Management tool (at scale), and an agentic Workflow/Intake tool.
- AI vs. Lawyering: AI will replace non-legal tasks, not the lawyers themselves, making AI literacy a new standard for the profession.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
Sophia Contreras Schwartz, General Counsel at Nextdoor, discusses her unique journey of building a legal department from the ground up. Sophia discusses how her background as a musician and fitness instructor informs her collaborative leadership style and why Nextdoor identifies as "Middle Tech"—a category of companies often overlooked by one-size-fits-all regulations.
The conversation explores the strategic value of hiring Legal Operations early, the specific tech stack that keeps a lean team of eight efficient, and why "versatility and curiosity" are the most important traits for in-house counsel today.
Key Takeaways:
- The First Legal Hire: Companies should consider their first GC when they start generating significant revenue or enter highly regulated spaces.
- "Middle Tech" Challenges: Nextdoor faces unique regulatory hurdles, like age verification laws, which are often designed for "Big Tech" giants but create significant operational burdens for mid-sized platforms.
- Force Multipliers: Investing in Legal Ops early allows a small team to scale by focusing on process design and vendor management rather than just manual intake.
- AI as a Strategist: Using tools like GC.AI doesn't just speed up drafting; it helps in-house lawyers ask better questions of their outside counsel by identifying nuances that general AI might miss.
Things We Talk About in this Episode * Legal Tech Tools: Ironclad, SimpleLegal, GC.AI * Organization: Chamber Music America
Lucas Moskowitz, General Counsel at Robinhood returns to the show to talk tokenization of Real World Assets and the current state of crypto legislation.
Lucas updates us on Robinhood's evolving demographics, noting that while the platform remains a hub for first-time investors, the customer base is maturing alongside the platform's product offerings, such as retirement matching and advisory services. Moskowitz also highlights the company's commitment to financial literacy.
The core of the conversation shifts to the shifting regulatory landscape regarding cryptocurrency and the potential for legislative clarity under a new administration. Moskowitz breaks down the concept of Tokenization of Real World Assets (RWA), explaining how blockchain technology can democratize access to private markets, art, and real estate.
The discussion covers the technical and legal differences between "native" tokens and "wrapper" products, the benefits of 24/7 liquidity, and why the United States risks falling behind global jurisdictions like the EU and Asia if regulatory frameworks do not evolve.
Key Takeaways * Robinhood's Evolution: The platform now serves 26 million customers. While half are first-time investors, the company is expanding into advisory and retirement products to serve users throughout their financial lifecycles. * Crypto Regulation: There is a shift from "regulation by enforcement" toward legislative clarity. Moskowitz discusses the importance of comprehensive market structure bills and stablecoin legislation to provide long-term durability for the industry. * Tokenization Mechanics: Tokenization is the digital representation of a real-world asset on a blockchain. This innovation promises to increase liquidity, allow for fractional ownership of high-value assets (like private equity or art), and enable faster settlement times. * The "Wrapper" Concept: Moskowitz explains Robinhood's EU offering, where customers trade a tokenized "wrapper" that represents a share of US stock held in custody, distinguishing this from companies issuing native tokens directly on the blockchain. * Why Lawyers Should Care: Even those outside of securities law must pay attention to tokenization, as it is poised to impact the documentation and transfer of all real-world assets, including real estate deeds and commercial contracts.
Things We Talk About in this Episode * Robinhood RWA Policy Paper: Read the policy papers mentioned in the episode regarding Tokenization.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
In this episode, James Barclay, CEO of Passle, discusses how legal technology is evolving to solve a big challenge in the legal industry: cross-selling. James shares the journey of Passle—from its roots in the early internet gold rush to becoming a leading thought leadership platform for the Am Law 200.
The conversation covers Passle's new AI-driven tool, CrossPitch, which helps attorneys overcome the "trust and awareness" barriers that prevent internal collaboration and revenue.
James explains that while content marketing is essential for lawyers to showcase expertise, the real value lies in how that expertise is shared internally within a law firm. Research suggests that firms leave at least 10% of their revenue on the table due to ineffective cross-selling. To address this, Passle developed CrossPitch, an AI tool that analyzes attorney bios and firm-wide thought leadership to automate internal networking.
Key Takeaways:
- The Problem of Silos: Large firms often suffer from a lack of awareness; attorneys in different offices or practice groups are often unaware of their colleagues' specific expertise.
- AI-Powered Matching: Cross Pitch reads a firm's thought leadership and matches it with the bios of attorneys whose clients would benefit from that specific knowledge.
- Data Visualization: The platform provides a "Cross-Selling Intelligence Map" to help managing partners visualize collaboration and identify "dark spots" where practice groups are not engaging.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
One of the most listened to episodes in 2025 featured a conversation with Andrea Muttoni, President of Story Protocol. The discussion explores how blockchain technology is being used as a foundational infrastructure for intellectual property (IP), aiming to simplify and modernize the process of registration, licensing, and monetization for creators and IP owners. Muttoni details his journey from a bedroom music producer to a product manager at Amazon and eventually to a leader in the blockchain industry, driven by a passion for the intersection of technology and creativity.
The conversation delves into the core problems Story Protocol aims to solve, particularly the complexities of copyright, fair use, and attribution in the age of AI-generated content. Muttoni introduces key concepts like the Programmable IP License (PIL), a customizable and on-chain license that makes IP rights more transparent and accessible. He also provides an overview of Poseidon, a new initiative that leverages the Story Protocol to create a marketplace for IP-safe, real-world data needed to train AI models, ensuring that data creators and owners are fairly compensated.
Key Takeaways * Andrea's Background: From a bedroom hip-hop producer to a product manager at Amazon working on Kindle and Alexa, Muttoni shares his path to the world of crypto and blockchain. * What is Story Protocol?: A deep dive into Story Protocol's mission to create an open IP blockchain. It's a way to register, license, and monetize IP in a more liquid and accessible way. * The Programmable IP License (PIL): Explanation of how this universal, customizable, and on-chain license simplifies IP transactions and makes it easier for others to legally use a creator's work. * Introducing Poseidon: Details on the new platform built on the Story Protocol to address the "data gold rush" for AI. Poseidon allows for the licensing of real-world, IP-cleared data to AI companies, ensuring fair compensation for contributors. * Promoting Adoption: Discussion on how Story Protocol uses a web3 incentive model to encourage widespread adoption and create a network effect for its IP infrastructure. * Why Story Protocol?: Muttoni explains what makes their platform uniquely suited for IP rights compared to other blockchains, emphasizing that the network was built from the ground up specifically for this use case.
Things We Talk About in this Episode * Story Protocol: story.foundation * Story Protocol IP Portal: portal.story.foundation * Poseidon: psdn.ai * Story Protocol Developer Docs: docs.story.foundation * WIPO Report: A report on intangible assets, mentioned as a key indicator of the value of intellectual property.
Avaneesh Marwaha, the CEO of Litera, visits the show to discuss his journey from IP lawyer to becoming a legal tech CEO and investor. He discusses the motivations behind his career pivot, including his desire to be a decision-maker and his passion for the business side of law.
The conversation delves into the evolution of Litera, from its origins as a document-focused migration software company to its current role as a comprehensive legal tech ecosystem. Avaneesh highlights the company's strategic shift from acquiring to building new technologies. He also emphasizes the importance of Litera's strong partnership with Microsoft and the company's focus on enhancing law firms' productivity and client service.
Key Takeaways:
- Pivoting from Law to Business: Avaneesh's move from practicing IP law to an in-house role and eventually becoming a CEO was driven by his desire for a more active role in business decision-making. He saw lawyers as reactive to business decisions, and he wanted to be at the forefront of the action.
- The Value of a Law Degree in Business: Avaneesh shares his perspective on the value of a law degree for business professionals, highlighting the critical thinking and risk tolerance skills it provides. He notes that the corporate transaction course he took in law school was particularly beneficial, teaching him about corporate governance and fiduciary duties.
- Litera's Evolution: Avaneesh discusses how Litera has grown through strategic acquisitions and a recent focus on internal development. He explains how the company integrates various tools, like Kira and Foundation, to create a seamless ecosystem for lawyers within their daily workflows, primarily in Outlook and Word.
- The Impact of Generative AI: The discussion touches on the transformative impact of AI on the legal tech industry. Avaneesh explains how AI has enabled Litera to accelerate its product development and introduce features that proactively assist lawyers with tasks like document comparison and client relationship management.
- Build vs. Buy Strategy: Avaneesh outlines Litera's shift from a buy-heavy strategy to a more balanced build-and-invest approach. This change is largely due to the increased efficiency and speed of development enabled by AI tools.
- Future of Legal Tech: Avaneesh shares his vision for the future of Litera, which includes a focus on "maniacal client service" and helping law firms proactively grow their business. He believes that as automation handles routine tasks, lawyers will have more capacity for business development and client-centric work.
Things We Talk About * Kira Systems - A company acquired by Litera specializing in AI-powered contract analysis. * Foundation Software - A business acquired by Litera focused on knowledge management. * Doxly - A document formatting and repair tool.
In one of the most popular episodes of the year, Legalbenchmarks.ai Founder Anna Guo discusses her organization's research that tests whether artificial intelligence custom-made for legal tasks better than general AI tools.
Anna is a former BigLaw lawyer who left the practice to become an entrepreneur and now focuses her energies on quantifying the utility of AI in the legal industry. Anna's initial anecdotal research for colleagues quickly revealed a strong community interest in a systematic approach to evaluating legal AI tools. This led to the creation of Legalbenchmarks.AI, dedicated to finding out where the promise of humans plus AI is truly better than humans alone or AI alone.
The core of the research involves measuring the "delta," or the extent to which AI can elevate human performance. To date, Legalbenchmarks.ai conducted two major studies: one on information extraction from legal sources and a second on contract review and redlining.
Key Findings from the Studies: * Accuracy vs. Qualitative Usefulness: The highest-performing general-purpose AI tools (like Gemini) were often found to be more accurate and consistent. However, the legal-specific AI tools often received higher marks in qualitative usefulness and helpfulness, as they align more closely with existing legal workflows. * Methodology: The testing goes beyond simple accuracy. It includes a three-part assessment: Reliability (objective accuracy and legal adequacy), Usability (qualitative metrics like helpfulness and coherence for tasks such as brainstorming), and Platform Workflow Support (integration, citation checks, and other features). * Human-AI Performance: In the contract analysis study, AI tools matched or exceeded the human baseline for reliability in producing first drafts. Crucially, the data demonstrated that the common belief that "human plus AI will always outperform AI alone" was false; the top-performing AI tool alone still had a higher accuracy rate than the human-plus-AI combo. * Risk Analysis: A significant finding was that legal AI tools were better at flagging material risks, such as compliance or unenforceability issues in high-risk scenarios, that human lawyers missed entirely. This suggests AI can act as a crucial safety net. * Strengths Comparison: AI excels at brainstorming, challenging human bias, and performing mass-scale routine tasks (e.g., mass contract review for simple terms). Humans retain a significant edge in ingesting nuanced context and making commercially reasonable decisions that AI's instruction-following can sometimes lack.
In the most listened to episode of 2025, author of "Systemology" and business systems expert, David Jenyns, discusses the importance of systemizing business processes, even in the nuanced field of law. Jenyns debunks the myth that legal work is too bespoke to be systemized, explaining how just like any other business, documenting legal workflows unlocks scalability and creativity. He shares his journey from digital SEO agency owner to becoming a systems expert and outlines the seven steps of his Systemology framework.
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Key Topics:
- The importance of documenting processes in any business, including legal services.
- How systemization can create space for creativity in legal work.
- The Systemology framework and its seven steps: Define, Assign, Extract, Organize, Integrate, Scale, and Optimize.
- The role of a "systems champion" in implementing a systems culture.
- Addressing common misconceptions about systemizing legal work.
- Practical tips for getting started with systemizing processes.
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Resources Mentioned:
- Systemology book by David Jenyns
- System Hub software
- The E-Myth by Michael Gerber
- Systemology Podcast (Mentioned interview with Crow Estate Planning firm)
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
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Meredith Kildow, President of Consilio discusses her career path from finance to leading global operations and delivery for one of the largest companies in the legal and eDiscovery space.
Meredith shares insights into building a revenue organization from the ground up and the shift to her current role overseeing operations and delivery for a highly acquisitive company. The conversation focuses on the practical, present-day applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the legal industry, examining how it's moving beyond "innovation theater" to drive ROI, efficiency, and cost reduction in corporate legal departments.
Key Discussion Points:
- The Transition: Meredith's journey from finance to operations, tech, and ultimately, a leadership role at Consilio.
- Revenue Operations vs. Chief Revenue Officer (CRO): Defining the roles and how to build a robust revenue organization, particularly in an acquisitive company.
- Improving Delivery from a Revenue Background: The importance of client listening and how a revenue-centric mindset can enhance service delivery and collaboration between sales and operations teams.
- AI in Legal: Clients view AI as both a problem and a solution. Discussion covers where real adoption is happening today (e.g., contract review, eDiscovery review) and the internal pressures on corporate legal departments to show AI efficiency.
- The AI Skills Gap and Literacy: Addressing the need for AI literacy among legal professionals and how Consilio is adding value through guided expertise, innovation labs, and rapid prototyping.
- Consilio's AI Offerings: A look at tools like Aurora, ECI (Early Case Intelligence), and specialized AI suites for privilege identification (PrivGen), review, and investigations, emphasizing flexibility and a secure, private cloud environment.
This episode features a conversation with Cecilia Ziniti, Co-Founder and CEO of GC.AI. Cecilia traces her career from early the early days of the internet to founding an AI-driven legal platform for in-house counsel.
Cecilia shares her journey, starting as a paralegal at Yahoo in the early 2000s, working on nascent legal issues related to the internet. She discusses her time at Morrison & Foerster and her role at Amazon, where she was an early member of the Alexa team, gaining deep insight into AI's potential before the rise of modern large language models (LLMs).
The core discussion centers on the creation of GC AI, a legal AI tool specifically designed for in-house counsel. Cecilia explains why general LLMs like ChatGPT are insufficient for professional legal work—lacking proper citation, context, and security/privilege protections. She highlights the app's features, including enhanced document analysis (RAG implementation), a Word Add-in, and workflow-based playbooks to deliver accurate, client-forward legal analysis. The episode also touches on the current state of legal tech, the growing trend of bringing legal work in-house, and the potential for AI to shift the dynamics of the billable hour.
In this episode, Sabastian Niles, President and Chief Legal Officer at Salesforce, takes a deep dive into the intersection of corporate strategy, in-house legal careers, and the transformative power of Agentic AI.
Sabastian shares his unique career path from a near two-decade tenure at a prestigious law firm before joining Salesforce. This conversation is essential for anyone interested in the evolving role of the Chief Legal Officer and the practical application of cutting-edge technology in legal operations.
Things We Talk About in this Episode * The In-House Career Journey: Sabastian's path highlights an early interest in the law and business connection and the role of the lawyer as a trusted advisor looking at the full lifecycle of a client's needs.
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Advice for Aspiring In-House Counsel: The importance of self-awareness, understanding your "why," and approaching your work with dedication and authenticity.
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Salesforce Legal as Customer Zero: How the Salesforce legal department uses the company's own technology, including building their outside counsel management platform on Salesforce and using internal AI agents in Slack channels for sales self-service.
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Understanding Agentic AI & Agentforce: An explanation of AI agents—systems that can reason and take actions on behalf of human direction—and Salesforce's focus on trusted agentics through the Agentforce Command Center.
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The Power of AI Guardrails: Sabastian explains that trust is an accelerant for innovation, not an obstacle. Guardrails define what an AI agent shouldn't do, ensuring responsible and ethical deployment, particularly around data access and defined roles.
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Legal Departments as an Accelerant, Not a Blocker: The vision for the optimized global legal department is one that is deeply embedded in product design, mitigating risk, and serving as a super connector across the entire organization.
- Regulation and Responsible Innovation in Artificial Intelligence: A discussion on the fast pace of tech innovation versus the speed of regulation, and why major tech companies must uphold high standards and embrace risk-based, interoperable approaches to drive responsible AI adoption.
Is artificial intelligence custom-made for legal tasks better than general AI tools like Google Gemini and ChatGPT? That is the topic of this episode featuring Legalbenchmarks.ai Founder Anna Guo. Anna is a former BigLaw lawyer who left the practice to become an entrepreneur and now focuses her energies on quantifying the utility of AI in the legal industry. Anna's initial anecdotal research for colleagues quickly revealed a strong community interest in a systematic approach to evaluating legal AI tools. This led to the creation of Legalbenchmarks.AI, dedicated to finding out where the promise of humans plus AI is truly better than humans alone or AI alone.
The core of the research involves measuring the "delta," or the extent to which AI can elevate human performance. To date, Legalbenchmarks.ai conducted two major studies: one on information extraction from legal sources and a second on contract review and redlining.
Key Findings from the Studies: * Accuracy vs. Qualitative Usefulness: The highest-performing general-purpose AI tools (like Gemini) were often found to be more accurate and consistent. However, the legal-specific AI tools often received higher marks in qualitative usefulness and helpfulness, as they align more closely with existing legal workflows. * Methodology: The testing goes beyond simple accuracy. It includes a three-part assessment: Reliability (objective accuracy and legal adequacy), Usability (qualitative metrics like helpfulness and coherence for tasks such as brainstorming), and Platform Workflow Support (integration, citation checks, and other features). * Human-AI Performance: In the contract analysis study, AI tools matched or exceeded the human baseline for reliability in producing first drafts. Crucially, the data demonstrated that the common belief that "human plus AI will always outperform AI alone" was false; the top-performing AI tool alone still had a higher accuracy rate than the human-plus-AI combo. * Risk Analysis: A significant finding was that legal AI tools were better at flagging material risks, such as compliance or unenforceability issues in high-risk scenarios, that human lawyers missed entirely. This suggests AI can act as a crucial safety net. * Strengths Comparison: AI excels at brainstorming, challenging human bias, and performing mass-scale routine tasks (e.g., mass contract review for simple terms). Humans retain a significant edge in ingesting nuanced context and making commercially reasonable decisions that AI's instruction-following can sometimes lack.
Discussion Highlights: * [0:00] – Introduction and background of Anna Guo and Legal Benchmarks AI. * [4:30] – The impetus for starting systematic AI benchmarking. * [6:00] – Explaining the concept of measuring the "delta" in performance. * [9:00] – Detailed breakdown of the three-part AI assessment methodology. * [15:00] – Discussion of the contrasting results: general LLM accuracy vs. legal AI qualitative value. * [19:00] – Results on AI performance matching human reliability in contract drafting. * [21:00] – Debunking the myth about Human + AI always outperforming AI alone. * [23:00] – The finding that legal AI excels at surface material risks that lawyers miss. * [27:00] – A SWOT analysis of when to use humans and when to use AI. * [30:00] – Future roadmap for Legal Benchmarks AI research.
Justin Wales, Head of Legal for the Americas at Crypto.com, and author of The Crypto Legal Handbook visits the show to provide his unique perspective on pivoting from a career in Constitutional Law, including work on high-profile appellate cases like the Obergefell gay marriage decision, to becoming a trailblazer in crypto law and blockchain technology.
He shares his serendipitous journey stemming from a law school article that launched his legal career and his subsequent deep dive into crypto, sparked by WikiLeaks accepting Bitcoin donations.
The discussion covers the evolution of his practice to one of the first successful crypto legal groups at a large law firm. Justin emphasizes the necessity for any lawyer in the space to use the technology and become a generalist to navigate the multi-jurisdictional and rapidly evolving industry.
Finally, the conversation touches on the critical distinction between centralized finance (CeFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi), and his outlook that crypto's infrastructure will ultimately serve as the underpinning for future advancements like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Episode Highlights:
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Justin's start in Constitutional Law, beginning with a law school paper on unconscionable cruise ship employment contracts that led to Supreme Court brief writing.
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The shift to crypto law: WikiLeaks and Bitcoin's role in it introduced Justin to blockchain technology.
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Building a pioneering crypto legal practice at a large firm in the early days (2013-2015).
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Why the best in-house lawyers, especially in a cutting-edge field like crypto, need to be generalists, not hyper-specialized.
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The inspiration and philosophy behind writing The Crypto Legal Handbook—creating an affordable, regularly updated, and candid resource for students and practitioners.
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Advice for aspiring crypto lawyers today: the field is more mature and requires blending traditional financial regulatory expertise with an industry-wide approach.
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The fundamental distinction between Centralized Finance (CeFi) and the legally complex, more innovative world of Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
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Rule #1 for Crypto Lawyers: Why you must use the technology and the risks of lawyers who are frozen in time with their technical understanding.
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High-level overview of US policy efforts to regulate crypto, including the GENIUS Act (Stablecoins) and the Clarity Act (Securities vs. Commodities regulation).
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Justin's crystal ball: The long-term view that crypto infrastructure will eventually become an unseen layer beneath the rise of AI agents and IoT.
Things We Talk About in this Episode * Book: The Crypto Legal Handbook by Justin Wales
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Book: Read Write Own by Chris Dixon
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JustinWales.com (for more information on the book and author)
Avaneesh Marwaha, the CEO of Litera, visits the show to discuss his journey from IP lawyer to becoming a legal tech CEO and investor. He discusses the motivations behind his career pivot, including his desire to be a decision-maker and his passion for the business side of law.
The conversation delves into the evolution of Litera, from its origins as a document-focused migration software company to its current role as a comprehensive legal tech ecosystem. Avaneesh highlights the company's strategic shift from acquiring to building new technologies. He also emphasizes the importance of Litera’s strong partnership with Microsoft and the company's focus on enhancing law firms' productivity and client service.
Key Takeaways:
- Pivoting from Law to Business: Avaneesh's move from practicing IP law to an in-house role and eventually becoming a CEO was driven by his desire for a more active role in business decision-making. He saw lawyers as reactive to business decisions, and he wanted to be at the forefront of the action.
- The Value of a Law Degree in Business: Avaneesh shares his perspective on the value of a law degree for business professionals, highlighting the critical thinking and risk tolerance skills it provides. He notes that the corporate transaction course he took in law school was particularly beneficial, teaching him about corporate governance and fiduciary duties.
- Litera's Evolution: Avaneesh discusses how Litera has grown through strategic acquisitions and a recent focus on internal development. He explains how the company integrates various tools, like Kira and Foundation, to create a seamless ecosystem for lawyers within their daily workflows, primarily in Outlook and Word.
- The Impact of Generative AI: The discussion touches on the transformative impact of AI on the legal tech industry. Avaneesh explains how AI has enabled Litera to accelerate its product development and introduce features that proactively assist lawyers with tasks like document comparison and client relationship management.
- Build vs. Buy Strategy: Avaneesh outlines Litera's shift from a buy-heavy strategy to a more balanced build-and-invest approach. This change is largely due to the increased efficiency and speed of development enabled by AI tools.
- Future of Legal Tech: Avaneesh shares his vision for the future of Litera, which includes a focus on "maniacal client service" and helping law firms proactively grow their business. He believes that as automation handles routine tasks, lawyers will have more capacity for business development and client-centric work.
Things We Talk About * Kira Systems - A company acquired by Litera specializing in AI-powered contract analysis. * Foundation Software - A business acquired by Litera focused on knowledge management. * Doxly - A document formatting and repair tool.
A conversation with Ben Chiriboga, Chief Growth Officer at legal CRM company Nexl and host of the This Legal Life podcast. Ben shares his journey from a litigator to a legal tech innovator. He recounts how an early e-discovery tool using natural language processing completed in six hours what had taken him six months, leading to an epiphany about the power of legal technology.
The conversation delves into the legal industry's historical resistance to technology, prioritizing billable hours over efficiency, and how Ben leveraged his legal experience to transition into a new role in tech. Ben discusses the challenges of building a legal tech company and the critical distinction between a general CRM and one designed specifically for law firms. The episode concludes with a thought-provoking discussion on the impact of AI on the legal profession, focusing on what aspects of law are truly "fundamental" and what new roles and jobs AI will create.
Key Takeaways * The Power of Tech: Legal tech tools can drastically improve efficiency, as demonstrated by an e-discovery tool that performed six months of work in just six hours. * Transitioning Careers: A background in law can be a valuable asset in the legal tech sector, but success requires adapting to new skills like sales, marketing, and growth strategy. * The "Why" Behind a Legal CRM: General CRMs are built for sales teams with built-in incentive structures, whereas a legal-specific CRM, like Nexle, is designed to passively collect and enrich data without requiring lawyers to manually input information. * The Fundamentals of Law: The human element—relationship building, counseling, and strategic advisory—is the core function of a lawyer that AI cannot replicate. * The Future of Legal Jobs: AI's true impact will not be in better-drafted motions, but in the creation of new "legal adjacent" roles and business models that merge legal expertise with technology and data.
We welcome back legal marketing expert Gyi Tsakalakis, President of AttorneySync and host of the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing podcast. Five years after Gyi’s first appearance on Technically Legal, he discusses the dramatic shifts in digital marketing for law firms, driven largely by the rise of artificial intelligence.
Gyi highlights how AI is changing the landscape for lawyers, from automating back-office functions and data analysis to influencing content creation and search engine optimization (SEO). He explains why law firms must diversify their marketing channels beyond just Google to adapt to the new era of conversational search and AI overviews. Despite these technological advances, Gyi emphasizes that the human connection, including a simple handwritten note, remains the most powerful tool in an attorney's arsenal. He argues that as technology automates the mundane, it forces lawyers to focus on the relationships and empathy that truly differentiate their practice.
Key Takeaways:
- Diversify Marketing Channels: Law firms must move beyond a "one-trick pony" approach with platforms like Google and diversify their client acquisition strategies to include social media, email, and local events.
- The Problem with Client Intake: Gyi discusses the persistent issue of lawyers not responding to inquiries and how AI can help automate certain parts of the intake process, though the human touch is still crucial for building trust.
- Do What the Bots Cannot: Attorneys should leverage AI for tasks that can be automated (e.g., scheduling, data analysis) to free up time to focus on complex legal work and building meaningful client relationships.
- AI for Data Analysis: A powerful, overlooked use case for AI in a law firm is analyzing internal data, such as call transcripts and financial records, to identify blind spots and inform marketing strategies.
- The Future of SEO and Search: Gyi predicts that search will become more conversational and influenced by AI Overviews and that ad-based models will be integrated into all major AI platforms.
This episode features a conversation with Andrea Muttoni, President of Story Protocol. The discussion explores how blockchain technology is being used as a foundational infrastructure for intellectual property (IP), aiming to simplify and modernize the process of registration, licensing, and monetization for creators and IP owners. Muttoni details his journey from a bedroom music producer to a product manager at Amazon and eventually to a leader in the blockchain industry, driven by a passion for the intersection of technology and creativity.
The conversation delves into the core problems Story Protocol aims to solve, particularly the complexities of copyright, fair use, and attribution in the age of AI-generated content. Muttoni introduces key concepts like the Programmable IP License (PIL), a customizable and on-chain license that makes IP rights more transparent and accessible. He also provides an overview of Poseidon, a new initiative that leverages the Story Protocol to create a marketplace for IP-safe, real-world data needed to train AI models, ensuring that data creators and owners are fairly compensated.
Key Takeaways * Andrea's Background: From a bedroom hip-hop producer to a product manager at Amazon working on Kindle and Alexa, Muttoni shares his path to the world of crypto and blockchain. * What is Story Protocol?: A deep dive into Story Protocol's mission to create an open IP blockchain. It's a way to register, license, and monetize IP in a more liquid and accessible way. * The Programmable IP License (PIL): Explanation of how this universal, customizable, and on-chain license simplifies IP transactions and makes it easier for others to legally use a creator's work. * Introducing Poseidon: Details on the new platform built on the Story Protocol to address the "data gold rush" for AI. Poseidon allows for the licensing of real-world, IP-cleared data to AI companies, ensuring fair compensation for contributors. * Promoting Adoption: Discussion on how Story Protocol uses a web3 incentive model to encourage widespread adoption and create a network effect for its IP infrastructure. * Why Story Protocol?: Muttoni explains what makes their platform uniquely suited for IP rights compared to other blockchains, emphasizing that the network was built from the ground up specifically for this use case.
Things We Talk About in this Episode * Story Protocol: story.foundation * Story Protocol IP Portal: portal.story.foundation * Poseidon: psdn.ai * Story Protocol Developer Docs: docs.story.foundation * WIPO Report: A report on intangible assets, mentioned as a key indicator of the value of intellectual property.
Crypto lawyer Nelson Rosario returns to the show to discuss the evolving landscape of decentralized AI and his role as General Counsel for the the Advanced AI Society (formerly known as the Decentralized AI Society), an association focused on engineering best practices, advocating for policy, fostering community, and enabling capital formation for decentralized AI startups
Nelson discusses the changing definition of decentralization, highlighting its origins in early crypto's focus on resilience and censorship resistance, and its current intersection with artificial intelligence. He explains the core reasons driving decentralized AI efforts: the potential for single service providers to control our access to AI models, computing power, and the data that underlies it all.
The conversation explores how decentralized AI aims to offer an alternative to large tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and OpenAI, But Nelson also points out the challenges of competing with resource rich organizations and suggests that decentralized AI might complement existing systems by "chopping it up" into distributed components.
The discussion also touches upon current players in the decentralized AI space, notably Bitensor and HyperCycle, and highlights the role of decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin and Arweave.
Nelson concludes by reflecting on the potentially profound societal impact of AI, likening it to other "tectonic technological revolutions" in human history. Drawing from the "Butlerian Jihad" concept in Frank Herbert's Dune, he cautions against blindly trusting AI and underscores the need for humans to remain intentional in their use of technology to prevent a decline in critical thinking and creativity.
Key Takeaways:
- Decentralization in AI aims to prevent single points of control over models, compute, and data, promoting censorship resistance.
- Decentralized AI faces challenges in competing with large, centralized tech companies due to their immense resources, but can serve as a complementary set of systems.
- DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) is crucial for the robust existence of decentralized AI applications.
- Industry associations like the Advanced AI Society play a vital role in setting standards, advocating for policy, building community, and attracting capital for decentralized AI projects.
- AI represents a transformative technological shift, and intentional human engagement is critical to navigate its societal implications.
In this episode, Dave Siegfried discusses the company he heads, Official AI -- a company focused on helping its customers create and verify authentic AI content. Siegfried, a "recovering accountant" with a background in tech and media licensing, discusses his journey from co-founding Audiosocket, a music licensing platform, to addressing challenges in generative AI.
The conversation highlights the evolution of intellectual property protection in the digital age. Siegfried explains how Official AI empowers individuals and brands to create AI-generated images and videos with consent, credit, and compensation for the use of their name, image, likeness, and voice. He details Official AI's "vault technology," which creates a "blueprint" of a person's likeness from a small set of images, enabling authorized creation of synthetic media.
The discussion also delves into provenance technology and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) open-source standard, which Official AI leverages to track content origin and changes, ensuring authenticity. Siegfried touches on the challenges of verifying content on social media platforms and the future role of blockchain technology in creating immutable records of consent. The episode concludes with insights into Official AI's business model, customer base (including athletes and historic estates), and future roadmap.
Key Takeaways:
- Generative AI presents significant challenges and opportunities for intellectual property rights, particularly concerning name, image, likeness, and voice.
- Official AI aims to proactively address these challenges by providing a platform for consent-based AI content creation.
- Provenance technology, including C2PA, is crucial for verifying the authenticity and authorized use of AI-generated content.
- The legal landscape surrounding AI and publicity rights is rapidly evolving, requiring adaptable technological solutions.
Things We Talk About in this Episode * Official AI Website: Visit theofficial.ai to learn more about their platform and services. * Contact Dave Siegfried: Dave can be reached at dave@theofficial.ai. * Content Authenticity Initiative (C2PA): Explore the open-source standard for content provenance and authenticity at c2pa.org.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
This episode is a conversation with Spellbook co-founder Scott Stevenson about intersection of technology and creativity. Spellbook is a AI contract co-pilot for transactional lawyers that plugs into Microsoft Word. Despite founding a legal technology company, Scott is not a lawyer but is computer engineer by training.
As a kid Scott was into video games and in fourth grade he talked his parents into getting him a computer because he wanted to figure out how to create them. By middle school he was building websites and eventually landed an internship at Electronic Arts.
Scott is also interested in electronic music and he launched his first start up, Mune, with a music professor, to create a whole new musical instrument that combined the power of digital music with an acoustic instrument. It was during his time at Mune that Scott started to think about building a legal tech company.
After he got his first legal bill he figured there might be a more efficient and less expensive way to do legal work. So he and lawyer buddy founded Rally, a document automation and templating engine for law firms which later begat Spellbook, but he funny thing about Spellbook, it was originally conceived as a marketing idea to generate leads for Rally.
Things We Talk About in This Episode Mune (Scott's Digital Instrument Startup)
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
A conversation with Kelly Twigger, an E-Discovery veteran and founder of ESI Attorneys and Minerva26. Kelly shares her journey into E-Discovery, stemming from the first-ever ABA event on the topic in the early 2000s, and the rapid evolution of case law and technology that led her to develop E-Discovery Assistant which has now been rebranded Minerva 26.
The discussion delves into how Minerva 26, a strategic command center for E-Discovery, curates case law, rules, checklists, and offers on-demand education. Kelly explains the reasoning behind rebranding from "E-Discovery Assistant" to "Minerva 26," emphasizing the shift from data tools to knowledge and strategic insight. The conversation also explores the current challenges legal professionals face in adopting technology, the impact of AI on the legal industry, and the need for updated federal rules of civil procedure to address technological advancements.
Key Takeaways: * Proactive E-Discovery: The importance of engaging with E-Discovery issues early in a case to save time and money, and to maximize the utility of electronically stored information (ESI). * Technology's Transformative Power: ESI, unlike paper, offers immense opportunities to leverage technology for more efficient and effective legal analysis and fact-finding. * Overcoming Fear and Expense: The primary barriers to technology adoption in the legal field are fear and perceived expense, which can be overcome through education and strategic planning. * AI's Role in Legal: AI is not replacing lawyers but enhancing their capabilities by improving efficiency, accuracy, and providing valuable insights. * The Need for Rule Updates: The rapidly changing technological landscape necessitates updates to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to provide clarity and consistency, especially concerning issues like control over personal devices and the use of advanced E-Discovery tools like Technology Assisted Review (TAR).
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
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Studies determined that at least one litigant does not have a lawyer in 75% of civil cases in the United States. The number is even higher when it comes to family law, domestic violence, housing, and small claims matters.
But organizations like Oregon’s Commons Law Center are doing something about it. On this episode, Kamron Graham, the Law Center’s Executive Director, talks about the not for profit law firm’s efforts to provide affordable legal assistance to people that make too much to qualify for legal aid, but don’t make enough to hire a lawyer.
The Commons Law Center helps out people facing evictions, have family law issues or need help with wills and estate planning.
Kamron initially planned to pursue a career in finance but pretty quickly figured out that her empathy and concern for others probably might not jibe with a Wall Street career. After returning to Oregon after college in the Northeast, Kamron started her career working in group homes, homeless shelters and served a stint with the United Way.
These experiences made clear to her that a professional degree might help her have a greater impact on people's lives and give her even more of an opportunity to use her education to help others. So, in her 30s she decided to go to law school.
After law school continued her career helping the underserved, including work for Legal Aid Services of Oregon and work as a public defender.
Eventually she landed at the Commons Law Center, starting as a tenant defense attorney and ascending to the role of executive director.
The business model of the Commons Law Center is not free legal work, but charging a sliding scale fee based on a client's income. Currently 70% of the firm's budget comes from fees. The firm is working to become 100% self-sufficient, but in the meantime to fill the gap, the firm leverages tech to streamline their processes and keep costs down. It also relies on donors, foundations, and grants.
Learn more about Kamron.
A conversation with Bim Dave, CEO of Helm 360, a consultancy focused on helping law firms optimize technology investments. Bim shares his experience in the legal tech space, tracing his journey from a technical support role at Elite (later acquired by Thomson Reuters) to leading a consultancy dedicated to improving law firm operations through strategic technology implementation. The discussion covers the critical aspects of data migration, the benefits smaller law firms can derive from technology, key factors for successful software implementation, and perspectives on hyped versus underutilized technologies in the legal field. Bim also offers a glimpse into the potential future of law firms, emphasizing the transformative role of AI.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
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A conversation with Yelena Shkolnik, a partner at Jump Capital, a venture capital firm with growing interest in legal tech companies. Yelena shares her journey from investment banking and entertainment finance to the world of venture capital, highlighting her focus on identifying transformative technologies.
The conversation delves into Jump Capital's investment philosophy, particularly their thematic approach and focus on Series A and B funding rounds. Yelena articulates what makes a legal tech company attractive to Jump, emphasizing the importance of demonstrated traction, a strong team dynamic, and a deep understanding of the specific challenges and opportunities within the legal industry.
Yelena provides a nuanced perspective on the billable hour model and the potential for technology, including AI, to reshape legal workflows and access to justice. She also shares her thoughts on the necessity of legal background for founders and whether legal tech will eventually just become "tech".
Key Takeaways:
- A deep understanding of the legal industry's nuances and specific problems is crucial for attracting legal tech investment.
- While AI presents significant opportunities, the entrenched nature of law firms and the complexities of legal workflows require thoughtful and targeted solutions.
- The rise of legal operations within enterprises is driving demand for technologies that enhance efficiency and manage risk.
- The consumer side of legal tech holds significant potential for expanding access to justice.
Amanda Tuminelli, Chief Legal Officer for the DeFI Education Fund, visited the podcast in September to discuss her crypto journey, her role with the organization and its objectives.
Since then, she was promoted and is now the Executive Director of DEF which is a nonpartisan research and advocacy group working to explain the benefits of DeFi, achieve regulatory clarity for the future of the global digital economy, and help realize the transformative potential of DeFi for everyone.
Amanda goes in depth into the DEF’s areas of focus:
- Research and Advocacy
- Policymaker Education
- Messaging for Crypto Companies
- Research about Blockchain Issues and Regulations
- Providing “Legal Firepower” to Crypto Causes; and
- DeFi Project Best Practices
Amanda also discusses how lawyers can pursue a career in crypto and why that wasn’t the case a few years ago. It’s not only an option now because the industry is more mature, but also because of the openness of those in the crypto world and their desire for passionate individuals to join them. To get a job in crypto law, Amanda emphasizes the importance of understanding the technology and finding projects of interest.
So how did Amanda get to the DEF? She started out as a securities and white collar crime lawyer, but a case came along that would change her career trajectory. She was working for Kobre and Kim, a law firm focused on disputes and investigations, when the firm was hired by a client accused of running an illegal crypto mining scheme. To get up to speed on the case and get her client out of jail, she had to dive deep into learning about blockchain technology and that is when she caught the bug. A few years later, a friend and former college friend contacted her about joining the legal team at the DeFI Education Fund and she took them up on it.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
In this episode, author of "Systemology" and business systems expert, David Jenyns, discusses the importance of systemizing business processes, even in the nuanced field of law. Jenyns debunks the myth that legal work is too bespoke to be systemized, explaining how just like any other business, documenting legal workflows unlocks scalability and creativity. He shares his journey from digital SEO agency owner to becoming a systems expert and outlines the seven steps of his Systemology framework.
- Key Topics:
- The importance of documenting processes in any business, including legal services.
- How systemization can create space for creativity in legal work.
- The Systemology framework and its seven steps: Define, Assign, Extract, Organize, Integrate, Scale, and Optimize.
- The role of a "systems champion" in implementing a systems culture.
- Addressing common misconceptions about systemizing legal work.
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Practical tips for getting started with systemizing processes.
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Timestamps:
- [00:00:00] Introduction and guest introduction: David Jenyns
- [00:02:00] David Jenyns's background and journey to systemology
- [00:08:00] The importance of a systems culture
- [00:12:00] Addressing the question: Why systemize?
- [00:15:00] Systemizing bespoke work, specifically in the legal field
- [00:20:00] The seven steps of Systemology
- [00:21:00] Step 1: Define
- [00:28:00] Step 2: Assign
- [00:30:00] Step 3: Extract
- [00:33:00] Step 4: Organize
- [00:37:00] Step 5: Integrate
- [00:46:00] Step 6: Scale
- [00:50:00] Step 7: Optimize
- [00:54:00] Where to start with systemizing processes
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[00:56:00] Conclusion
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Resources Mentioned:
- Systemology by David Jenyns
- System Hub software (systemhub.com)
- The E-Myth by Michael Gerber
- Technically Legal Podcast
- Systemology Podcast (Mentioned interview with Crow Estate Planning firm)
- Systemology Website: systemology.com
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
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A conversation with Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis, North America, UK, and Ireland. Fitzpatrick discusses how LexisNexis is integrating AI into its products to enhance legal practice. The discussion covers the company's approach to innovation, the role of AI in improving attorney efficiency and client outcomes, and the future of legal technology. Key topics include LexisNexis's AI assistant "Protégé," the company’s philosophy on AI, and the impact of AI on the legal profession.
- [0:09-1:43] Introduction to Sean Fitzpatrick and LexisNexis's focus on AI in legal tech.
- [2:05-4:37] Fitzpatrick's career journey at LexisNexis and the evolution of the company's technology.
- [7:48-8:20] LexisNexis's philosophy on AI: to make attorneys more efficient and drive better outcomes.
- [8:20-10:24] Overview of LexisNexis's AI tools, including Protégé and its features (drafting, Vault, etc.).
- [11:46-12:45] LexisNexis's partnership with OpenAI and its benefits.
- [15:14-16:01] The importance of data in AI and LexisNexis's approach to ensuring reliability and combating hallucinations.
- [16:30-17:37] Explanation of agentic AI and its significance for the legal field.
- [19:05-19:31] The role of document management systems (DMS) and LexisNexis's integration with them, including the acquisition of Henchman.
- [24:17-25:39] Discussion on the impact of AI on legal jobs and the belief that AI will augment, not replace, lawyers.
- [27:30-28:27] Fitzpatrick's prediction on the rapid advancement and adoption of generative AI in the legal industry.
A conversation with Jaron Luttich, co-founder of Element Standard, a legal tech startup designed to bring transparency and organization to litigation. Jaron discusses how Element Standard's "CONTROLit" app and litigation cartography help litigators manage cases, improve client communication, and streamline internal processes. He highlights the disconnect between traditional legal practices and modern client expectations for transparency, drawing comparisons to consumer experiences like ride-sharing and package tracking. Jaron also addresses how the litigation management software can enhance associate training and provide valuable structured data for law firms. The company will be participating the ABA Techshow 2025 Startup Alley.
Things We Talk About in this Episode * elementstandard.com * Jaron Luttich's LinkedIn profile * CONTROLit™ by Element Standard - Legaltech Hub * Element Standard's LinkedIn page.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
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This episode involves two people with very distinguished careers. Bridget M. McCormack who now heads the American Arbitration Association (AAA) and Colin Rule, the founder of ODR.com just acquired by The AAA.
Bridget has served in just about every role you can in the legal industry. She started her legal career in legal aid and as a public defender handling trials and appeals. She then moved to teaching law school, first at Yale and then Michigan.
After her stint as an educator, she decided she wanted to help foster even more change and won a seat on the Michigan Supreme Court where she ultimately ascended to the position of Chief Justice. Fast forward to 2023 and she took the helm of the AAA.
One of Bridget’s biggest initiatives at AAA is bringing tech into the arbitration process and that is where Colin Rule comes in. He founded an online dispute resolution (ODR) company, about 15 years ago that ultimately became ODR.com which the AAA just announced it was acquiring.
To say that Colin is an ODR OG is an understatement. He literally wrote the book on ODR way back in the early days of the internet. Ebay brought him on board in the early 2000s where he headed up the company’s ODR function.
In this episode Bridget and Colin discuss:
- AAA's acquisition of ODR.com: The strategic partnership between AAA and odr.com to revolutionize dispute resolution.
- AI's transformative role in dispute resolution: How AAA is using AI internally and through external tools to improve efficiency and accessibility.
- The future of dispute resolution: A vision for a more accessible, efficient, and user-friendly system that leverages technology and data.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
This episode features Daniel Rollingher, co-founder of Fabrica, a company leveraging blockchain technology to revolutionize real estate ownership. Rollingher discusses Fabrica's innovative approach to putting real estate titles on chain, creating a more transparent and efficient system for property transactions. He explains how Fabrica's platform uses NFTs to represent property ownership, simplifying the process of buying, selling, and managing real estate assets.
The conversation also explores the legal framework behind Fabrica's blockchain real estate platform, including the use of trusts and smart contracts to ensure secure and verifiable ownership. Additionally, Rollingher touches on the use of blockchain in real estate to address challenges in the traditional real estate market, such as title insurance and liquidity issues.
Key Takeaways:
- Fabrica uses NFTs to represent real estate ownership, streamlining transactions and property management.
- The platform employs a unique trust model to connect on-chain ownership with real-world legal frameworks.
- Fabrica aims to improve transparency and efficiency in real estate transactions through blockchain technology.
- The company is exploring the potential of blockchain and real estate to disrupt traditional processes, such as title insurance and recording deeds.
- Fabrica's platform offers solutions for unlocking liquidity in land assets and other real estate holdings.
- The company is actively working on expanding its blockchain real estate platform to new jurisdictions and asset classes.
Resources/Links:
- Fabrica website: fabrica.land
- Daniel Rollingher on Twitter: @notdroll
Jack Weinberger, co-founder of Ajax, a legal tech app that handles timekeeping for lawyers, shares his unconventional journey from finance to legal tech. Jack discusses his experiences in investment banking and private equity, and how those roles, while not directly related to law, sparked his interest in entrepreneurship and ultimately led him to the world of legal tech. He details the challenges of building a legal tech company, emphasizing the importance of understanding the specific needs of lawyers and addressing the critical concerns of data security. Jack also provides insight into Ajax's innovative approach to timekeeping, which uses AI to automate the process of generating time entries by analyzing a lawyer's activity on their computer. He explains how Ajax integrates with popular practice management software and highlights the significant time savings and increased accuracy that Ajax offers to legal professionals. Finally, Jack shares some exciting upcoming features that Ajax is developing, including capturing impromptu conversations and further streamlining the user experience.
Key Takeaways
- Career transitions from finance to legal tech are possible, highlighting the transferable skills and entrepreneurial spirit.
- Building successful legal tech solutions requires a deep understanding of lawyer workflows and pain points, with timekeeping being a major one.
- Data security is paramount in legal tech, and companies must prioritize client confidentiality.
- AI is transforming legal practice by automating tasks like timekeeping, allowing lawyers to focus on higher-value work.
Additional Information
- Ajax website: https://www.joinajax.com/
- Learn more about Jack.
This episode features Tom Dunlop, founder of Summize, a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform. Tom discusses his unique path to founding Summize, from his background as a professional athlete and lawyer to his passion for solving real-world problems with technology.
Key takeaways:
- The genesis of Summize: Tom explains how his experience reviewing hundreds of contracts manually led to the idea for Summize.
- Early challenges and the evolution of AI: Tom describes the initial challenges of summarizing contracts using AI in 2018 and how the advent of generative AI has revolutionized Summize's capabilities.
- Summize's unique approach: Summize differentiates itself by embedding its functionality within popular workplace tools like Slack, Teams, and Microsoft Word, allowing users to manage contracts without leaving their familiar workflows.
- How Summize works: Tom explains how Summize uses AI to curate contract data and provide summaries that are relevant and tailored to specific business needs.
- The future of Summize: Tom shares his vision for the future of Summize, including plans to further leverage AI, enhance native integrations, and incorporate validated content from the legal community.
Resources and Links:
- Summize Website: summize.com
- Connect with Tom on LinkedIn
Keywords: legal tech, contract lifecycle management (CLM), AI, generative AI, contract summarization, legal technology, Summize, Tom Dunlop, Microsoft Word, Slack, Teams, Outlook, DocuSign
A conversation with Lucas Moskowitz, General Counsel for financial services company Robinhood. Launched in 2013, Robinhood’s stated mission is to "democratize finance for all" by making it easy for investors to start investing with a few bucks rather than having to be a high roller. Key to this effort is the fact that Robinhood offers commission-free trading and also provides access to cryptocurrencies.
The discussion covers various topics, including:
- Robinhood’s Mission: Lucas explains Robinhood's mission to democratize finance by breaking down barriers to investing and making it accessible to everyone, regardless of their financial background.
- Lucas’s Career Path: Lucas shares his unique career journey, transitioning from big law to the SEC, Capitol Hill, and eventually Robinhood. He emphasizes the importance of diverse experiences in shaping his perspective.
- Regulation in the Financial Industry: Lucas advocates for a data-driven approach to regulation, striking a balance between investor protection and fostering innovation and access.
- Crypto & Blockchain: The potential of crypto and blockchain technology is explored, with Lucas highlighting their role in making financial markets more efficient.
- Education: The importance of educating investors about making sound investment decisions and also educating legal professionals about emerging technologies like blockchain and tokenization of assets.
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Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
In this Best of 2024 episode, we revisit our conversation with Scott and Digby Leigh, founders of AltFee—a legal tech startup tackling one of the industry’s biggest challenges: the billable hour.
Despite decades of debate, the billable hour still dominates legal billing. Enter AltFee. The app helps legal professionals scope, price, and manage projects using alternative fee arrangements (AFAs), offering clients more transparency and value.
Scott and Digby highlight why AFAs matter now more than ever: as AI reduces time spent on tasks, value-based pricing will become essential. AltFee provides a foundation for law firms to shift away from time-based billing, encouraging lawyers to focus on the actual value of their services—not just the clock. From scoping projects to auditing fees, this conversation explores the future of legal pricing and how AFAs can reshape client relationships for the better.
If you’re curious about innovation in legal tech, or if you’re tired of the constraints of hourly billing, this episode is a must-listen.
Episode Credits
Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
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What does it take to build a successful legal tech startup? In this Best of 2024 episode, we revisit our conversation with Zach Posner, co-founder of the LegalTech Fund, an investment fund focused on supporting innovative legal technology companies. Zach’s unique perspective on legal tech investing is rooted in his broad experience, including building an education tech company acquired by McGraw Hill. During our conversation, he shares valuable insights into what makes startups thrive. From the importance of transparent investor updates to fostering frequent, meaningful customer interactions that guide product development. We also explore the LegalTech Fund’s investment focus: * Tools leveraging contracting data for business insights * Tech solutions expanding access to legal services
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, an investor, or simply interested in the evolution of legal tech, this episode is full of practical advice and inspiring insights. Episode Credits
Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
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In one of the most popular episodes of 2024, John Grant talks about how legal teams can adopt Agile and Kanban project management methodologies to optimize workflows, correct bottlenecks and increase client satisfaction. John is a lawyer and the founder of The Agile Attorney consultancy.
As John explains, the traditional project management method is waterfall. A technique often used by technology companies, involving a sequential approach where each stage is dependent on the completion of the previous one.
But John is a proponent of the newer, Agile methodology, which emerged from the software development community. It is a flexible approach where tasks are broken down into small increments with minimal planning, and processes are iterative. Agile is one of John’s favorites because he believes it is well suited for legal work.
John also talks about the value of a Kanban board, a visual tool used to manage work at various stages of a process. It typically includes columns such as “To Do,” “Doing,” and “Done”.
So why is he so into project management methodologies? Because despite coming from a long line of lawyers, before he went to law school, he first worked in tech.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
Conrad Everhard, founder of Flatiron Law Group discusses his career trajectory from Georgetown University to becoming a partner at Big Law firms Jones Day and Brian Cave. He explains why he left BigLaw to found Flatiron Law Group, to provide a more cost effective and efficient way to offer legal services to clients involved in mergers and acquisitions.
To do so, the firm leverages a multi-pronged model: flat fees, low overhead, general contract labor to assist with the more labor intensive parts of an M&A deal, and advanced technology, including the firm's own custom build Deal Driver software that provides the clients with data and other insight about the deals they are working on.
Conrad also talks about his work with Stanford’s Codex project, where he is helping develop an AI based negotiation simulator to train young lawyers in M&A deals. He highlights the importance of capturing the decision-making process of senior lawyers to effectively guide the AI model.
Key Discussion Points & Timestamps:
Transition from Big Law to Entrepreneurship: [0:40 - 13:03]
The Flatiron Model: [14:16 - 26:48]
Work with Codex and AI in Legal Training: [26:48 - 33:00]
Resources & Links:
Flatiron Law website: flatiron.legal
Episode Credits
Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
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This episode features Stan Shepard, General Counsel of Atlassian, a leading provider of team productivity and collaboration software. Stan discusses his unique career journey from a finance journalist to the current GC of Atlassian. He shares valuable insights into how Atlassian's legal department leverages the company's productivity software products and AI for maximum efficiency.
Episode Highlights:
[00:00:09]: Introduction and Stan's background - Learn about Stan's journey from finance journalist to lawyer at Charles Schwab, and eventually to his current role at Atlassian.
[00:04:00]: Why Stan transitioned from journalism to law - Discover his motivations for pursuing a legal career, including the desire for greater impact and client interaction.
[00:07:00]: The growth of Atlassian's legal department - Hear how the legal team has expanded significantly alongside the company's rapid growth, particularly during the pandemic.
[00:12:39]: How Atlassian's legal team uses their own products - Stan explains how Atlassian's legal department utilizes Jira, Confluence, and other tools to streamline workflows and improve collaboration.
[00:14:10]: AI routing of legal requests - Discover how AI automates the process of routing incoming legal requests to the appropriate specialists.
[00:17:02]: Atlassian's new AI product, Rovo - Learn about Rovo's search, chat, and agent capabilities, designed to enhance teamwork and efficiency.
[00:23:31]: Advice for legal departments adopting AI - Stan provides practical guidance on how legal teams can effectively integrate AI into their workflows.
[00:24:29]: Responsible AI implementation - Stan emphasizes the importance of approaching AI adoption with a focus on ethical considerations and mitigating potential biases.
[00:28:16]: Atlassian's involvement with BSA | The Software Alliance - Learn about Atlassian's advocacy work in the global software industry and their efforts to shape responsible tech policy.
Key Takeaways:
- Embrace continuous learning: Stan's career path underscores the importance of adaptability and a growth mindset.
- Leverage technology for efficiency: Atlassian's legal team exemplifies how technology can optimize legal workflows and improve collaboration.
- Adopt AI responsibly: Stan highlights the need for a thoughtful and ethical approach to AI implementation.
Resources Mentioned:
- Atlassian: www.atlassian.com
- Jira: Atlassian's project management software.
- Confluence: Atlassian's knowledge management software.
- Loom: Atlassian's asynchronous video messaging tool.
- Rovo: Atlassian's new AI product with search and chat functionality.
- Responsible Tech Review Template: A guide for responsible AI development. (Available on Atlassian's website)
- BSA | The Software Alliance: bsa.org
Connect with Stan Shepard:
LinkedIn: Stan Shepard
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
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New Era ADR CEO Rich Lee makes a return appearance to Technically Legal to talk about the company’s cutting-edge platform revolutionizing dispute resolution. Rich first came on the podcast in 2021 right as the company launched. Rich discusses the company's mission to provide a faster, more efficient, and cost-effective alternative to traditional litigation and arbitration, the company’s growth and what he has learned from a few years in.
Key takeaways:
- New Era ADR offers a unique platform for resolving disputes in under 100 days, significantly faster than traditional methods.
- The platform leverages technology to streamline processes, reduce costs, and enhance accessibility for all parties involved.
- New Era ADR boasts a diverse pool of experienced and qualified neutrals, ensuring fair and impartial resolutions.
- The company's commitment to innovation is evident in its use of data and technology to drive efficiency and transparency.
Timestamps:
- [00:00:00] Introduction and recap of New Era ADR
- [00:01:30] Discussion of the platform's features and benefits
- [00:05:00] How New Era ADR addresses common dispute resolution challenges
- [00:10:00] The importance of social proof in legal innovation
- [00:15:00] Attracting and recruiting qualified neutrals
- [00:20:00] The neutral selection process
- [00:25:00] Future developments and roadmap for New Era ADR
- [00:30:00] The impact of New Era ADR on various stakeholders
Resources and Links:
- New Era ADR website: https://www.neweraadr.com/
This episode features Matthew Rasmussen, Founder and CEO of ModeOne, which is an app that provides targeted smart phone data discovery. Matt discusses his journey from a psych major waiting tables to landing a job in eDiscovery in its earliest days-- a job that ultimately helped him land jobs in BigLaw for multiple firms running their litigation technology departments. It was when he was working for O’Melveny & Meyers when he had his "light bulb moment" that led to the creation of ModeOne, a solution addressing the challenges of efficient data collection from mobile devices.
Matt explains how ModeOne works, its benefits over traditional digital forensic collection methods, and how it addresses concerns about evidentiary defensibility. He also highlights the various use cases for ModeOne beyond litigation, including internal investigations, HR matters, and compliance. The conversation delves into ModeOne's development, its unique approach compared to competitors, and its future roadmap, including internationalization and integrations with other platforms like Relativity.
Learn more about Matt.
Key Discussion Points:
- [0:39] Matt's unconventional path to eDiscovery
- [3:35] The "light bulb moment" that sparked the idea for Mode One
- [9:02] How Mode One works and its advantages
- [11:36] Addressing evidentiary concerns and gaining credibility
- [19:19] Expanding use cases beyond litigation
- [22:48] iOS and Android certification process
- [23:31] Apps and data supported by Mode One
- [25:18] Mode One's built-in review tool and Relativity integration
- [28:04] Future roadmap and upcoming features
Jason Heinze originally wanted to be an architect but got into disability law after taking over his father in law’s practice. To establish his client’s disability claims, he would have them manually enter daily notes into a pain journal, but he often had difficulty getting clients to consistently maintain the journals because they might forget and it was a completely manual process.
He thought to himself, there has to be an app for that, but when he looked, he found some that were close, but not exactly what he needed. So, he created his own and called it ClaimData. By using the app, disability claimants can now make pain journal entries via a web app and it will also remind them to enter it.
ClaimData uses a progressive web app model for efficiency and cost-effectiveness. ClaimData integrates with case management systems and plans to expand into personal injury and workers' compensation. The app aims to simplify the evidence-gathering process for attorneys, making it easier to prove disability cases.
Amanda Tuminelli, Chief Legal Officer for the DeFI Education Fund, visits the podcast to discuss her role with the organization and its objectives. (What is DeFi? It is shorthand for Decentralized Finance and the backbone of DeFi is blockchain technology and smart contracts.)
The DeFi Education Fund is a nonpartisan research and advocacy group working to explain the benefits of DeFi, achieve regulatory clarity for the future of the global digital economy, and help realize the transformative potential of DeFi for everyone.
Amanda goes in depth into the DEF’s areas of focus:
- Research and Advocacy
- Policymaker Education
- Messaging for Crypto Companies
- Research about Blockchain Issues and Regulations
- Providing “Legal Firepower” to Crypto Causes; and
- DeFi Project Best Practices
Amanda also discusses how lawyers can pursue a career in crypto and why that wasn’t the case a few years ago. It’s not only an option now because the industry is more mature, but also because of the openness of those in the crypto world and their desire for passionate individuals to join them. To get a job in crypto law, Amanda emphasizes the importance of understanding the technology and finding projects of interest.
So how did Amanda get to the DEF? She started out as a securities and white collar crime lawyer, but a case came along that would change her career trajectory. She was working for Kobre and Kim, a law firm focused on disputes and investigations, when the firm was hired by a client accused of running an illegal crypto mining scheme. To get up to speed on the case and get her client out of jail, she had to dive deep into learning about blockchain technology and that is when she caught the bug. A few years later, a friend and former college friend contacted her about joining the legal team at the DeFI Education Fund and she took them up on it.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
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AffiniPay is historically a fintech company with a big presence in legal. Their flagship product is LawPay used by law firms to bill clients and accept payments. Dru joined the company in 2021 and right around that time, the company ventured beyond the world of payment software and acquired MyCase, which is law practice management software used by law firms to keep all case details and documents in a single location, keep track of tasks and streamline client communications.
Growing up, Dru wanted to be a lawyer because she comes from family of lawyers, including her father. She studied law at the University of Chicago, but after a couple of gigs with law firms, she figured out that maybe the law wasn’t for her.
So, she finished her MBA and went to work for Boston Consulting. After a few years as a consultant, she needed a break, and, being somewhat of a foodie, she went to work in the kitchens of some of New York's finest dining establishments.
She took lessons learned from the kitchen into her later work as a co-founder of a baby monitor start-up and ultimately roles as CEO of the property management company Grace Hill and now AffiniPay.
In this episode, Dru talks about:
- Joining AffiniPay and its mission
- The company’s acquisition of MyCase and expansion into practice management software
- Affirm, AffiniPay’s Buy now, pay later product and its impact
- The company’s AI plans and integration within the platform
-
Core responsibilities of a CEO and what has surprised her in her role as a CEO
-
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Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
A conversation with Lucas Moskowitz, General Counsel for financial services company Robinhood. Launched in 2013, Robinhood’s stated mission is to "democratize finance for all" by making it easy for investors to start investing with a few bucks rather than having to be a high roller. Key to this effort is the fact that Robinhood offers commission-free trading and also provides access to cryptocurrencies.
The discussion covers various topics, including:
- Robinhood’s Mission: Lucas explains Robinhood's mission to democratize finance by breaking down barriers to investing and making it accessible to everyone, regardless of their financial background.
- Lucas’s Career Path: Lucas shares his unique career journey, transitioning from big law to the SEC, Capitol Hill, and eventually Robinhood. He emphasizes the importance of diverse experiences in shaping his perspective.
- Regulation in the Financial Industry: Lucas advocates for a data-driven approach to regulation, striking a balance between investor protection and fostering innovation and access.
- Crypto & Blockchain: The potential of crypto and blockchain technology is explored, with Lucas highlighting their role in making financial markets more efficient.
- Education: The importance of educating investors about making sound investment decisions and also educating legal professionals about emerging technologies like blockchain and tokenization of assets.
Stay in the know:
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A conversation with Matthew Veale, a European Patent Attorney and UPC Representative at PatSnap, an app that provides users with a comprehensive and user-friendly platform to conduct patent searches. Matthew discusses his experiences from work as an attorney in private practice and a stint at the UK Patent Office before joining PatSnap.
Matthew will discuss:
- The future of AI in patent searches: How PatSnap's new AI component is transforming years of knowledge into a 10-second search.
- AI's capabilities in analyzing and classifying images: Why AI can outperform humans in these tasks.
- The impact of AI on legal practice: Assisting attorneys in understanding patent data and improving client communication.
-
The role of AI in due diligence: Enhancing efficiency without replacing human expertise.
-
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This episode involves two people with very distinguished careers. Bridget M. McCormack who now heads the American Arbitration Association (AAA) and Colin Rule, the founder of ODR.com just acquired by The AAA.
Bridget has served in just about every role you can in the legal industry. She started her legal career in legal aid and as a public defender handling trials and appeals. She then moved to teaching law school, first at Yale and then Michigan.
After her stint as an educator, she decided she wanted to help foster even more change and won a seat on the Michigan Supreme Court where she ultimately ascended to the position of Chief Justice. Fast forward to 2023 and she took the helm of the AAA.
One of Bridget’s biggest initiatives at AAA is bringing tech into the arbitration process and that is where Colin Rule comes in. He founded an online dispute resolution (ODR) company, about 15 years ago that ultimately became ODR.com which the AAA just announced it was acquiring.
To say that Colin is an ODR OG is an understatement. He literally wrote the book on ODR way back in the early days of the internet. Ebay brought him on board in the early 2000s where he headed up the company’s ODR function.
In this episode Bridget and Colin discuss:
- AAA's acquisition of odr.com: The strategic partnership between AAA and ODR.com to revolutionize dispute resolution.
- AI's transformative role in dispute resolution: How AAA is using AI internally and through external tools to improve efficiency and accessibility.
- The future of dispute resolution: A vision for a more accessible, efficient, and user-friendly system that leverages technology and data.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
Dr. Heidi Gardner of the Harvard Business and Law Schools joins the podcast to talk about about latest book Smarter Collaboration and the importance of collaboration in legal teams and in all organizations generally.
Smarter Collaboration is Dr. Gardner’s second book and a follow up to Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos. Both books are helpful to those in law because much of Dr. Gardner’s research is based on the many years she studied collaboration in professional service firms, including many law firms.
Why is collaboration across different disciplines and business units important? As Dr. Gardner explains, most importantly, it creates better client outcomes which improve revenues and profits. But collaboration doesn’t just help make clients happy and improve the bottom line, it also fosters diversity and reduces enterprise risk.
Dr. Gardner has cold hard data that supports her conclusions: Back in the 1970s, 60% of US patents were awarded to individual inventors. Nowadays, that numbers has reversed. The vast majority of patents are issued to teams and the more diverse the backgrounds of those teams, the more successful their innovation.
Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
Medex Chief Forensic Officer Brandon Epstein joins the Technically Legal Podcast to discuss the purpose built forensic tool for use in legal proceedings. The company counts legal professionals, law enforcement and journalists as its customers.
Medex is used to examine digital video files to establish provenance, detect tampering and identify modifications. Users may also use Medex to identify the device type that created the video.
As Brandon explains, the type of hardware used to create a digital video file leaves its own fingerprint. By examining the bits and bytes of a video file, Medex can discern whether a video file was created by, say, an iPhone, an Android based device, or even whether it was altered by posting on social media.
Brandon got his start in law enforcement as a patrol officer and through that work, he became acutely aware of the importance of video evidence in helping to solve crimes. Fast forward a few years later and he met MedEx’s CEO at a conference they hit it off and Brandon was asked to join Medex.
Learn more about Brandon.
Litera’s Haley Altman visits the Technically Legal Podcast to discuss the company’s new software offering: Foundation Dragon–an app powered by artificial intelligence that helps legal professionals advise clients based on market insights drawn from their law firm’s existing data and prior deal points.
This is a repeat appearance for Haley. She was first on the podcast in 2018 to discuss the company she had recently launched called Doxly. Founded in 2016, Doxly is a cloud based app that helps automate processes involved in closing M&A deals. In 2019, Haley sold Doxly to Litera and she too joined Litera and currently serves as a strategic advisor to the company.
One of the initiatives in which Haley is heavily involved is the company's recent launch of an AI product called Foundation Dragon.
Foundation Dragon is an app that connects to a law firm’s document management systems and experience software and once connected, using GenAI, it compiles information from the software and enables lawyers to enter into contract negotiations from a position of strength.
For instance, using Foundation Dragon users can:
- Learn what contractual positions opposing counsel starts with or has agreed to in the past
- Provide industry standards for individual contract clauses; and
- Enable users to find precedents across a law firm to figure out what terms colleagues are using
In addition to Foundation Dragon, Haley also shares insights for startups. Including the importance of understanding the implications of capital raises and the potential impact on future exits.
Learn more about Haley and if you're interested in learning more about Foundation Dragon go here.
Attorney Chris Edgar talks about founding of Filmtracts- a DIY platform indie film makers can use to create entertainment based contracts for their projects.
Chris’ career path started with a clerkship for a future U.S. Supreme Court justice and then long hours as a Big Law litigator. After a few years of legal battles in and out of the courtroom, he realized that maybe his current career path wasn’t for him.
That’s because the world of entertainment law and independent film production was calling him. In 2010, Chris threw out his own shingle and founded an entertainment law practice. A few years later he and a partner launched their own indie film production company.
When other indie filmmakers figured out he was an attorney, he was often peppered with legal questions, but most of the time, those asking could not afford his services as an attorney. That’s when he decided to launch Filmtracts. A self serve repository of film related contracts that users can tailor to fit the needs of their project–and depending on the subscription they buy, they can also get a few hours of legal consultation from Chris.
Studies determined that at least one litigant does not have a lawyer in 75% of civil cases in the United States. The number is even higher when it comes to family law, domestic violence, housing, and small claims matters.
But organizations like Oregon’s Commons Law Center are doing something about it. On this episode, Kamron Graham, the Law Center’s Executive Director, talks about the not for profit law firm’s efforts to provide affordable legal assistance to people that make too much to qualify for legal aid, but don’t make enough to hire a lawyer.
The Commons Law Center helps out people facing evictions, have family law issues or need help with wills and estate planning.
Kamron initially planned to pursue a career in finance but pretty quickly figured out that her empathy and concern for others probably might not jibe with a Wall Street career. After returning to Oregon after college in the Northeast, Kamron started her career working in group homes, homeless shelters and served a stint with the United Way.
These experiences made clear to her that a professional degree might help her have a greater impact on people's lives and give her even more of an opportunity to use her education to help others. So, in her 30s she decided to go to law school.
After law school continued her career helping the underserved, including work for Legal Aid Services of Oregon and work as a public defender.
Eventually she landed at the Commons Law Center, starting as a tenant defense attorney and ascending to the role of executive director.
The business model of the Commons Law Center is not free legal work, but charging a sliding scale fee based on a client's income. Currently 70% of the firm's budget comes from fees. The firm is working to become 100% self-sufficient, but in the meantime to fill the gap, the firm leverages tech to streamline their processes and keep costs down. It also relies on donors, foundations, and grants.
** Thanks to former Technically Legal Guest John Grant for making this episode happen and connecting us to Kamron.
Learn more about Kamron.
Zach Posner discusses the LegalTech Fund, an investment fund he helped start that focuses on legal tech businesses and offers insight on what it takes to build a successful start up.
The LegalTech Fund has a solid track record and, if you have listened to a few episodes of this podcast, you’ve probably heard from founders of companies in which the Fund has invested–including Scott Stevenson from Spellbook, Otto Hansen at Term Scout, Tom Dreyfus at Josef, and also Zach’s colleague at the Fund, Mike Suchsland.
Zach brings a unique blend of experience and insight to legal technology investing. Among other things, prior to starting the LegalTech Fund, he helped build an education tech company that was ultimately acquired by McGraw Hill.
The LegalTech Fund has a couple of main areas of investing interest: Companies building tech that harnesses information from contracting processes and companies that are working to make legal services available to more people.
Zach also offers insight and advice for those trying to build a company–including the importance of investor updates because the most successful companies often have the highest frequency of reporting to stakeholders. He suggests that entrepreneurs should be open and honest about challenges, allowing investors to assist in problem-solving.
Zach also says it is important for entrepreneurs to demonstrate their products in a quick, iterative manner. He stresses that frequent engagement with customers can provide invaluable insights guiding the product development process. He further suggests that entrepreneurs should be tenacious with their vision, but flexible in their approach to achieving it.
Learn more about Zach.
This episode is a conversation with Michael Clark the VP Global Head of Digital Transformation and Futurist at MasterCard. He discusses his upcoming book "Data Revolution, The New Currency of You" and what he believes will be a new paradigm in data ownership–that we will actually own our own data and benefit from its value. He also examines what role the law and regulation should play in it.
Michael and many others like him, believe that data is going to become a new currency and that to date, we have overlooked its value. Consumers have given up most of their control and access to this value because we have been too focused on what we were getting in exchange its use –i.e. The software tools we use.
Michael is well suited to write a book about the value of data. He has long worked in banking and spent a lot of time in the open banking world which, among other things, is a practice that provides third-party financial service providers open access to consumer banking information through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs).
For consumers to take back their data and capture its value, Michael says the focus needs to broaden from data privacy and also onto security, ethics, and bias in data usage
He says it is going to also take a new way of thinking–specifically more cooperation between regulators and the tech industry to effectively manage and leverage the tech fairly.
Michael also believes that the use of AI will play a big role in data management going forward because there is so much data, it will continue to grow and AI is the only way we are going to be able to understand what data tells us and harness its value.
In this episode Colin Levy shares insights from his new book, The Legal Tech Ecosystem, his journey into legal tech, and his role at contract lifecycle management company, Malbek as Head of Legal and Chief Evangelist.
Conversation highlights:
- Colin’s journey into legal tech: Colin shares how he first got into legal tech during his time as a paralegal at a big law firm in New York, his decision to work for a year before attending law school and his choice to work in an in-house legal department after graduation.
- Colin's role at Malbek: As the Director of Legal and the Chief Evangelist at Malbek, Colin's day-to-day tasks vary from traditional legal work to writing blog posts, participating in webinars, attending events, and assisting with marketing and sales efforts.
- The Legal Tech Ecosystem: Colin talks about his new book, which serves as an accessible, non-technical introduction to the world of legal tech. The book combines Colin's experiences and learnings with anecdotes and quotes from other legal tech leaders.
- Skills needed in legal tech: Colin emphasizes the importance of understanding data, meeting people where they are, and having a clear understanding of why you want to learn about legal tech. He also talks about the need for openness to risk, experimentation, and discomfort.
- Legal tech vs. legal innovation: Colin clarifies that legal tech is not just about AI and robots, it can be more mundane but still helpful tools like billing software. The focus should be on making people's lives easier and increasing productivity and efficiency.
Learn more about Colin.
Professor Tonya Evans of Penn State Dickinson Law School visits Technically Legal to talk about her book Digital Money Demystified.
Professor Evans has pretty much held every job in legal from judicial clerk, to Big Law lawyer and now legal educator. She is also the host of the Tech Intersect Podcast which focuses on Web3 and how it will impact the future of work, wealth and creativity.
In this episode, Professor Evans talks about her journey from risk averse crypto doubter to blockchain believer. She emphasizes the importance of lawyers staying ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving world of technology and the need for more education and awareness around crypto and blockchain, not only in law schools but also in other professional fields.To those ends, she founded Advantage Evans Academy, a platform designed for non-technologists to understand the new digital economy.
Professor Evans’ book, Digital Money Demystified, is an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to learn more about cryptocurrencies. The book explains blockchain concepts in plain language and debunks many myths about crypto.
Such as:
Myth: Crypto is Mainly for Criminals. Fact: Blockchain data analysis firm Chainanalysis estimates that only .24 of all crypto transactions in 2022 were for illicit purposes.
Myth: Crypto is untraceable. Fact: Blockchain transactions are pseudonymous, but, if recorded on an open blockchain, such as bitcoin, they are transparent and available to anyone to view..
Myth: Crypto is terrible for the environment. Fact: Not all blockchains are energy guzzlers, especially those based on proof of stake validation and it should not be overlooked that the energy consumed by traditional financial markets is much greater.
Professor Evans also explains the need for clear crypto regulation and the risk of the United States falling behind if the regulatory environment is not clarified.
Learn more about Professor Evans
Despite much ballyhoo and countless articles about them, alternative fee arrangements, or AFAs, have yet to gain widespread traction and the billable hour still reigns supreme for legal billing.
Enter the Leigh brothers, Scott and Digby, and their new legal tech startup, AltFee. The company’s stated goal is encouraging legal professionals to break free of hourly pricing and move to AFAs by using the app to help scope and price legal projects.
The brothers point out that the traditional billable hour pricing model doesn't provide certainty for clients and that AFAs will become more important with increasing use of AI which will likely reduce billable hours. They explain how Altfee offers a solution by providing a foundation for law firms to operate on an alternative fee model. The app helps users scope, price and audit their fees.
Scott and Digby also delve into the concept of 'value billing', explaining that it involves charging fees based on the value of the service provided to the client, rather than strictly on the time spent. They underline the importance of taking both task-based considerations and value-based considerations into account while pricing.
Learn more about Scott and Digby.
Things We Talk About in this Episode
Directory of Law Firms Offering Alternative Fees Episode Credits Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
This episode is a conversation with Spellbook co-founder Scott Stevenson about intersection of technology and creativity. Spellbook is a AI contract co-pilot for transactional lawyers that plugs into Microsoft Word. Despite founding a legal technology company, Scott is not a lawyer but is computer engineer by training.
As a kid Scott was into video games and in fourth grade he talked his parents into getting him a computer because he wanted to figure out how to create them. By middle school he was building websites and eventually landed an internship at Electronic Arts.
Scott is also interested in electronic music and he launched his first start up, Mune, with a music professor, to create a whole new musical instrument that combined the power of digital music with an acoustic instrument. It was during his time at Mune that Scott started to think about building a legal tech company.
After he got his first legal bill he figured there might be a more efficient and less expensive way to do legal work. So he and lawyer buddy founded Rally, a document automation and templating engine for law firms which later begat Spellbook, but he funny thing about Spellbook, it was originally conceived as a marketing idea to generate leads for Rally.
John Grant talks about how legal teams can adopt Agile and Kanban project management methodologies to optimize workflows, correct bottlenecks and increase client satisfaction. John is a lawyer and the founder of The Agile Attorney consultancy.
As John explains, the traditional project management method is waterfall. A technique often used by technology companies, involving a sequential approach where each stage is dependent on the completion of the previous one.
But John is a proponent of the newer, Agile methodology, which emerged from the software development community. It is a flexible approach where tasks are broken down into small increments with minimal planning, and processes are iterative. Agile is one of John’s favorites because he believes it is well suited for legal work.
John also talks about the value of a Kanban board, a visual tool used to manage work at various stages of a process. It typically includes columns such as “To Do,” “Doing,” and “Done”.
So why is he so into project management methodologies? Because despite coming from a long line of lawyers, before he went to law school, he first worked in tech.
At an early age, Feargus MacDaeid, the founder of legal tech company Definely, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, which is a rare eye disease that breaks down cells in the retina slowly over time causing vision loss.
Until he got to college to study computer science, Feargus’ vision was decent, but at university, it began to deteriorate and eventually went blind.
After college he landed a couple of tech jobs but ultimately decided to go to law school.
After law school, Feargus took jobs at two Magic Circle Firms in London, Allen & Overy and Freshfields where he was working on mergers and acquisitions. Because of his visual impairment, Feargus had to develop hacks in the software he used, like custom keyboard shortcuts, to get his job done.
He met his Definely co-founder, Nnamdi Emelifeonwu, at Freshfields when the two of them were working on the same deal. As Feargus explains it, his soon to be co-founder was the first colleague that actually took an interest in how Feargus accomplished his work and marveled that he was getting it done.
The two figured there had to be a better way for Feargus to work on contracts, but the duo figured out pretty quickly there really wasn’t and Definely was born.
Definely is a suite of tools that helps lawyers accomplish the tedious tasks relating to the drafting of contracts. As the company describes it, they create legal tech solutions to free lawyers from frustrating, repetitive tasks, so they can get back to the work that matters.
This episode is a conversation with Katherine Porter about her journey from practicing law to founding her own company, Resourceful Lawyer which is a consultancy helping legal teams implement project management techniques into their legal work.
Katherine discusses her unique approach to problem-solving in the legal field, which involves design thinking and project management principles. Katherine explains the importance of lawyers understanding client needs, the process of workflow mapping, and the challenges of implementing new processes in law firms.
Katherine also emphasizes that empathy and understanding the client journey is a must when designing effective legal services. In the end, she also gives some real world tips about where to begin working in project management principles into legal practice.
As we close out 2023, we are replaying some of our most listened to episodes.
Not surprisingly, AI was the hot topic this year and as its acceptance grows, so to tough questions, like whether AI developers need permission to use copyrighted works and other IP before using it to train artificial intelligence?
In a very popular episode, Professor Mark Lemley of Stanford explained whey he does not think so because he believes that copyrighted works used to train AI fall should under the fair use exception to copyright law.
Professor Lemley is the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, an author of seven books and more than 130 articles on intellectual property, antitrust and related areas of the law. He is also a co-founder of Lex Machina and most recently of Counsel to Lex Lumina, a boutique IP law firm.
Professor Lemley argues that AI companies should be permitted to use copyrighted works to train AI models without first getting permission from owners because of the benefits AI will yield and the impossibility of tracking down millions of copyright owners to get permission. He also believes that it is a fair use for AI developers to use works protected by intellectual property laws to train artificial intelligence models because such a use is transformative and the more data available to the AI, the more accurate it will be.
In one of 2023's most listened to episodes, Nathan Walter, founder of Briefpoint, joins Technically Legal to explain how his company is using technology and artificial intelligence to automate routine legal drafting tasks.
A good portion of lawyers’ time and those helping them is copying or re-using prior work. This is especially true in litigation and especially in discovery.
Thankfully more and more apps have been developed that help automate the creation of legal documents. Historically, these programs have been form based and users populated documents by selecting choices from a menu.
But with advances in generative AI maybe form based software is unneeded. That’s what Briefpoint is banking on.
Briefpoint uses tech to analyze legal documents, like interrogatories and document requests, and then generates preliminary responses to give legal teams a head start on drafting.
As Nathan explains, if more legal processes are automated and augmented with AI, it will bring legal fees down and free up lawyers to focus on the complicated stuff rather than cutting and pasting prior work product.
In the most listened to episode of 2023, Zach Abramowitz makes a repeat appearance on Technically Legal to talk generative AI (like OpenAI) and its impact on legal technology adoption.
Zach is a keen observer of legal tech and its trends. If you want to keep tabs on up and coming tech geared for legal, Zach is a good person to follow.
He started is career at a large New York law firm where he worked on mergers and acquisitions. From there he launched his own tech company called Reply All and his latest venture, Killer Whale Strategies, is a consultancy that works with law firms and legal departments to find and utilize technology to disrupt the way traditional legal work is done.
Zach has always been a strong proponent of using artificial intelligence in the legal industry, but after the release of ChatGPT and the growth of other generative AI platforms, he believes it might be the catalyst that finally expedites legal tech adoption.
Zach explains why he thinks generative AI could make legal services cheaper, less profitable for service providers and on a timeline that is faster than most might think.
In this episode, trial attorney, mediator and Web3 believer Mitch Jackson talks about the future of mediation, dispute resolution and the law in a Web3 world.
Mitch is a long time litigator and a name partner at Orange County, California based Jackson and Wilson. He also maintains a busy mediation practice and is passionate about the positive impact new technologies can have on the practice of law.
Mitch talks about how he uses AI to facilitate mediations and his use of virtual reality to engage with clients in the metaverse. He gives a glimpse of what dispute resolution could look like in the future. He thinks cases might converted into digital files that parties interact with on a blockchain and that AI could be consulted about potential resolutions.
Vivek Rao, talks about his path from workers compensation attorney to co-founder and CEO of Foundation AI, an app that automates the manual process of collecting, categorizing and filing documents and unstructured data. The software is used by law firms and insurance companies and utilizes a combination of artificial intelligence, optical character recognition (OCR) and computer vision to process incoming documents and email by type, time-sensitivity, and matter or claim.
Vivek, a native of Los Angeles, figured he would get into entertainment law, but ended up as a lawyer working in real estate and finance.
Later on, he started helping a workers compensation firm handle case files. In that role, he saw an opportunity to use AI and natural language processing (NLP) to automate the manual work of processing and filing the thousands of documents his firm received every week.
After the acquisition of a medical AI company he represented as corporate counsel, Vivek started wondering if a similar technology could be employed in the legal and insurance industries and after some ideation, Foundation AI was born.
UpLevel Ops Founder Stephanie Corey and COO Liz Lugones visit the podcast to tell us why a good legal operations program is a crucial to managing the business side of law, so lawyers can focus on practicing law.
Stephanie and Liz break down what legal ops is and what it entails. They say it boils down to managing the business aspects of law–from the people and processes to the technology used.
Stephanie and Liz also fill us on why the right people in the right roles improves efficiency and productivity and how well-defined processes can help ensure that everyone knows what they need to do and when.
Liz and Stephanie also emphasize that organizations just can’t just throw tech at a problem to fix it. To make any improvement in legal operations, whether it be adding technology or tweaking a process, the first step is understanding the current state of what is being improved, specific legal department needs and the needs of the clients it serves.
They explain why legal ops is not not a one-size-fits-all approach, and that tailoring solutions is crucial. To figure out what their clients need, UpLevel uses thorough assessments to understand the current environment of a legal department and its goals and current processes.
The episode closes out with a discussion about why legal operations is an ongoing process rather than a one-time project and the importance of being ready to adapt and evolve as needs change.
Chad Sakonchick is a serial entrepreneur.
After a stint selling computers for Dell, he launched his first technology company: an early SaaS platform that allowed users to easily create websites.
From there, he launched an app that took online orders for food truck owners and then he launched Spacesift, which he describes as Airbnb for event spaces.
Spacesift did fine, but he didn’t find startup traction until a few years ago when he convinced a lawyer buddy to let him automate the creation of LLC documents.
Using automation apps like Zapier, project management software like Asana and online form apps like Formstack, Chad built the automation and his friend loved it.
It worked so well, the two decided to launch BetterLegal and while they have graduated to a more sophisticated backend, as we will hear, they are still building the company on a low/no-code philosophy using platforms like Bubble.
After hearing Chad’s backstory, you would think he most certainly would end up pursuing a career in law. While in college at the University of Texas he worked as a paralegal at his dad’s law firm. After that, he landed a job with an early legal tech company that digitized deposition transcripts. But alas, his heart was not in pursuing a career as a lawyer. His passion is entrepreneurship.
Legal technology guru Adriana Linares visits Technically Legal to discuss the the tech and software law firms (and all legal teams really) should be using to run a successful legal practice.
Adriana is a legal tech OG. Fresh out of college in the late 90s, a large Florida law firm hired her to train its lawyers on how to use technology and to help the firm figure out what tech to buy.
Fast forward to the early 2000s, and she started her consultancy LawTech Partners to help legal professionals use technology to maximize their skills, run profitable businesses, and deliver great client service.
At a minimum Adriana advises that lawyers and their teams utilize at least three specific pieces of software: 1) A productivity suite like Microsoft 365; 2) a PDF tool; and 3) case management software.
Adriana explains the differences between case management software, document management platforms, and practice management software. She also touches on the importance of document assembly software and how to maximize the use of data captured during the various stages of a legal matter.
She closes out the discussion explaining why many in legal are missing out when they don’t use CRMs–Client and Customer Relationship Management platforms.
Professor Richard Jolly of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and a co-founder of the Stokes Jolly consultancy visits Technically Legal to discuss the importance of motivating legal organizations to change even when they are resistant to do so.
Professor Jolly also shares stories from his experiences as a chef and a psychotherapist and explains how he draws upon them in his organizational and executive consulting practice.
Professor Jolly also discusses the common psychological make-up of lawyers such as high skepticism and frequent reluctance towards change. These traits remind him of an essay by Philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the Hedgehog and the Fox, which is a reference to an idea from the Greek poet Archilochus: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”.
Applying it to the legal profession, Professor Jolly explains that legal subject matter experts are like hedgehogs with deep expertise in one area, but in a rapidly changing world, the ability to adapt like a fox is increasingly important. Traditional law firms are full of hedgehogs, but organizations such as startups lean more toward foxes because they are better at adapting. The pandemic has accelerated the pace of change, and law firms need to be open to these changes to survive and thrive.
Along those lines, Professor Jolly points out that education and training of young lawyers is more important now because of remote work and the new generation of lawyers want to practice differently than their older colleagues. Specifically, his research has shown that most new lawyers do not plan on spending a whole career at a single law firm.
He also points out that law firms may have to adapt to the new reality that more work may have to be done by partners because associates are increasingly harder to come by.
In this episode, Emily Witt discusses how to transition from law firm life to in-house legal work in the tech industry. Emily is a legal recruiter with Whistler Partners specializing in health law, life sciences and tech. She is also a podcaster and hosts Beyond the Legal Lens which focuses on career advancement and how to get jobs in health law and tech.
Before she joined Whistler Partners, Emily worked as a recruiter for the Wachtell Lipton law firm in New York, but she did not have aspirations to get into legal recruiting right out of college.
Her career path took some twists and turns. After receiving an English degree from Colgate, she thought she wanted to be a journalist, but ended up finding a career in publishing. However, her publishing stint ended when she headed out on a European vacation.
When she came back, Emily started trying to figure out what she wanted to do professionally. Around this time, she found a new rock climbing partner who was a lawyer at a large New York law firm. Her climbing partner suggested she look into legal recruiting.
The twists and turns of Emily’s career ultimately informs the advice she gives to candidates searching for a job with a tech company after working at a law firm or in a different industry. She explains that to find a job with the legal department at a tech company, you need to be flexible. Specifically, she says you need to be willing to jump to a different firm if you are not getting the type of experience that tech startups are looking for.
She also says it is important to work for a firm that is already servicing technology companies. Emily also recommends networking through LinkedIn, social media, and listening to relevant podcasts to find an in with a tech company.
Do AI developers need permission to use copyrighted works and other IP before using it to train artificial intelligence? Professor Mark Lemley of Stanford does not think so because he believes that copyrighted works used to train AI fall should under the fair use exception to copyright law. Professor Lemley is the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, an author of seven books and more than 130 articles on intellectual property, antitrust and related areas of the law. He is also a co-founder of Lex Machina and most recently of Counsel to Lex Lumina, a boutique IP law firm. Professor Lemley argues that AI companies should be permitted to use copyrighted works to train AI models without first getting permission from owners because of the benefits AI will yield and the impossibility of tracking down millions of copyright owners to get permission. He also believes that it is a fair use for AI developers to use works protected by intellectual property laws to train artificial intelligence models because such a use is transformative and the more data available to the AI, the more accurate it will be.
Erik Bermudez, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for legal practice management software Filevine, visits the podcast to discuss the importance of having an internal champion to drive software adoption within an organization, as well as ongoing training and metrics tracking to ensure the software is being used effectively.
Erik also emphasizes that successful implementation of new technology requires top management’s understanding of the problem and pain points that the software is solving. Without buy in from the top, the odds are stacked against successful adoption.
Dr. Heidi Gardner of the Harvard Business and Law Schools joins the podcast to talk about about latest book Smarter Collaboration and the importance of collaboration in legal teams and in all organizations generally.
Smarter Collaboration is Dr. Gardner’s second book and a follow up to Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos. Both books are helpful to those in law because much of Dr. Gardner’s research is based on the many years she studied collaboration in professional service firms, including many law firms.
Why is collaboration across different disciplines and business units important? As Dr. Gardner explains, most importantly, it creates better client outcomes which improve revenues and profits. But collaboration doesn’t just help make clients happy and improve the bottom line, it also fosters diversity and reduces enterprise risk.
Dr. Gardner has cold hard data that supports her conclusions: Back in the 1970s, 60% of US patents were awarded to individual inventors. Nowadays, that numbers has reversed. The vast majority of patents are issued to teams and the more diverse the backgrounds of those teams, the more successful their innovation.
A conversation with former Big-Law lawyer turned tech entrepreneur, Dan Rabinowitz. After stints with law firms, the Department of Justice and time as general counsel, Dan tells us how all of that led to the founding of Pre/Dicta.
Pre/Dicta is an app that uses data science to tackle judicial analytics, but unlike other similar software, Pre/Dicta does not just look at a judge’s opinions and track record, but also looks at other factors that influence court opinions. The app looks into data like the judge’s net worth, political affiliation, education, work experience, and other biographical data points.
You may have read about Pre/Dicta recently in the legal tech press because it acquired Gavelytics–another judicial analytics company founded by Rick Merrill–who was a guest on the show way back in 2018. Pre/Dicta originally focused on federal courts, but by joining forces with Gavelytics the company acquired a trove of info about state court judges and opinions.
In this episode, lawyers Haley Lennon and Preston Byrne discuss the current state of crypto regulation in the US and explain why being “crypto literate” will benefit lawyers.
Hailey and Preston practice with Brown Rudnick’s Digital Commerce group. Hailey counsels fintech and crypto companies on regulatory requirements and Preston advises technology companies on corporate and commercial law issues.
Both Hailey and Preston have deep crypto experience from both private practice and also as in-house counsel for crypto and blockchain companies. This episode touches on the SEC’s enforcement actions against crypto players and the importance of decentralized tools.
They also discuss the potential loss of talent and innovation in the US due to lack of guidance and the importance (and difficulty) of educating others about the industry.
The duo also explain why it is important for lawyers in many practice areas to be “crypto literate” and possess a working knowledge of blockchain concepts. They point out that crypto is not a legal discipline, but is a market sector needing the same type of legal work other businesses do.
In this episode, Felipe Alexandre, a founding principal of AG Immigration, talks about his experience growing up as an immigrant in South Florida, his journey into law, and his passion for helping newcomers to America.
He also discusses his firm’s services, including business-related visas, humanitarian work, and asylum. In addition, Alexandre talks about his firm’s move to the metaverse and the benefits of using VR consultations with clients.
Since she was a kid, Dorna Moini, the CEO of legal document automation company Gavel, knew she wanted to be a lawyer–specifically a human rights lawyer. So, right after she received an accounting degree from NYU she headed to law school and even took an internship with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
After talking to a trusted professor, she decided that before pursuing human rights law, it might be best to get other types of legal experience and she ended up working in big law for several years.
Even though corporate clients and large employers were her clients, Dorna never lost her desire to use her law degree for the greater good and took on a bunch of pro bono work–especially in the area of domestic relations.
While doing that work she figured out pretty quickly that a lot of it was repetitive, form based tasks that took time away from other work that actually required her legal skills. She asked a friend to build her an app that would automate the form creation process.
Basically she wanted TurboTax for domestic law. They called the app Self Help Law and it was a success. So much so that people within and without her firm started using it. In fact, it was so successful that people from other countries started asking her to design apps to fill out forms for the legal work they were doing. It was at that point that she figured maybe she should start a company and take her app to the masses.
In 2018 she quit her law firm job and became a full fledged legal tech entrepreneur. She changed the name of her company to Documate and the company began building a platform that would enable the automation of all kinds of forms.
Ultimately, the company turned into what is now known as Gavel and it helps its users automate the creation of all kinds of legal forms. It also automates documents related to running a law firm or legal department like intake forms and billing documents.
Nathan Walter, founder of Briefpoint, joins Technically Legal to explain how his company is using technology and artificial intelligence to automate routine legal drafting tasks.
A good portion of lawyers’ time and those helping them is copying or re-using prior work. This is especially true in litigation and especially in discovery.
Thankfully more and more apps have been developed that help automate the creation of legal documents. Historically, these programs have been form based and users populated documents by selecting choices from a menu.
But with advances in generative AI maybe form based software is unneeded. That’s what Briefpoint is banking on. Briefpoint uses tech to analyze legal documents, like interrogatories and document requests, and then generates preliminary responses to give legal teams a head start on drafting.
As Nathan explains, if more legal processes are automated and augmented with AI, it will bring legal fees down and free up lawyers to focus on the complicated stuff rather than cutting and pasting prior work product.
Zach Abramowitz makes a repeat appearance on Technically Legal to talk generative AI (like OpenAI) and its impact on legal technology adoption.
Zach is a keen observer of legal tech and its trends. If you want to keep tabs on up and coming tech geared for legal, Zach is a good person to follow. He started is career at a large New York law firm where he worked on mergers and acquisitions. From there he launched his own tech company called Reply All and his latest venture, Killer Whale Strategies, is a consultancy that works with law firms and legal departments to find and utilize technology to disrupt the way traditional legal work is done.
Zach has always been a strong proponent of using artificial intelligence in the legal industry, but after the release of ChatGPT and the growth of other generative AI platforms, he believes it might be the catalyst that finally expedites legal tech adoption.
Zach explains why he thinks generative AI could make legal services cheaper, less profitable for service providers and on a timeline that is faster than most might think.
Oh…and he also has a great music video.
IP lawyer Len Hickey joins the show to discuss Litigaze, the legal tech start up he founded that helps legal teams evaluate litigation risk, make smarter settlement decisions, figure out which claims to pursue and budget for litigation.
Len has worked both in-house and at law firms. Over the course of his practice, to answer questions posed by his clients about the value of their cases, he developed sophisticated spreadsheets to analyze his clients’ odds and determine what expected outcomes might be worth.
After awhile, as many tech founders do, he said to himself, “there should be a better way to do this.” So he taught himself to code and put together a beta version of Litigaze–software that enables users to build graphical decision trees of stages in a legal claim.
Using Litigaze, lawyers and their clients can estimate chances of success and determine potential monetary values for outcomes. After he built the beta version, Len tested it out on friends, they liked it so he took the next step and hired developers to make a real app.
In January 2021, Litigaze went live. Using Litigaze, lawyers and clients can make better decisions about litigation and determine the best courses of legal action to take.
Joshua Schwadron Founder and CEO of Mighty Law visits the podcast to discuss how his company and law firm are disrupting personal injury law.
Even though Joshua has a law degree, he knew he did not want to practice law in the traditional sense.
Instead, in 2010 the entrepreneur in him founded Betterfly, a marketplace where consumers found service providers to help with projects like home remodels, yardwork or wedding plans.
Betterfly was acquired by a company ultimately purchased by Microsoft and Joshua found himself with time to move on to a new venture, and that would be legal related.
After Betterfly, he launched a litigation finance company and worked on it for a few years, until 2015 when he launched Mighty.
At first, Mighty also had a litigation funding component and tried to pair plaintiffs with funders by having them compete for cases.
Gaining traction with that model turned out to be a little harder than Johsua expected, so Mighty started building tech to help plaintiffs and their lawyers track liens against recoveries in their cases held by medical providers and other attorneys.
As you will hear from Joshua, Mighty is a purpose driven company and its goal is to make the practice of personal injury law more efficient so plaintiffs can take home better settlements.
That’s why he decided to found Mighty Law. A law firm that requires lawyers to abide by a code of conduct and work to put the most money in plaintiff’s pockets.
Ethics attorney Jim Doppke makes his fourth appearance on the show to discuss the pros and cons of liberalizing legal ethics rules like Model Rule of Professional Conduct 5.4 that prohibit people who are not lawyers from owning an interest in legal services companies and preventing them from sharing in legal fees.
In recent years, states like Utah and Arizona that are testing the waters and permitting lawyers to team up with others to provide legal services and share legal fees. Jim discusses the ethical implications of these programs and explores preliminary statistics from the programs that trac the number of people served and the number of complaints raised about the services.
Jim is an ethics attorney with the Chicago firm of Robinson, Stewart, Montgomery & Doppke. Before that, he spent most of his career as a prosecutor with the Illinois ARDC (the Attorney Registration and Discipline Commission). He also has a legal ethics focused podcast called Legal Ethics Now and Next.
Noah Waisberg literally wrote the book on Lawyers and Artificial Intelligence. Now he is building his second company that offers AI to analyze contracts.
As many do, Noah went to a top notch law school and then to BigLaw. He ended up doing deal work at the firm and had to review of ton of contracts.
What Noah learned is that even moderately sized companies have a ton of contracts, but because lawyers are expensive, to get a deal done, they would review only the most important contracts. This often left an incomplete picture of the liabilities and risks a company might be taking on by buying another.
This got Noah thinking. After taking some off from the legal grind, he and a co-founder launched Kira Systems to build an artificial intelligence tool that would help lawyers analyze contracts. If it worked, Noah figured, the AI would give the lawyers a head start permitting them to review more contracts with the same amount of work they were putting in without AI. Because more contracts could be reviewed, companies involved in M&A deals could have a better picture of the risks and liabilities in a deal.
Kira’s AI did work, and in fact, was a smashing success. Last year, another legal tech company, Litera, bought it.
Before the Litera acquisition, Kira started working on a tool that would help in-house legal teams use AI to analyze contracts to help out with contract management. After the Litera deal, this project became a new company that Noah now runs, Zuva. Zuva’s technology permits users to embed AI into into their own applications via APIs to extract information from their contracts.
In this episode, Noah explains how he and his team grew Kira systems and why he is excited to do the same with Zuva.
Richard Mabey, CEO and co-founder of contract automation platform Juro, visits the podcast to talk about building a legal tech start up that helps in-house legal teams deal with contracts from drafting to execution (and reduce the number of software products they use while doing it.)
Richard founded Juro in 2016 with a technical co-founder he met in business school. Prior to getting a business degree, Richard received a few others that run the gamut from music to philosophy and to (of course) law.
Richard started his professional career at one of the UK’s premier law firms and while there, he was seconded to a client. During his time at that company is when the seeds were sown for Juro. As Richard explains, the legal team he worked with team included very smart people but they spent a lot of time comparing versions of high volume, low risk contracts in Word. And that was only one out of five pieces of software the company used to run an agreement through its lifecycle.
Richard, like many that have come before, said to himself, “there has to be a better way” and went on to found Juro, an end to end contract automation platform that helps legal teams manage contract lifecycles.
But Richard didn’t launch Juro right away. Before he and his co-founder started the company, he did a stint at Legal Zoom.
Angela Floessel, Global Director of Pricing and Legal Project Management at Morrison Foerster, discusses the litigation finance program she helped set up permitting MoFo to take good cases it might not otherwise take, secure good results for clients it might not otherwise help and help grow the firm’s bottom line while doing it.
Before moving to legal, Angela spent most of her career in finance. But in 2015, she took her business skills to the legal world. First to Baker Mckenzie and ultimately landed at Morrison Foerster.
Among other responsibilities, Angela was hired to build out MoFo’s pricing and practice management teams, but while doing that, her business background helped her spot another opportunity at the firm to develop–a litigation funding program.
Working with other lawyers at her firm, they developed a structured litigation funding program, with a due diligence protocol and a legal funding committee that vets good cases for which they can enlist the help of litigation funders.
As Angela also explains, to ensure the program is a success, its foundation relies on project management processes. The firm’s project management team is involved in the cases every step of the way to make sure they identify the right opportunities, staff the cases correctly and stay on budget.
Crypto lawyer Nelson Rosario discuses the legal, regulatory and political landscape of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency.
We also get an update from TurnSignl CEO Jazz Hampton about his company’s progress since he was last on the show.
Nelson started out as an intellectual property lawyer but caught the crypto bug in law school. His boutique law firm Rosario Tech Law, focuses on servicing crypto and emerging technology companies that are working to change in the way we all interact with each other and deal with privacy and power.
Although IP is still a significant part of his practice, Nelson’s firm provides those companies with strategic counseling, general outside services and assistance with privacy issues.
Before he went to law school he was an election official in Florida and worked to streamline voter registration rolls and how his county processed absentee ballots.
Nelson discusses the potential impact blockchain technology may or may not have on elections, the political and regulatory ramifications of the recent U.S. sanctions against crypto “mixer” Tornado Cash and how blockchain technology might change certain areas of the law.
Brightflag COO Alex Kelly discusses the AI powered legal operations platform he co-founded that helps legal teams get a handle on legal spend and gain insight into their legal operations as a whole.
By collecting information from legal bills and other sources, Brightflag provides analytics about how legal work is being resourced which can then be used to inform procurement decisions, help determine which legal service providers to add to panels and help create legal pricing models.
It is interesting that Alex ended up cofounding Brightflag because he never worked in-house and instead spent seven years in private practice at one of Ireland’s premier law firms representing financial institutions.
But, that Alex is a lawyer turned entrepreneur is not surprising. Both his father and stepmom are lawyers and his mother’s family founded one of Ireland’s preeminent bespoke carpet manufacturing companies.
Daniel Linna, Senior Lecturer & Director of Law and Technology Initiatives at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law & McCormick School of Engineering visits the podcast to talk legal education, artificial intelligence and intersection of computer science and law.
Professor Linna teaches classes at both Northwestern’s law school and engineering school that relate to tech and law including a couple on artificial intelligence. Dan is also heads up the University’s Legal Innovation Lab.
Dan also does a fair bit of research including his most recent project that is testing conversational AI that tenants can use in disputes with landlords.
Prior to Northwestern Dan held positions at both the University of Michigan and Michigan State. Before he was a professor Dan practiced law at a large law firm.
In this episode Chris Handman, COO and Co-Founder of data privacy management app TerraTrue, talks about Shifting Left with data privacy. “Shift left” is a concept used to identify defects and bugs early in the software development process before deployment.
This is also how Chris and his team think legal departments, privacy officers and compliance professionals should think about data privacy.
TerraTrue is a data privacy management platform that companies can use and integrate with the other software (like Jira and Slack) to get people thinking about the data privacy implications of products they are building while they are building them.
Chris explains that with the continued growth of privacy regulations, companies cannot just ship software and hope to deal with privacy issues after the fact.
Chris ended up in the data privacy world after a successful career as a lawyer in private practice. Chris worked as an appellate lawyer right out of law school and handled high profile cases in front of federal appellate courts including the United States Supreme Court.
After a few years, an executive search firm contacted Chris about becoming Snapchat’s first general counsel. He had been doing more and more privacy work in his appellate practice and people began to notice. Chris made the jump to Snapchat and hit the ground running.
Among other intense and high profile legal cases he had to deal with, the FTC was all over Snapchat about data privacy issues that ultimately ended in a consent decree.
In 2017 Chris left Snapchat, took a little time off with his family, and began talking to some of his old Snap colleagues about building a new company. That is when TerraTrue was born.
Blockchain lawyer and fellow podcaster Jacob Robinson visits Technically Legal to talk about how blockchain is impacting the law now and how it will in the future.
Jacob hosts the Law of Code Podcast covering blockchain related legal issues and hosting a Who’s Who of #Cryptolaw as guests.
On this episode, Jacob discusses the interplay between blockchain technology and legal rights (such as property rights). He also explains how, for some endeavors, blockchain might change the look of business organizations. Specifically, Jacob covers legal issues implicated by NFT (non fungible token) ownership and participation in a DAO (distributed autonomous organizations).
Jacob also fills us in about interesting legal questions arising it the metaverse.
Krystal Kovac, Head of Legal & Compliance at Oncore, visits Technically Legal to share her story about building a legal department from the ground up. Like many, Krystal decided to become a lawyer without a good understanding of all that entails. Also, like many, she didn’t like her first legal job that much, and when it ended, she went to Canada and became ski instructor. She also got another legal job in Canada that she actually liked, but her Visa ran out and she headed back home to Queensland.
When Krystal got back to Australia, she did a stint as a temporary attorney working for a tech company but ended up at Oncore for what was supposed to be a temporary gig helping the company clean up their contracting process.
Well…it turned out Krystal did such a good job, they asked her to be be general counsel and build out their legal and compliance functions.
Krystal explains that to build a legal department from the ground up, you need to first map out operational processes that touch legal. She says lawyers should also get out and talk to people to not only learn more about the company, but to actually build relationships.
Krystal also is a big proponent of meeting clients where they are, communicating with them via methods they already use and using tech that is accessible.
Aaron Powers, CEO and co-founder of Hunit, talks SLCs or, Smart Legal Contracts, that are natural language contracts but utilize blockchain technology to record certain aspects of contractual relationships. Hunit enables users to create text based contracts in Microsoft Word, but tie the document to a blockchain creating an immutable record of certain contract components, like successful performance and the fact that a contract even exists between two parties.
Aaron is an entrepreneur first and foremost and started his career in wireless communication technology in the early 2000s, but ultimately joined the founding team of a biostimulant company.
After almost a decade in the biostimulant industry, in 2018, Aaron jumped over to legal tech and founded Hunit.
Do you want to spend less time dealing with email? Are you interested in automating repetitive work tasks?
Cyndi Wheeler and Mark Pike offer some tips on how to do just that in this episode from 2020. Cyndi and Mark are both in-house lawyers at collaboration software company Slack.
Cyndi and Mark discuss how they moved almost all of their communications with outside counsel away from email and into Slack channels and how that has increased the productivity and the effectiveness of their legal team.
They also explain that Slack is more than just a communication hub, but has many other features including workflows and bots that the Slack legal department uses to automate common legal tasks. They use Slack workflows to field questions, review documents and contracts for legal issues and help sales close deals.
Finally, the two lawyers offer tips about how to organize and prioritize Slack channels and messages to stay sane and not become overwhelmed by the barrage of electronic communications we all get everyday.
This episode originally aired on June 23, 2020.
Victor Bornstein tells us how Justpoint, the company he co-founded and now heads, is taking advantage of changes to Rules of Professional Conduct to build artificial intelligence that matches personal injury clients to the best attorney for their case. Specifically, the company is taking advantage of changes to Rule 5.4 in Arizona that now permits people other than lawyers to have an ownership stake in law firms and legal services companies.
Justpoint lets potential clients leverage AI to find the right attorney for their claim. The company uses a combination of human intake by medical professionals and predictive analytics to identify the right attorney for the job.
Before launching Justpoint, Victor and his co-founder had nothing to do with the legal industry. Victor has a PhD in biomedical sciences with an emphasis in immunology and worked in medical, his co-founder worked at Google before launching Justpoint.
The pair started the company in 2019 and recently closed a $6.9 million fundraising round.
Right out of college with a computer science degree in hand, a buddy helped Andy Wilson (now CEO of SaaS based e-discovery software company Logikcull) get a job at a printing company because Andy’s friend said there was a technology component to the job. It was the early 2000s and what the printing company was actually doing was printing out email messages so they could be used in a legal matter. The absurdity of printing out something that is inherently digital was not lost on Andy. So, after a couple of years at the printing company, he and a college classmate that also happened to work there launched Logik Systems. At Logik Systems, Andy and his co-founder created software that processed email to make it easier to transfer and review electronically rather than printing them out.
Logik Systems was doing great until the economy crashed around 2008. But, it was during this downturn that Andy and his co-founder saw the future of e-discovery software and that future was the cloud. That is when the duo launched Logikcull. It took 4 plus years to develop the software, but they persevered and in 2013 Logikcull went live.
Logikcull is an eDiscovery solution that provides user friendly legal software for processing, reviewing, and producing data.
The company just celebrated it’s 10th birthday and it continues its upward trajectory toward its goal of democratizing electronic discovery.
“You’re marrying a firefighter. That’s all I’ll ever be. I’m never going to finish college.” That’s what Bill Henderson told his soon to be wife many years ago, but thankfully that was not true.
Fast forward to today and Bill is now Professor William Henderson, the Stephen F. Burns Chair on the Legal Profession at Indiana University and he has been a law professor for nearly 20 years.
Professor Henderson is also the moving force behind Legal Evolution, an online publication focusing on changes in the legal industry with the stated mission of providing lawyers, legal educators, and allied professionals with high-quality information to solve very difficult industry-specific problems.
It was almost true that Professor Henderson did not finish college. He dropped out and got a job as a firefighter. But… it was only because he was a firefighter that he ended up going to law school.
In the early 90s, during firefighter union negotiations, Bill’s union rep asked him to tag along and take notes. Foreshadowing his career as a professor, not only did Bill take notes, he also did in depth research into prior collective bargaining agreements and into state law so the union team could strike a better bargain.
In the end, Bill moved on from note taker to union vice president and eventually took over as lead negotiator.
Because of all of this, Bill decided to go to law school at the University of Chicago and became a legal professor.
Since entering academia, Bill has done a ton of research and writing on the state of legal services in general, but more specifically, how legal innovation can improve it.
In a nutshell, Bill’s research has determined that more and more legal work is focused on commercial law at the expense of “PeopleLaw” –a term he uses to describe legal work done on behalf of individuals (like criminal law, domestic relations law and the like).
50 years ago, legal work was pretty much split 50/50 between PeopleLaw and commercial law. Now that division is 75/25 in favor of commercial law which is causing an access to justice issue. There is a great need for legal services related to PeopleLaw, but it is too expensive or just doesn’t exist.
However, Professor Henderson thinks there are a few things the legal community can do to address this problem: Better use of project management techniques, use of allied professionals, and leveraging legal technology.
SCENE: Afternoon. Early 2000s. Because the first internet bubble is popping, two tech lawyers find themselves with not much to do so they go to a matinee showing of Black Hawk Down. Those two attorneys are James Fisher and Kevin Broyles. That particular afternoon was not the only slow one for them. Work for them had dried up and colleagues at their law firm were getting laid off left and right.
Although they had opportunities to go to different firms, they started looking around at how their current firm was set up and knew there was a better way of doing things.
That is when the seeds were sown for Fisher Broyles. A firm that started with five lawyers and would ultimately join the ranks of the AmLaw 200.
From the get-go, James and Kevin concluded law firms had a lot of overhead they probably didn’t need which in turn, required them to charge high rates. Not the least of which they figured, was paying rent. They also understood that while support is important, lawyers are hired for what they know, and not based upon how many support staff a firm has.
As a result, they decided Fisher Broyles would be a fully remote, distributed law firm that would run lean and mean. Their business model would permit lawyers to pocket most of their hourly rate rather than it going to pay rent and other office expenses.
Fast forward to 2021, Fisher Broyles has almost 300 attorneys and had one of their best years ever bringing in $136 million in revenue. And they did it by leveraging technology and doing remote work before it was even a thing for most other firms.
Thibault Schrepel joins the podcast to talk blockchain, antitrust and competition law. He is a professor at the Free University in Amsterdam and on the faculty of the Codex Center at Stanford University. At Stanford he is involved in the Computational Antitrust Project which works to foster the automation of antitrust procedures and the improvement of antitrust analysis.
Thibault knew he wanted to pursue a career in antitrust on the very first day of his very first antitrust class during law school.
As Thibault recalls, "I remember the very first day when I went to the antitrust class in law school. It was a two hour long class and after one hour, we had a break. I went to my friend, and I said, Well, that's it. That's what I want to do."
Thibault is not just into antitrust. He is also really into tech and has a certificate from Harvard for Computer Science for Lawyers, so it makes sense that he likes to study the intersection of antitrust and blockchain technology.
Through his study and passion for law and tech, Thibault has concluded that the maxim "code is law" might be true, but there is still a need for external rules to govern tech and computer code.
This is especially true for blockchain because he believes that too can be used for anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices.
But, Thibault also believes that technology also provides a unique opportunity to identify and protect against antitrust behavior.
In fact, he just put out a book entitled Blockchain + Antitrust The Decentralization Formula that explores the relationship between blockchain and antitrust, providing a unique perspective on how law and technology could cooperate.
De-escalation. That is what Jazz Hampton and two friends from college set out to achieve when they co-founded Turnsignl. An app used during traffic stops to access legal help in real time to de-escalate what is often a very tense situation. Prior to becoming Turnsignl CEO, Jazz was a public defender and ended up doing commercial litigation at a top Minneapolis law firm. It was there that he began to question whether he was putting his law degree to its best use.
While Jazz was still in private practice, Philando Castile, with whom two of three Turnsignl co-founders grew up, was killed by police during a traffic stop near Minneapolis in 2016.
While at a vigil for Castile, Jazz began ask himself how he could use his legal skills for social change.
(Jazz is no stranger to police stops either. He has been stopped 12 times in his life and never been cited for anything.)
Although it was Castile’s death that planted the seed for Turnsignl, it wasn’t until the 2020 killing of George Floyd that Jazz and his co-founders decided they could wait no more and founded Turnsgnl.
As Jazz explains, they set out to create a “telelegal” mobile app to connect users with attorneys to advise them during police stops to protect their rights and diffuse the encounters.
Despite being a newcomer to the legal tech space, Turnsignl is already making waves. It is one of 15 legal startups in the Startup Alley at the ABA Techshow. Opening night, the companies will face off in a pitch competition. The winner receives a bundle of marketing and advertising prizes.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Michael Callier, Head of Legal Solutions and Consulting and colleague Edward Sohn, Head of Solutions at legal services company Factor discuss how in-house legal teams, their outside counsel and new law players like alternative legal service providers (ALSPs), can collaborate and maximize productivity by leveraging the strengths of each.
Factor is a new law company (sometimes described as a managed legal services provider) providing legal and contracting solutions to in-house counsel and their lawyers. Factor describes what it does as “having a niche focus on the mid-to higher complexity transactional legal work that forms the core workload of most in-house legal and contracting functions.”
In this episode of the Technically Legal Podcast, Michael and Ed and explain how all players in the legal ecosystem can and should work together to turn out efficient and quality work product for clients.
While much of Factor’s focus is contract lifecycle management (CLM), Michael and Ed point out that efficient processes and appropriate use of software solutions may be applied to many areas of legal work.
In fact, when collaboration and legal processes are done right, Michael says it can solidify the position of legal departments and legal teams as “legal integrators” connecting and influencing various parts of an organization and providing positive impact on business results.
Ed takes it a step further and points out that ALSPs should become seamless integrated extensions of legal departments and become not vendors being managed, but just another member of the legal team.
Casey Flaherty, Chief Strategy Officer for Lex Fusion, makes his second appearance on Technically Legal. This time around, Casey discusses his thesis that organizations often turn to technology as an avoidance mechanism for addressing issues with process and culture.
Casey has deep experience with legal process from all angles, he started his career as a commercial litigator before moving in house at Kia Motors.
From there he launched a legal operations consultancy and started Procertas, a technology training and benchmarking platform.
Since Casey was last on the podcast, he has taken on a couple of other roles. He served as Director of Legal Project Management for one of the world’s largest law firms, Baker Mackenzie, and recently took on his current role at Lex Fusion.
Casey talks about his legal industry experience, his writing process and explains why it is not a good idea to implement technology before taking a step back to map processes and making sure organizational culture supports change.
In the first episode of 2022, Mike Suchsland of the LegalTech Fund and Bridge Investments talks about investing in legal technology.
Mike has been in legal tech before it was even a thing. He started his career with Wolters Kulwer in the 1990s and ultimately ended up climbing high up the corporate ladder at Thomson Reuters.
He started as Thomson’s head of legal strategy, moved to the small law business group, ended up running the corporate legal unit, the legal education division and ultimately became President of Legal Business. In that role, Mike was responsible for 10,000 employees and over 3 billion in revenue.
In 2014 Mike left Thomson but did not leave the legal tech world. He is and was a board member for several legal tech companies and now spends most of his time investing in legal tech companies as a venture capitalist.
Mike explains how he got into venture capital, what investors look for in legal tech companies, the state of legal tech in 2022 and if there really is such a thing as a legal tech unicorn.
Legal ethics attorney Jim Doppke returns for an encore appearance to discuss the impact that legal tech and legal innovation have on the Rules of Professional Conduct and other rules that govern how lawyers practice law.
Jim explains how Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.1 (Lawyer’s Duty of Competence) and 5.3 (Responsibilities Regarding Nonlawyer Assistance) are implicated by advances in legal technology and legal innovation.
A comment to Rule 1.1 (and adopted by most states) says that as part of a lawyer’s duty of competence, lawyers must stay abreast of changes in technology. MRPC 5.3 states that lawyers must actively supervise “non-lawyer” assistance they engage to help out on legal matters. Historically, this meant that lawyers needed to supervise others lending them a hand–like a paralegal.
However, Jim points out that the rule specifically relates to “assistance” and not just “assistants”. This is significant, because certain legal tech, like artificial intelligence (AI), is really non-lawyer “assistance.” So, as Jim points out, if lawyers are going to use AI, they must supervise the training of the algorithms to ensure accuracy, just like they are obligated to supervise the work of their paralegals and other assistants to make sure their work is accurate.
In a similar vein, Jim points out that as the use of ALSPs (alternative legal service providers) increases, there too is another situation in which lawyers must supervise work done by those who may not be attorneys.
Looking for an in-house counsel job? Wondering what companies look for when hiring legal professionals? Well, this episode is for you. Bruce Byrd, General Counsel for cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, talks about what he looks for when he is hiring for his legal team.
Like many in-house attorneys, Bruce worked a few years at a law firm and then moved in-house when he took his first corporate legal job with the AT&T legal team. He climbed the ladder and ultimately ended up with the top job as Chief Legal Officer.
Earlier this year, he moved to Palo Alto Networks and took his current role as Senior Vice President and General Counsel.
Bruce’s 20+ years as corporate counsel has afforded him great insight about landing an in-house job. Bruce says that he looks for a few attributes when interviewing attorneys for his company:
- Curiosity
- An understanding of what drives the company's business (especially financial aspects)
- Business Development Skills (which is really understanding what the clients/business people need)
- Being a good listener
- Adaptability and Flexibility
Eric Farber, attorney and writer, visits the Technically Legal Podcast to talk about Creators Legal, a LegalZoom like app for creators and those in the entertainment industry. Creators Legal offers self serve industry contracts drafted by experienced lawyers.
It makes sense that Eric launched a legal tech company for creative types. He started his career in the entertainment industry working for a talent agency and then headed up business affairs for a movie studio. Ultimately he moved to private practice and represented entertainers and athletes. In fact for many years, he represented Amaru Entertainment which released Tupac Shakur’s posthumous music.
In 2008, with the economy in shambles, Eric, like many, had to pivot and launched Pacific Workers which was initially a workers compensation law firm for athletes, but later came to represent workers from all fields.
So, how is that Eric decided to launch a legal tech company? One of Eric’s law clerks pointed out that Eric always had great business advice, but he never used it himself. That comment resonated with Eric and that’s when he decided to launch Creators Legal. Based on his experience in the entertainment world, he knew the vast majority of those creating art and intellectual property could not afford proper legal representation to protect their rights.
What Eric saw is an access to justice issue and set out to do something about it. The result is a site that creators can go to and find legal documents to help them protect their rights and create businesses around their art.
Although historically Eric was on the legal side of the entertainment industry, he is also a creator. He wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Case for Culture: How to Stop Being a Slave to Your Law Firm, Grow Your Practice, and Actually Be Happy.
We talk to Nicole Clark, Co-Founder of Trellis, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform.
Like many entrepreneurs before her, Nicole came up with the idea for Trellis to “scratch her own itch”. She was burning the midnight oil on a pleading she needed to get on file for a client (prior to launching Trellis, she was a litigator). She was unfamiliar with the judge that would hear the motion so, that night, she sent an email to colleagues at her firm to find out if any of them had been in front of the judge.
In a stroke of luck, another lawyer in the office had been in front of the judge and with the very same legal issue. Needless to say, she was now armed with important background information about the judge that would help her notch a win for her client. It was that night that Nicole, said to herself, “there has to be a better way.” Why isn’t there a database of background information on state court judges she wondered.
It was then and there that the idea for Trellis came to be. Eventually, Nicole hired a developer to create a bare bones app and used her law firm colleagues as testing guinea pigs. And it worked…Trellis became a reality and started attracting users outside of Nicole’s law firm. Nicole and the Trellis team got into Tech Stars LA and started raising money, and the rest…as they say is history…well…history in the making. Nicole and the trellis team have a lot of big plans they have yet to execute.
The ransomware episode.
October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so how couldn't we do this episode?
Our guests are Kelly Geary, National Practice Leader of Executive Risk & Cyber/Professional Services Claims for EPIC Insurance Brokers, and Rich Gatz, Claims Counsel for Coalition, a Silicon Valley cyber insurance company.
While both Kelly and Rich have law degrees, they have worked in insurance for a long time. Both got started with cyber insurance and incident response in the early days.
On the show, they talk about the history of cyber insurance coverage and what parts of ransomware and cyber incident response insurance covers. To close out the conversation, they explain what goes on behind the scenes in a cyber attack response.
Blockchain. Crypto mining. Proof of stake. Smart contracts. Non Fungible Tokens (NFT). DAOs. Crypto regulation.
We talk about all of the above and more with Lewis Cohen of the blockchain focused law firm of DLx Law.
Lewis breaks down what a blockchain network is and how transactions are recorded and verified on the network. He also talks about the legal and intellectual property implications of NFTs and decentralized autonomous organizations. Lewis also touches on recent efforts to regulate cryptocurrencies and blockchain businesses.
Sonja Ebron found herself in a couple legal tangles over the years. From disputes with landlords to dust-ups with shady creditors, she represented herself in court a couple times and quickly figured out litigation without a lawyer can be very difficult.
So, what did she do about it? She founded Courtroom5, an app that helps civil pro se litigants with legal research, provides education about court procedures and also helps them draft and file pleadings. A “do-it-yourself” litigation support tool.
In 2019 when Courtroom5 participated in the Duke Law Tech Lab incubator program, Sonja met Maya Markovich who joined the Courtroom5 advisory board. Together with the Courtroom5 team, they are trying to bridge the access to justice gap and make it a little easier on litigants who head to court without a lawyer.
Otto Hansen, the founder of Term Scout, visits Technically Legal to talk about the company he founded that uses machine learning to analyze and rate contracts. Specifically, it analyzes contracts to determine whether they are in line with industry standards and how vendor or customer friendly they are.
The goal of Term Scout’s rating system is to cut down on contract negotiation and eliminate the back and forth about uncontroversial terms so the parties can focus provisions that will require more give and take before they are finalized.
Term Scout is not Otto’s first start up. Otto is a lawyer who practiced for a few years before launching Term Scout, but prior to entering the legal world, he worked at a start up that was making ski gloves. It was his experience with the ski glove company that actually inspired Otto to go to law school.
“Whatever benefits advanced legal technology may bring to lawyers, I am concerned about this sort of technology seeping into the legal writing classroom,” writes Northwestern University Legal Writing Professor Michael Zuckerman in an article he penned for the ABA Journal, Law Professor Makes Case Against Automating Legal Writing in Law School.
However, Professor Zuckerman is not anti-legal tech. In fact, as he explains in the latest episode of Technically Legal, he even founded a legal tech company before joining the law school faculty at Northwestern.
His concern is that if law students are not first taught to write their own legal documents and do their own legal research, but instead rely on tech, it may very well come at the expense of their ability to employ critical legal thinking and, ultimately, be effective attorneys to their clients.
Professor Zuckerman also talks about how the Rules of Professional Conduct are also implicated by the use of legal technology.
Contract automation and building an alternative legal service provider (ALSP) within a law firm is the topic of Episode 52.
Eric Baker and Michael Case, transportation attorneys with Frost Brown Todd, talk about their journey founding Transaction Expeditors, an AI enabled contracts automation platform for the transportation industry.
Before joining Frost Brown Todd and before launching Transaction Expeditors, both Eric and Mike were in house attorneys. Eric served as GC for transportation and logistics companies SIRVA and CRST. Mike was also in-house doing legal work and running claims for a transportation insurer Protective Insurance.
There has been much talk over the last couple of years about the interplay between law firms and alternative legal service providers. Should law firms use them? If so, should the create their own?
When Eric and Michael, along with their colleague Stacy Katz, founded Transaction Expeditors, they were not thinking about those questions. They just wanted to create a more efficient contract management solution for their transportation clients. But in the end they created an ALSP within their law firm.
Having Eric and Mike on the show also brings the podcast full circle because Transaction Expeditors’ technology partner is the AI engine Legal Sifter, a company we had on the show way back on Episode 15 in 2018.
Cyber incident response. Cyber attacks. Unfortunately, we hear these terms daily nowadays. But what really goes on behind the scenes in a cyber incident?
To answer that question, we asked Luke Green, a Breach Response Services Manager for cyber insurer Beazley Group and Josh Sudbury, Managing Principal of Forensic Investigations at Lodestone, a leading cyber defense and incident response company, to come on the show.
They break down step by step what happens when an organization is hacked. From containment to remediation, Luke and Josh explain the stages of a cyber incident response plan. They also explain how cyber insurers and incident response teams work with companies to minimize cyber risk and damage.
They also discuss cybersecurity and what companies can do ahead of time to prevent cyber attacks including education initiatives and implementing cyber incident policies.
Data analytics maturity models (and legal operations maturity models in general) are the topic of discussion with Peter Eilhauer, Managing Director for Legal Spend Solutions at Epiq.
Peter knows his stuff about legal spend management–he’s been working in and around it for 16 years. He started as a consultant helping law firms manage costs and then jumped ship to help corporate legal departments manage their legal spend. Most recently with Epiq and just before that with Elevate Services.
Peter describes a maturity model as “a set of structured levels that describe how well the behaviors, practices and processes of an organization can reliably and sustainably produce required outcomes.”
Stated another way, a legal operations maturity model is a way of measuring how well a legal department is using their people, processes and technology to handle legal work.
Although Peter mainly discusses maturity models as they relate to data analytics (and specifically how to use data analytics to monitor and control legal spending), maturity models can be applied to many legal operations functions.
Using artificial intelligence to help make hiring decisions is the topic du jour of Episode 49. Matt Spencer and Aaron Meyers, the CEO and CTO of Suited, respectively, explain how their AI powered, assessment-driven recruiting platform helps law firms and corporate legal departments find the best candidate for legal jobs and also increase diversity hires.
After a career in investment banking, Matt and his co-founders launched Suited to address the major difficulties in finding the right job candidate: limited time, limited budgets and limited information.
Suited trains its AI with assessments taken both by hiring parties and candidates to identify potential hires who have the best chance at thriving in a particular firm or company work environment.
Suited’s assessments collect three categories of information: psychometrics, skills and academics. Once candidates take the assessment, the app ranks them for a particular firm to predict whether the candidate will work well in that environment.
To better identify the right legal job candidates and create a more diverse hiring pool, Suited’s engineers worked hard to develop software that mitigates bias in the hiring process. To do that Suited’s A.I. models models exceed the standards for fairness set forth by the EEOC.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
"The fundamental tool of lawyers is language" explains Serena Wellen in this episode. Serena is a Senior Director for LexisNexis and works on the Context legal analytics platform. Context leverages machine learning and natural language processing from Ravel, a company LexisNexis acquired in 2017.
Using Ravel's analytics engine, Context sits atop many of the LexisNexis databases and analyzes information about judges, lawyers, expert witnesses and companies compiled in "entity authorities."
With Context, lawyers can craft their best arguments using analytic insight about the judges they are in front of and opposing counsel they face. Context can help identify the case law judges and adversaries rely on the most, and how likely a court is to grant their motions.
Context is also a helpful tool outside of the courtroom. In-house legal teams can use it to vet outside counsel and attorneys can use it to figure out if the expert witness they want to hire has ever been disqualified and if so, why. Learn more about Serena.
Online Dispute Resolution. That is the topic of discussion with New Era ADR cofounders Collin Williams and Rich Lee. New Era ADR is an online claims dispute resolution platform that provides online mediation and online arbitrations.
Collin and Rich came up with the idea for New Era after they both served as General Counsel for a couple of Chicago based tech start ups. Collin was GC for online music instrument marketplace Reverb and Rich's last role was general counsel for Civis Analytics. A data science company founded by technology vets from the 2012 Obama reelection campaign.
Collin and Rich are buddies and a couple of years ago they were commiserating about inefficiencies in dispute resolution they dealt with as GCs. That is when the seeds for New Era were sown.
Fast forward to 2020, and the two got serious about launching an online dispute resolution company. The company teamed up with the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals and provides experienced neutrals to oversee online arbitrations and mediations. The rest, as they say, is history (or at least history in the making).
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr and WooCommerce (among others), is a distributed company by design. In fact, the company’s creed spells out its commitment to a distributed workforce. They have 1500 employees spread across 80 countries.
In the latest episode of Technically Legal, Paul Sieminski, Automattic’s General Counsel, discusses how legal work, which has traditionally been performed in offices, is prime for distributed teams because it is quintessential knowledge work.
And… the legal industry, like all others, must face the new post-Covid reality where people will likely spend much less time in an office (if at all).
Paul explains why effective communication is key to working with others outside of an office environment, and how this is good for lawyers because communication is a “legal superpower”. He also shares tips and suggestions on how to create productive and successful distributed legal teams.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Using legal tech to scale a corporate legal department is the topic du jour in Episode 45. The guest: Mel Scott, Senior Legal Counsel for Megaport, a global technology company offering scalable point to point connectivity for public and private cloud connections. Mel is also the host of a great podcast called Counsel about in-house lawyer life.
Mel talks about her journey from law firm lawyer to an in-house role. She also talks about her experience scaling Megaport's legal department not only with specific legal technology (contract management app Ironclad) but by starting with technology the company was already using. In this case, Slack and Jira (issue and project tracking software).
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
The history, current state and the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) is the topic of conversation with George Socha. George currently serves as Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness for e-discovery software company, Reveal Data, but back in 2005, he founded the EDRM along with Tom Gelbmann.
What is the EDRM?
It is a model that outlines the stages of the Electronic Discovery process. The EDRM discovery stages are:
- Information Governance Identification Preservation and Collection
- Review and Analysis
- Production and Presentation
In the 16 years since the inception of EDRM, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is much more prevalent in e-discovery, and as George explains, can be used in nearly every EDRM phase.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Using intellectual property management software and automation is the topic of conversation for Episode 43. We talk to Jeppe Hudtloff Viinberg Rightly.io co-founder and Rightly user Michael Ro Mejer Interim General Counsel for Danish clothing company, Masai.
Rightly is IP management software that automates and tracks tasks across the IP management lifecycle. Such as docketing, renewal management, and brand protection. The app also provides IP registration metrics and reporting.
Jeppe and Michael explain how through the use of technology, IP management can move from manual processes and tracking deadlines on spreadsheets to automating tasks necessary to the intellectual property lifecycle.
Using technology to manage intellectual property also makes it possible to leverage metrics and maximize return on IP investments.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In the first episode of 2021 we talk to a fellow podcaster and legal blogger Greg Lambert. He is co-host of the Geek in Review Podcast and also writes for Three Geeks and a Law Blog. Both the Three Geeks podcast and blog focus on legal innovation and change in the legal industry.
Greg’s day job is Chief Knowledge Services Officer for the Dallas based law firm Jackson Walker. Although Greg still considers himself a law librarian, as Greg explains, the role of a law librarian in the 2020s is way different than it was in the late 90s when he started his career after a stint in the army, law school and with a masters degree in library sciences in hand.
If the term law library conjures up visions of books and an old school card catalog, think again. Modern law librarians are often legal technologists and the role of law librarians overlaps with knowledge and information management professionals, among other functions in a law firm.
In fact, Greg oversees several non-library functions at his firm that involve the use of tech and data. Greg is a member of the firm’s C Suite and is in charge of its research team, the firm’s conflicts and intake team and he also helps with marketing and business development.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
The modern legal ecosystem and all its allied professionals is the topic of discussion with Lucy Bassli, founder of InnoLaw Group (formerly InnoLegal Services) and Chief Legal Strategist at Law Geex.
Lucy started her career in Big Law (at Davis Wright Tremaine) and ultimately landed a job in Microsoft’s legal department where she served as Assistant General Counsel. At Microsoft, Lucy was responsible for, among other things, the legal department’s procurement operations and contract management systems.
Lucy left Microsoft in 2017 and started InnoLaw Group–part law firm and part consultancy–where she helps law firms and law departments develop new ways to deliver and receive legal services.
In her role as Chief Legal Strategist for Law Geex, Lucy advises on the use of artificial intelligence in contracting, helps with product roadmaps, consults with corporate customers, and assists with the development of go-to-market strategies.
Lucy discusses the players in the modern legal ecosystem (regulators, industry groups, service providers, consumers of legal services and educators) and why to be really successful and efficient, all of them should work together.
She also explains what it means to be a unicorn lawyer–a lawyer that knows law, but also loves, understands and values process and technology.
We also talk about the “Big 4” entering the legal market and how law firm associates have a real opportunity to push for change.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Workflow automation for lawyers and legal teams is the topic of Episode 41. Our guest is Scott Kelly, one of the founders of Community.Lawyer, which is “no-code” workflow automation software with an app builder designed with attorneys in mind.
Community.Lawyer is a way for law firms, corporate legal departments and legal aid organizations to automate common and repeatable tasks to save time and resources. Among other uses, Community.Lawyer can be used to create forms to collect data, create portals for both internal and client use, automate document creation and even collect payments.
The app is centered around databases that legal teams can use to collect and reuse data relating to their clients and legal matters.
As Scott discusses, Community.Lawyer is being put to some pretty cool uses both for public and commercial purposes. Law firms and legal departments are using it to create better client experiences and it is also a great tool for legal aid organizations to tackle access to justice issues.
Speaking of access to justice and public sector legal work–Scott is no stranger to that. With an Ivy League law degree in hand, he started his career working for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Episode 40 is a great conversation with Matthew Holland, CEO of Field Effect Software, a cyber security company providing tools and managed detect and response (MDR) services to protect against cyber attacks.
Field Effect is Matthew’s second company. In 2007 he founded Linchpin Labs, a company that offered ethical privatized intelligence to governments and companies.
Matt started his cyber security career with an internship at Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE). Canada’s CSE is similar to the NSA in the United States. The CSE ultimately brought Matt into the Tailored Access Operations group to gather signals intelligence for the agency (intelligence from communications and information systems).
Matt explains why law firms and legal departments are prime targets for hacking. He thinks of law firms and legal departments as “the formalization of relationships between businesses and people and the documents, the communications around all those resources.” And, in those documents and communications, is the type of very sensitive information hackers hunt for. That is why law firm data security is key.
Matthew also discusses cyber security best practices for law firms and corporate legal departments (cyber security best practices for all businesses, really).
Matthew’s first and foremost suggestion to prevent against cyber attacks? Education. The majority of cyber incidents have a root cause in human error and cyber security education goes a long way. He also suggests the use of multifactor authentication (MFA), VPNs (virtual private networks) and password managers.
He also explains that an organization’s first step in implementing a cybersecurity policy or program is to designate a point person and figure out what kind of budget is available. Once a budget is known, organizations can then start to figure out the best approach to cyber security (what software to use and whether security efforts should be handled in-house or outsourced, like an MDR solution).
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Virtual court hearings are the subject of Episode 38. We talked to Magistrate Judge Tony Leung via Zoom about using Zoom videoconferences for court.
Judge Leung sits on the bench for the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota and has a pretty impressive background. He emigrated from Hong Kong to the United States at the age of 6, was valedictorian of his high school class and then headed to Yale for college.
From Yale he went to New York University law school, worked as an attorney at BigLaw for a few years and then became not only the first Asian American state court judge in Minnesota, but also the first Asian American federal judge in the state.
Judge Leung talks about his experience with virtual court hearings and the pros and cons of holding court hearings by videoconference. He also offers some best practices for appearing before a judge via video (test your equipment ahead of time, make sure you have a stable internet connection and good lighting, take time to mark and ready your exhibits and... make sure you are out of bed before hopping on the video call!).
Judge Leung also talks about how internet access for all also implicates access to justice issues. Specifically, if not everyone has access to the internet, it may limit their ability to have their day in court.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Ethics attorney Jim Doppke returns to Technically Legal to talk legal ethics and technology.
Jim is a former prosecutor for the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission and is now in private practice with Robinson, Stewart, Montgomery and Doppke. Jim counsels attorneys and businesses on legal ethics issues and represents attorneys and attorney candidates in ARDC proceedings.
Way back in 2017, Jim was our first guest and he talked about what was then a fairly recent change to Comment 8 to Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1 (a lawyer’s duty of competence).
In response to changes in technology, the American Bar Association added language to MRPC 1.1 , Comment 8 stating attorneys must understand “the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” (To date, more states than not require attorneys to be “technologically competent.”)
We brought Jim back to talk about what has changed since he first appeared on the podcast because his original episode is still one of the most downloaded. Jim says a few things have changed since the tweak to the Rule 1.1: More lawyers using artificial intelligence (AI), especially for contract review and litigation, more lawyers using tech in general (especially since COVID-19) and that there are now other legal ethics rules that touch on the use of technology (like MRPC 5.3 (Responsibilities Regarding Nonlawyer Assistance).
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Attorney Michael Volkov, head of the Volkov Law Group, is our guest for Episode 38. He discusses the use of technology, software and data analysis in corporate compliance and ethics programs. Michael and his firm focus on regulatory compliance issues, internal investigations and white collar crime.
Michael explains that it is very difficult to implement a successful ethics and compliance program without using technology to analyze data.
In fact, recent updates to the U.S. Department of Justice Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs (the “DOJ Compliance Guidance”) emphasizes that corporate compliance officers must be given access to relevant compliance and human resources data so they may properly monitor and assess the effectiveness of compliance programs.
Michael discusses the types of data that should be measured to ensure the effectiveness of a corporate compliance program, where to find that data and the future of compliance software and “RegTech” (Regulatory Technology).
Michael has his own compliance podcast, Corruption, Crime and Compliance and a great blog focused on compliance, internal investigations and white collar crime.
Things We Talk About in This Episode
- DOJ Compliance Guidance
- Compliance Dashboards
- RegTech Software
- Association of Corporate Counsel Legal Operations Maturity Model for Compliance
- Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)
- Mr. Roboto
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Bryan Cave data privacy attorney Christian Auty returns for Episode 36 to talk about the real world implications of the Schrems II opinion from the European Court of Justice.
What is Schrems II? It is shorthand for Case C-311/18 Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook Ireland Limited and Maximillian Schrems. In it, the Court of Justice reaffirmed that generally, transfers of personal data from the EU to non-EU countries are prohibited unless sufficient measures are taken to protect it.
The court followed law found in the European Data Protection Directive and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Both say that personal data of EU citizens may not be transferred to non-EU countries unless proper safeguards are in place and only if the Non-EU country ensures an adequate level of protection for the personal data transferred.
In short, Schrems II invalidated the EU/US Privacy Shield Framework that many companies used to legally transfer data between the EU and US. The EU and US governments created the Privacy Shield so companies could become certified to securely transfer data between the EU and US.
The Schrems II court did not believe that the Privacy Shield did enough to protect EU personal data because, among other things, even under the program, EU citizens have no right to challenge government requests for their information under the Foreign Information Surveillance Act.
As Christian explains, although Schrems II invalidated Privacy Shield, it did not invalidate Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) and he suggests that if you do not have SCCs in place and you transfer data from the EU to the United States, you should look into them.
Standard Contractual Clauses are model contract clauses officially sanctioned by the European Commission that address how companies must handle and protect personal data of EU citizens.
Christian says too that companies can bolster their contracts and SCCs by implementing a law enforcement policy–a specific policy about how a company will handle inquiries from intelligence agencies or law enforcement regarding data.
You don't have to "boil the ocean" to implement innovation and change in a law firm or legal department. That's what we learn in Episode 35 from Anna McGrane, PacerPro COO, and Joshua Fireman, President of Fireman & Company.
PacerPro is an app that streamlines and automates the distribution and capture of data from federal court filings. Fireman & Company is a legal industry-focused management consulting firm.
Anna and Joshua join us to talk about a white paper they put together analyzing the time saved and the ROI law firms realized by automating the distribution and processing of federal court filings.
Dealing with pleadings may not be the sexiest legal tech use case, but as Joshua explains, addressing solvable, everyday pain points can be a big win in the development of a knowledge management program and in the bigger picture of change management.
In their study, Anna and Joshua figured out that by automating the distribution and processing of federal court filings, participating law firms saved nearly 50,000 hours of human time.
Do you want to spend less time dealing with email? Are you interested in automating repetitive work tasks?
Cyndi Wheeler and Mark Pike, both in-house lawyers at collaboration software company Slack, offer tips on how to do that in Episode 34.
Cyndi and Mark discuss how they moved almost all of their communications with outside counsel away from email and into Slack channels and how that has increased productivity and the effectiveness of their legal team.
They also explain that Slack is more than just a communication hub, but has many other features including workflows and bots that the Slack legal department uses to automate common legal tasks. They use Slack workflows to field questions, review documents and contracts for legal issues and help sales close deals.
Finally, the two lawyers offer tips about how to organize and prioritize Slack channels and messages to stay sane and not become overwhelmed by the barrage of electronic communications we all get everyday.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
LegalMation Co-Founder Thomas Suh is our guest in Episode 33. LegalMation is a suite of artificial intelligence tools that helps attorneys and legal professionals automate routine litigation tasks like drafting pleadings and written discovery responses.
Thomas and his Co-Founder James Lee came up with the idea for LegalMation while working at a litigation boutique. The firm handled high profile cases and, to even the playing field with larger law firms, they leveraged automation to save time and conserve resources.
Taking automation a step further, the two attorneys realized artificial intelligence could be used to tackle routine (and sometime mundane) tasks that every litigator has to deal with–like responding to complaints and written discovery.
Fast forward a few years, LegalMation is live and used by corporate legal departments for some of the biggest companies in the world. As Thomas explains, Walmart uses LegalMation’s AI in slip and fall cases to give their lawyers a head start and let them focus on “higher touch” legal tasks. Using LegalMation’s assistance in drafting pleadings also promotes consistency throughout the company’s large litigation portfolio.
Similarly, LegalMation is also used by law firms to automate litigation tasks, such as Ogletree Deakins whose employment lawyers use it in certain employment cases.
Thomas points out that the use of AI in legal is not a replacement for attorneys, but a “lawyer’s technician.” He also says that lawyers implementing tech and AI should start slowly because if you take on too big of a project, you might be setting up yourself for failure.
Things We Talk About in This Episode
LTL Lawyers
Legal Project Management Software
IBM’s Watson
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Legal Value Network Founding Board Members Keith Maziarek and Justin Ergler visit Technically Legal for Episode 32. Keith, a second time guest (Episode 15 – legal service pricing) and Justin talk about the genesis of LVN (an evolution from the P3 conference) and the group’s mission of “designing, building and implementing the foundations of a more contemporary and commercially-sound model of legal service delivery.”
Keith is Director of Legal Pricing and Project Management at Katten Muchin and Justin is Director of Alternative Fee Intelligence and Analytics at GlaxoSmithKline.
Keith and Justin explain that inclusiveness is a big goal for the Legal Value Network and the group wants to create a membership community with representation from all corners of the legal ecosystem.
Keith and Justin explain that through LVN they hope to encourage community and collaboration throughout the legal services industry.
Things We Talk About in This Episode LVN Webinar: The Challenges and Opportunities of One-to-Many Legal Solutions
Blickstein Group Legal Department Operations Survey
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Microsoft attorneys Dennis Garcia and Jason Barnwell discuss how legal teams can successfully and productively work remotely. They also discuss how recent work from home orders may speed up innovation and transformation in legal departments and law firms.
Dennis is an Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft and a prior Technically Legal guest. We talked to him on Episode 4 about Automation, Cybersecurity and the Cloud. Dennis leads a team of lawyers assisting Microsoft’s Enterprise Commercial Sales and Services team, one of the company’s largest commercial businesses.
Jason is also an Assistant General Counsel and heads up Microsoft’s Modern Legal team. In that role, his mandate is to drive industry leading innovation to digitally transform and modernize the Microsoft legal department.
Dennis and Jason explain that for companies to equip their lawyers and employees to successfully work from home, they need to invest in the right tools. The first of which is good hardware—devices up for the task of running whatever software the business needs.
Jason points out that if remote workers have good hardware, they are well positioned for success because most modern software is cloud based and “meets you where you are” permitting work to be done pretty much anywhere with an internet connection.
Dennis and Jason also explain that for successful remote work, the modern legal team needs collaboration tools to communicate and work with team members, productivity software like Word and Excel to create legal documents, remotely accessible data storage and knowledge management tools.
Both Dennis and Jason agree that change is hard, but lawyers, like everyone else, just need to make the jump and try new tools and new ways of working. And… it all starts with a mindset shift.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Sterling Miller joins us on Episode 30 to discuss how in-house legal teams can help their companies respond to crisis situations and pandemics. Sterling is a three time general counsel (Travelocity, Sabre Corporation and Marketo) now with the Hilger Grabens law firm. He also writes a great blog, Ten Things You Need to Know as In-House Counsel.
Sterling explains that during crises, in-house lawyers should “run to the fire” and actively help their companies deal with difficult times. It is a good opportunity for legal departments to lead and show value to the organization.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
According to Clio’s Legal Trends Report, attorneys fail to respond to more than 60% of inquiries from prospective clients. This abysmal response rate is juxtaposed against surveys of in-house counsel reporting that, on a scale of 1 to 10, responding to client inquiries rates 8.8 in importance .
Poor client communications should not be the norm in legal. In Episode 29, lawyer and founder of Attorney Sync, Gyi Tsakalakis explains how lawyers can use tech and software to be more responsive to client inquiries, strengthen client relationships and win new business.
Gyi is a good person to talk to about this subject. His company Attorney Sync is a digital marketing consultancy helping lawyers build good websites and implement effective digital strategies. Gyi is also the co-host of a great legal marketing podcast called Clienting.
In this episode, Gyi talks about a few of the findings from the Clio Legal Trends report, but also offers practical tips to improve client communications. As Gyi notes, the first step in building strong client relationships and improving customer experience does not involve tech at all: It’s making responsiveness a priority and implementing client response policies.
Once a policy is in place, then it is time to think about using tech to enhance client interactions. The backbone is a good CRM platform (customer relationship management). These tools often provide access to email automation, bots and customer support tools that help facilitate client communications.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 28 Joshua Becker, Chairman of Lex Machina and head of the Lexis Nexis Legal Tech Accelerator talks data driven lawyering. Josh discusses his start in the tech community and his move to venture capital. Ultimately, Josh became involved with Lex Machina, a legal data analytics company started at Stanford.
Lex Machina permits legal teams to mine litigation data to find insights about judges, lawyers, parties, and the subjects of the cases themselves to discover meaningful patterns in data.
Josh explains how data analysis can not only help lawyers win cases, but it can also help them win business and help corporate legal departments find the right lawyers for their legal projects.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 27 we talk to Chuck Fox, Director of the Visualization Practice Group at Engineering Systems Inc. (ESI). Chuck explains how his team creates 3D models and virtual reality applications to help lawyers better understand their cases and demonstrate to judges and juries how situations occurred.
Chuck explains that VR modeling starts with laser scan data that is turned into a point cloud and then loaded into software to create the VR environment.
Chuck and ESI have been hired by lawyers to create VR models for injury cases and also patent cases. Chuck believes that VR also presents an opportunity to recreate situation for insurance claims handling and create training models for insurance claim adjusters.
Learn more about Chuck or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
We headed to Silicon Valley to chat with SimpleLegal founder Nathan Wenzel in Episode 26. Nathan has a great legal tech startup story–from idea to acquisition.
SimpleLegal provides legal operations software to help corporate legal teams run their departments, manage their legal operations and monitor finances. (This type of software is sometimes referred to as ELM software or “enterprise legal management” software.)
The early days of SimpleLegal were spent at Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s highly respected start up accelerator. The company was one of the first legal tech companies YC accepted. After completing the program, Nathan and his team raised a seed round and then a $10 million Series A round to grow the company.
Fast forward to 2019 and Onit came knocking. Onit is another company providing enterprise software for in-house legal departments and legal ops teams. Onit acquired SimpleLegal in May, 2019.
Nathan talks about his legal tech journey and what it was like to raise money when investors were not as familiar with legal technology companies.
Learn more about SimpleLegal, and be sure to check out their great blog covering legal ops and in-house legal topics. The company also has a great legal ops resource center too.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 25, we talk to New York Times Senior Economics Correspondent Neil Irwin about his book, How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: The Definitive Guide to Adapting and Succeeding in High-Performance Careers.
To write the book, Neil interviewed successful employees with companies in various industries–from Microsoft to a company running popular New York City eateries. He wanted to understand what made these people successful in the modern economy. An economy driven by automation, “gig” jobs and dominated by “winner take all” companies (companies that dominate an industry like Google, Facebook and Walmart).
Neil figured out that the most successful professionals are “glue people.” People who can communicate across varying job types and roles. Glue people are effective communicators because they are flexible, held varying types of positions in their career and understand the economics of their company.
What does this have to do with legal tech and legal innovation? Quite a bit.
The legal industry is not immune to economic changes affecting other industries. Technology and automation are changing the way lawyers work. To be a successful lawyer nowadays, it takes exposure and skills outside traditional lawyering (like understanding project management and being tech savvy–or, being a “unicorn lawyer”).
In his book, Neil ultimately concludes that for people with the right mindset, economic changes impacting the modern career path are positive. Those that are flexible, willing to make the effort to stay ahead of industry trends and take time to understand what really drives business to their companies and firms are poised to succeed.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 24 we talk litigation finance with Justin Barker, an investment manager and the head of the Chicago office for litigation funding firm Validity Finance, and Bartlit Beck litigator Steven Nachtwey.
Justin and Steve discuss the process of securing litigation funding, deal structure and explain that a good litigation finance relationship is built on trust.
We close out the interview discussing the non-monetary benefits of litigation funding (another “set of eyes” to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a claim and the ability to see a claim all the way through to the end). The guys also dispel some myths about litigation finance (such as that it encourages litigation of bad claims).
In the legal tech founder segment we talk to lawyer and legal tech founder, Brian Powers of PactSafe. Founded in 2015 PactSafe is software enabling users to create, monitor and track high volume contracts (like clickwrap agreements) at massive scale. Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Legal ethics attorney Jim Doppke discusses the impact that legal tech and legal innovation have on the Rules of Professional Conduct and other rules that govern how lawyers practice law.
Jim explains how Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.1 (Lawyer’s Duty of Competence) and 5.3 (Responsibilities Regarding Nonlawyer Assistance) are implicated by advances in legal technology and legal innovation. A comment to Rule 1.1 (and adopted by most states) says that as part of a lawyer’s duty of competence, lawyers must stay abreast of changes in technology.
Rule 5.3 states that lawyers must actively supervise “non-lawyer” assistance they engage to help out on legal matters. This is significant, because certain legal tech, like artificial intelligence (AI), is really non-lawyer “assistance.” So, as Jim points out, if lawyers are going to use AI, they must supervise the training of the algorithms to ensure accuracy.
In a similar vein, Jim points out that as the use of ALSPs (alternative legal service providers) increases, there too is another situation in which lawyers must supervise work done by those who may not be attorneys.
In the legal tech founder segment, we talk to Jeffrey Eschbach, the founder of Page Vault. Page Vault software permits users to capture webpages and social media for use in legal matters. The captures are forensically sound, delivered in pdf format and include vital metadata strengthening evidentiary value. Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
For Episode 22 we headed to Washington D.C. to talk to patent attorney Kate Gaudry about using big data to help legal clients.
Much of Kate’s data analysis focuses on allowance rates for individual patent examiners (the percentage of patents they approve) and also for the “art units” they work in.
We also talk to Kate about how mathematical models like game theory can be used to make decisions about pursuing or abandoning patent applications.
Finally, Kate explains that before attorneys start collecting data and using technology to analyze it, they need to take a step back, look at the whole process and figure out which questions really need answered and identify the ones for which data may provide insight.
In this episode we also talk to Lawcadia founder Warwick Walsh. The Lawcadia platform is an end-to-end matter and spend management system built specifically for in-house legal teams. Check out episode page. Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 21 we talk to Dave Rogers, Chief Technology Officer for the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom. (Similar to the U.S. Department of Justice).
Dave explains how falling in love with “hype technology” (the hot new tech of the moment) may actually hinder an organization’s efforts to innovate.
Dave also points out that legacy technology can be problematic for organizations large and small. He refers to this as the “toxicity of legacy”. Toxicity caused by older software and systems that are poorly supported, hard to update, poorly documented, non-compliant or inefficient.
We also talk to Crawford Appleby, founder of rulings.law. A searchable database of tentative rulings issued by Los Angeles Superior Court judges. Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 20 we talk to Evisort founder Jerry Ting about his company and also about improving legal technology by looking outside of legal tech.
Jerry founded Evisort while studying at Harvard Law and it was there that he started looking outside of the legal world to build his business. He applied to and was accepted by the Harvard Innovation Lab to help launch the company. By the time he graduated Harvard, Jerry and his team already had customers and had raised money for the company.
In this episode’s legal tech founder segment, we talk to Andrew Klein, founder of Reynen Court, a services automation platform that uses containerization to enable law firms to deploy computing applications without exposing firm or client content to outside computing environments.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Lawyers Zach Smolinski and Christian Auty return for Episode 19. Like last time, they discuss blockchain technology and its impact on the practice of law. Zach is with Smolinski Rosario Law and Christian with the Much firm.
We talk about what’s changed in the blockchain world since they were on the show in 2017. Both agree that regulators have stepped up enforcement and the public is less enthralled about the technology. However, both are still big supporters and excited to see people getting serious about building sustainable blockchain businesses.
In this episode’s legal tech founder segment, we talk to Basha Rubin and Mirra Levitt the founders of Priori Legal. The company makes it easy for companies to find, hire and manage outside counsel without the costly infrastructure of a firm.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
The focus of this episode is automation of legal processes by law firms and in-house legal teams. We talk to immigration lawyer Greg Siskind. He and his firm automate both client facing and internal legal processes. As we learn, automation limits errors, automates expertise, saves time and is good for marketing.
In our legal tech founder segment, talk to Tom Dreyfus, CEO and co-founder of Josef, an automation platform helping lawyers create legal chatbots.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 17 we talk about online dispute resolution with Stephen Kane, the founder of Fairclaims, a platform that helps people resolve legal claims online.
ODR has been around since the 1990s, but really took off when companies like Ebay and Amazon started to use it to resolve customer complaints and disputes.
As Stephen explains, many types of disputes are amenable to ODR and courts across the globe are starting to use it.
In our Legal Tech Founder Segment, we talk to Tucker Cottingham, the CEO and co-founder of Lawyaw, a document automation and assembly tool for lawyers.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
Our guest this time is Vishal Agnihotri, Chief Knowledge Officer (or “CKO”) for Hinshaw & Culbertson. As CKO, Vishal is responsible for the firm’s knowledge management programs.
Vishal has a great definition for KM: the ability to identify critical knowledge within an organization and then leveraging it to serve up at the right time for the right purpose.
Vishal explains that law firms are great candidates for knowledge management and law firm CKOs must work closely with the firm’s Chief Information Officers and Chief Marketing Officers.
For law firms and legal departments interested in implementing a knowledge management program, Vishal says the first step is determining what constitutes “critical knowledge” and to use tools to organize that critical information. She suggests a good starting point is a collaboration platform to share knowledge and pose questions and to also utilize a good intranet for the organization.
We also talk to Jeff Kerr, the CEO of CaseFleet. A case chronology and management tool for lawyers that helps attorneys review evidence, organize facts, and identify trends in legal matters. Jeff also points out that CaseFleet is also used by investigative reporters and expert witnesses.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In this episode, we sit down with Keith Maziarek, Director of Pricing and Legal Project Management for the law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman.
Keith explains that law firms are adding pricing positions because of economic pressures and client demands. Clients are demanding changes in the way they are billed (AFAs or “alternative fee arrangements”) and also demanding that law firms become more efficient.
Keith also explains how project management and pricing legal services go hand in hand because to properly forecast the cost of a legal project, a thorough understanding of how the work will be done and what resources are needed is necessary.
Keith notes that fixed fees are not the only type of AFA out there. He discusses fee collars and success based legal fees. Keith explains how pricing fits into law firm marketing efforts and why sometimes it is best not to bid on work at all if it is not a good fit for the law firm.
In our Legal Founder Segment we talk to Kevin Miller, the CEO of Legal Sifter, an app that uses artificial intelligence to help people negotiate contracts with speed and providing advice from company leaders and lawyers in seconds.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 14 we talk to Barry Solomon, lawyer, former BigLaw CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) and current President of Foundation Software Group. Foundation develops experience management software for law firms.
Barry distinguishes marketing from business development and explains how the two should work together. Barry says the key to good business development is to really listen to clients about their needs.
Barry also discusses the benefits of using of technology to gather data and track marketing metrics. He points out that much of the data helpful to improve marketing efforts is often found in software law firms already use (such as billing and timekeeping software, matter management software and the like).
Barry’s tip for law firms wanting to get serious about marketing, but still testing the waters, is to have two programs in place: 1) a program to gather client feedback; and 2) a program in place to train lawyers how to develop business.
We also talk with Daniel Goldstein, the Founder of Trust & Will, an online tool to create, edit, store, and share a trust and will.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
For Lucky Episode 13, we talk to Justine Gottshall about data privacy laws. Specifically, about the GDPR and California’s Consumer Privacy Act.
Justine is a partner at InfoLaw Group, where she counsels clients on data privacy, technology, information governance, consumer protection, and digital marketing issues. Justine began her career as a Washington D.C. litigator and was involved in the FTC’s first data privacy investigation.
In this podcast, Justine explains to whom the GDPR and CCPA apply and the protections the laws give consumers. Justine also explains that law firms are not immune from data privacy laws.
We also talk to former bankruptcy attorney Morris Massel about the company he founded, CourtSolutions, The company provides an efficient way for judges and lawyers to make telephonic court appearances.
In Episode 12, we talk to Jae Um, founder of Six Parsecs, an insights company for the legal industry.
The conversation with Jae is wide ranging. We discuss Han Solo, the true distance of a parsec and how she came up with the name for her company.
Jae explains that a “new normal” confronts many law firms and discusses how they must now compete for business post-2008 recession.
Jae also talks about how “data viz” (or data visualization) helps explain information and why it is not helpful to use the “Because Lawyers” excuse as the reason change does not always come quickly to the legal industry.
In Episode 12, we also talk to Jason Boehmig, attorney and founder of Ironclad. A contract management and automation platform.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In this episode we connect with Zach Abramowitz, lawyer, legal tech writer and entrepreneur. Zach left the practice of law to launch ReplyAll.me, a tool that lets users conduct live conversations and embed them on a website as the conversation unfolds. We talk to Zach about trends in legal tech, how lessons learned by e-discovery software companies helped pave the way for other legal tech apps and why law firms are positioned to develop legal tech software.
In Episode 10, we also talk to Catherine Krow, also an attorney and the founder of Digitory Legal, a cloud based legal budgeting and resource management platform.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
For Episode 9 we visited Gabriel Teninbaum, Director of the Institute on Legal Innovation and Technology and a legal writing professor at Suffolk University School of Law.
Suffolk’s Legal Innovation Institute has three programs: A legal tech concentration for law students, the LIT Lab, and an online legal tech certificate program.
Gabe also developed an called Spaced Repetition that helps law students with their studies and to prepare for the bar exam.
In this episode, we also talk to Rick Merrill, the founder of Gavelytics, an AI powered database containing information about judges, their tendencies and rulings.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 8, we talk to Angie Hickey, CEO of the Chicago based law firm Levenfeld Pearlstein. Angie discusses the benefits of business people holding leadership positions in law firms.
Angie explains that one of the main benefits of hiring business people to help run law firms is that it permits lawyers to spend more time doing what they are trained to do–practice law.
Angie also points out that when law firms implement business strategies and systems, the client experience is improved.
Angie also discusses why collecting feedback is a must for improvement and that when business minded people get involved with law firms, they might have to push for change lawyers may not always want to make.
We also talk to legal tech founder Michael Chasin about Lexicata, a CRM (customer relationship management) and client intake app designed specifically for law firms. Lexicata helps lawyers stay on top of leads, automate client intake forms and provides analytics and insight into marketing efforts and referral sources so law firms can make better business decisions.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 7 we talked to Augie Rakow and Max Cantor of the legal tech startup, Atrium. Augie is one of Atrium’s founders and Max heads up Atrium’s artificial intelligence efforts.
Atrium is actually two companies: Atrium LLP, a law firm focused on providing legal services to start-ups, and Atrium LTS (Legal Technology Services), the company providing operational and technological support to Atrium LLP.
Augie founded Atrium with Justin Kan, a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and former partner at Y Combinator.
The talk with Augie and Max is wide ranging: Augie’s studies at divinity school, Max’s hobby of flying planes, why Atrium was founded and how it differs from the conventional law firm model. Augie and Max also discuss the tech Atrium is developing and their future plans.
In this episode we also talk to Jeremiah Kelman of Everchron, a great collaborative case management platform for litigators.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
For Episode 6, we sat down with D. Casey Flaherty at the Legal Tech conference in New York City.
Casey talked about a few things: how many lawyers struggle to master everyday technology, his experience as corporate counsel and the efforts he took in that role to improve the way company lawyers did their jobs. But, a good chunk of the conversation focused on Casey's belief that inefficiencies in legal service delivery will not change until clients demand change.
In this episode, we also talk to Haley Altman, the founder of Doxly. A legal transaction management platform used by transactional and M&A lawyers to stay organized when they are working on and closing deals.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 5 we talk to Ken Grady about lean thinking and the practice of law.
Ken explains that the main goal of lean thinking is to eliminate waste from business processes and that legal work is rife with waste. He also points out that eliminating waste from the practice of law might just free up time for lawyers to do other work, including the pursuit of access to justice initiatives.
Ken is currently a law professor at Michigan State's Legal RnD program and held prior positions in corporate legal departments and law firms.
In this episode, we also talk to Gavin McGrane the founder of PacerPro, a great app that makes it a whole lot easier for attorneys and law firms to stay on top of federal court dockets and pleadings.
Episode Notes.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In this episode we talk to Microsoft Assistant General Counsel Dennis Garcia about legal department automation, the benefits of cloud computing and steps law firms can take to shore up cybersecurity. Dennis also discusses lawyers’ use of social media.
We also introduce a new segment for the podcast. Starting with this episode, we will include a short interview with a legal tech founder.
We start with Ryan Alshak, a lawyer and the founder of Ping, automated time keeping for attorneys.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In this episode, we speak with Kent Zimmermann about the rise of alternative legal service providers--companies that help clients and attorneys accomplish legal related work such as document review for electronic discovery, or due diligence contract review for corporate mergers and acquisitions.
Kent also talks about law firm mergers. A topic he knows quite a bit about because he is a consultant helping law firms with strategic planning, management consulting, mergers, and marketing.
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In Episode 2 we discuss blockchain technology and its impact on the practice of law with two Chicago lawyers Zach Smolinski and Christian Auty. Zach is with Ziliak Law and Christian with the Much Shelist firm. Both counsel clients on blockchain related matters.
In this episode Zach and Christian discuss what blockchain technology is, how they became interested in it, and the impact it will have on the practice of law.
Zach is involved in Fin Tank a group working to grow Chicago's blockchain community, and Christian authors the Digital Lawyer blog.
Episode Credits:
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI
Audio Clip: excerpt from 14 Carrot Rabbit, Copyright 1952 Warner Brothers
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.
In our inaugural episode, legal ethics attorney Jim Doppke of Chicago's Robinson Law Group discusses changes to the Rules of Professional Conduct (ethics rules for lawyers) addressing the impact of technology on modern legal practice.
In 2012 the American Bar Association amended Comment 8 to Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1 (a lawyer's duty of competence) in response to changes in technology. The Comment now suggests attorneys must understand "the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” To date, more than twenty-five states require attorneys to stay abreast of changes in technology relating to law practice.
In this episode, Jim discusses the ethical obligations of attorneys to keep up with changes in legal technology and offers tips on how attorneys can begin to become for "technologically competent."
Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.