This week, I am attending Summit AI New York. Summit AI is a global conference and exhibition focused on the application of AI in business in general as opposed to legal in specific.

As I have mentioned before, I like attending nonlegal tech conferences because they often yield insights we don’t get in our legal tech cocoon. That was certainly true from the opening Summit AI Keynote this morning.

The Keynote was a fireside chat with Matthew Fraser, the CTO for New York City. I almost didn’t attend the Keynote since I figured it would not yield anything possibly relevant to the law. But I was wrong.

Continue Reading The AI Summit Keynote: Don’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy: Lessons from NYC’s AI Initiatives

It’s a common theme among law firm leaders, particularly big law firm leaders, to claim that their firms have some sort of vaunted “culture” that has been painstakingly developed over many years. This incredible culture, the theory goes, imbues the firm with some kind of wonderful familial aura, enabling the firm and its lawyers to respect a time-honored profession.

Based on what I’ve seen lately, I have to largely call bullshit on all that.

Continue Reading Have Big Law Firms Lost Their Cultural Soul?

One GenAI legal disruption that’s not talked much about is its potential to head off disputes and problems in advance. Elimination of disputes means less need for lawyers, particularly litigators. I have written about the potential for technology to do just this before. But GenAI and AI have the potential to advance preventive lawyering in ways we haven’t thought of. I learned of one interesting way in a recent conversation with Bruce Kiefer, Vice President of Software Engineering of OpenText.

Continue Reading Generative AI and the New Era of Preventive Lawyering

The NetDocuments user conference, Inspire 2024, took place in Atlanta this week. NetDocuments is a sophisticated cloud-based document management system. It offers an end-to-end platform for document and email organization and management. NetDocuments has over 7,000 customers globally.

Three things stood out from the Conference.

  • NetDocuments is positioning itself to be a player in the AI, GenAI, and automation market by combining these tools with its document management services platform.
  • NetDocuments is positioning itself as a one stop platform for all document management services for customers’ content.
  • Most importantly, the tools NetDocuments is offering and will offer in the future provide a glimpse into just how disruptive GenAI will be in the legal marketplace. And how ill-prepared we are for it.
Continue Reading Three Takeaways From NetDocuments’ Inspire 2024: GenAI, One Stop Services and BTW, We Need to Talk

AltaClaro, an innovative provider of interactive, experiential legal training (about which I have written before), recently announced the launch of a new course, Guiding Effective Use of GenAI: A Supervisory Course for Law Firm Partners. 

The launch is noteworthy for several reasons. The course is unique in that it focuses not on summer associates or even associates but on partners and senior legal professionals. It’s specifically designed to equip partners and managers in law firms and in-house legal departments with the skills and knowledge needed to effectively oversee the use of Generative AI (GenAI) by everyone on their teams. AltaClaro developed the supervisory course in collaboration with K&L Gates law firm and its AI Solutions group. (Interestingly, according to Abdi Shayesteh, AltaClaro CEO, K&L was AltaClaro’s first client some five years ago).

Continue Reading Empowering Lawyer Leadership: K&L Gates and AltaClaro’s GenAI Supervisory Course for Partners. Yes, Partners.
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One of the central themes of the recent Clio user conference held in Austin was the anticipated death of the billable hour. Jack Newton talked a lot about this in his keynote, as did other Clio executives in presentations and their talks with me.

The idea is based on one of the more startling findings announced by Clio at their 2024 annual Conference that just concluded. According to Clio’s Annual Legal Trends Report,  AI can automate up to 75% of the work for which legal professionals currently bill. That’s a startling finding and should put fear into the hearts of managing partners. This billed time percentage is significantly higher than that reported by Goldman Sachs in March of 2023. At that time, Goldman Sachs believed 44% of legal tasks could soon be automated.

Continue Reading Clio’s Legal Trends Report 2024: AI, Automation and the Death of the Billable Hour?

This week I’m attending the annual extravaganza put on by Clio, the cloud based practice management provider. ClioCon never disappoints. In addition to offering sessions devoted to its products, it also provides presentations that make you think about broader issues that impact the profession. One of these session was the Tuesday Keynote by Nita Farahany. Farahany is the author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending The Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.

The thrust of Farahany’s talk was that technology can detect brain activity that reveal things like your mood, what you find appealing and not, and your memories. All of these can result in the creation of data. All that data is the world of GenAI can be used for tremendous good in the treatment of things like mental illness, epilepsy, and other neurological diseases. It can be used to detect fatigue in workers or the attention of students. But unchecked, it can be used for a lot of bad as well.

Continue Reading Neurotechnology in Litigation: The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End?

I am thrilled to post this insightful article from my good friend, Tara Cheever. Tara is a co-founder of LitSoftware. LitSoftware suite of products, including TrialPad and TranscriptPad, among others, revolutionized how litigators practice their cases. Thanks Tara!

A cultural clash has been brewing within law firms for years. On one side are midlevel associates who grew up immersed in the sleek, intuitive world of Apple products. On the other side, legacy IT teams prefer entrenched Microsoft-based infrastructure, and are often dismissive of Apple altogether. As this clash reaches a boiling point, law firms may soon face an existential choice: stick with what’s comfortable for their IT departments, or embrace the future of technology that a growing number of associates not only prefer but demand.

Continue Reading Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Apple: Is Your IT Team Holding You Back?

As many of you know, I regularly participate in Bob Ambrogi’s LegalTech Week journalist roundtable on Fridays. This past week, we actually did the roundtable live and in person at Relativity Fest. I raised two articles/developments during the roundtable. The first one had to do with the settlement by DoNotPay with the FTC, which Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer analyzed in a recent article. DoNotPay was fined for alleging offering legal services to consumers that they could not deliver. (Josh Browder,the owner of DoNotPay was not named as a defendant in the action).

The second was the announcement that Rocket Lawyer had been granted approval by the Arizona Supreme Court to operate as an alternative business structure. This approval paves the way for nonlawyer law firm ownership. Rocket Lawyer has previously secured similar permissions in Utah and the UK. I usually don’t post what I talk about during the roundtable since that would be a little redundant But the two articles raise some access to justice (A2J) issues that merit additional consideration and thought.

Continue Reading Access to Justice: Perfection Can’t Be the Enemy of Progress

I’m attending Relativity Fest this week in Chicago. Relativity Fest is put on by the e-discovery software provider Relativity. Relativity is one of the largest discovery software providers. Relativity Fest is its extravagant user conference. According to Relativity, there are a record 2000 attendees at this year’s show, the 15th annual one.

I attended a panel discussion early in the conference on the findings of an annual in-house counsel Survey conducted jointly by the consulting firm FTI and Relativity. On the panel were Ari Kaplan, the principal investigator for the Survey, Adam Weiss, Relativity’s Chief Legal Officer; Wendy King, Senior FTI Director; and Celia Perez, in-house counsel at FreightCar America.

This was the sixth such Survey. Kaplan talked to some 34 in-house counsel in 11 countries.

Continue Reading Relativity Fest 2024: E-Discovery Providers Like Relativity Pave The Way for Legal Embrace of GenAI