“I am well traveled but sometimes I think I’ve landed on Mars”.

Connie Brenton, CLOC President.

The CLOC 2018 Institute kicked off yesterday in appropriately enough in Las Vegas, home of the big, the sprawling, the decadent, the atypical in the land of straight laced morals and tradition. For just as Las Vegas flaunts the traditional and the staid in the legal world, so does CLOC .

For those who don’t know, CLOC stands for Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. Continue Reading CLOC: Change Agent In a Change Resistant Business

Litera Microsystems recently announced a new publication called The Changing Lawyer. So, yawn, what’s so new about that?

Turns out there is something new. Like most vendors, Litera Microsystems (which it insists it be referred to as instead of any shortened version of its name), one of the larger document management service and technology providers with a complete range of products in this space, already has a product blog devoted to providing standard information about the products and services it offers. Continue Reading The Changing Lawyer: Litera Microsystems to Offer Its Own Content

 

I tell you, no prophet is accepted on his own land.

Assume: /ə-soom/ Verb. Making an ass out of you and me

Sometimes you find pearls right under your nose. You just miss seeing them because you make certain assumptions based on what you’ve heard or how you have been conditioned. This happened to me recently when I discovered there is a Kentucky law school on the cutting edge of teaching innovation, entrepreneurship and legal technology. Continue Reading How a Little-Known Kentucky Law School Became a High-Ranking Innovation School

A long-time law practice mentor of mine used to say after spending the day with really smart people discussing big problems and solutions, that all that thinking gave him a headache. If that’s the case then Carl would have had colossal migraine if, like me, he participated in the Building a Better Lawyer” Design Thinking Workshop at Michigan State University College of Law yesterday. (Want to see more? See  #betterlawyer). Continue Reading LegalRnD’s Workshop on Building a Better Lawyer: Can Law Schools Lead Us Out of the Wilderness?

An interesting article appeared today in Artificial Lawyer (AL), Richard Tromans’ excellent blog on the impact of artificial intelligence, data analytics, and more generally, technology on the practice of law.

The gist of the article is that UK-based insurance law firm BLM has announced a partnership with  the London School of Economics (LSE), to develop litigation prediction models as part of a wider move into legal analytics. Continue Reading Litigation Predictive Analytics: Driving a Stake in the Heart of the Billable Heart?

So I’ve spent the past 3 days walking the Exhibit Floor at ALM’s LegalWeek18. Hundreds of booths; I frankly never knew there were still so many eDiscovery providers. 

 

But one vendor caught my eye. Cloudlex advertises itself “as the only Legal Cloud built exclusively for personal injury law firms”. This got me to thinking. There are all these legal tech providers trying to sell tools to lawyers to make them more efficient. But most of the marketing dollars seem to be directed toward firms whose business model is the billable hour. Continue Reading Plaintiffs’ Lawyers: A Neglected LegalTech Market?

I had a chance to catch up with Avaneesh Marwaha, CEO of Litera Microsystems earlier this week at LegalWeek18. Litera Microsystems is one of the larger document management service and technology providers with a range of products in this space. I first met Avaneesh at last year’s ILTA conference shortly after the Litera Microsystems merger which I wrote about in a piece for the Lawyerist. At that time, the CEO decision was up in the air although it seemed pretty obvious to me at least that Avaneesh was the likely choice. Continue Reading Avaneesh Marwaha, Litera Microsystems CEO, Talks About Tech, LegalWeek and Litera Microsystems

 

I’m spending this week at LegalWeek 2018, ALM’s annual event in New York. Lots of good presentations and talks.

 

One of the more intriguing presentation was on the official opening day of the Conference. Steve Kovalan and Nicholas Bruch– both of ALM—offered a presentation on the state of the legal market. They started by debunking the notions Continue Reading The AmLaw 200: At Risk?

The Janus Issue

The Supreme Court is set to consider in late February in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees whether workers can be forced to pay union dues even when they don’t agree with the Union’s political activities or simply don’t want to. If the Court holds that these mandatory fees violate workers’ First Amendment rights, a large and perhaps unrepairable crack in the power dam held by state bar associations may be about to occur. Continue Reading Is SCOTUS About to Disrupt the Legal Profession?