Avocado teapots. Cats playing chess. How new technology mandates a level of judicial technological competence and understanding. 

 

Bluntly put, judges exist to serve litigants who have disputes. The business of the judiciary is to facilitate the resolution of disputes–whether the dispute is resolved by the judge, a jury or through settlement. Judges are in a service business: like every other service business these days, judges need some basic familiarity and understanding of relevant technology.

 

.A new technology caught my eye last week that drives this point home. DALL-E, a technology that lets you create digital images by typing in what you want to see, was discussed in a recent New York Times article by Cade Metz. The technology was developed by an outfit called OpenAI, which is backed by a billion dollars in funding from Microsoft. According to OpenAI, DALL-E is “trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs”. It is a “new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.”

Continue Reading To Serve Their Customers, Judges Need To Understand Technology

A new Microsoft Survey reveals how much work has changed. And no amount of magical thinking is going to bring the concept of work back to what it was pre-pandemic.

 

Have you ever noticed men’s shirt buttons are on your right while women’s shirt buttons are on your left. Why? Most men usually dressed themselves in ancient times, while rich women often had servants to help them put on clothes. To make it easier for the servants to button dresses, dressmakers placed the buttons on the left. Few women have servants who dress them, yet their buttons remain on the left. Even though, for most women, it would be far easier for buttons to be on the right. But the tradition persists for no good reason.

Continue Reading New Microsoft Study Reveals Work Changes: We Aren’t Going Back

West Virginia recently announced a new effort to use technology to make its appellate Court system more accessible.

 

On July 1, West Virginia will launch an intermediate appeals court that is a step below its Supreme Court. The Intermediate Court of Appeals (ICA) is authorized to hear appeals from family courts, civil cases from lower courts, guardianship appeals, and workers comp appeals among other things. The ICA will consist of three judges. The initial 3 judges were appointed by the Governor; in the future, judges will be elected on a staggered basis.The ICA’s headquarters and clerk’s office will be in Charleston. The three-judge panel will sit in Charleston.

Continue Reading West Virginia Initiates a Hybrid Appellate Court Process

Three takeaways from a new Kaplan-Cimplifi legal operations Study:

  • Legal operations and what it does is becoming more recognized by in-house legal.
  • There is an increased recognition that legal ops can better deal with things like e-discovery and contract management.
  • E-discovery providers, like Cimplifi, see an opportunity to apply their e-discovery skills and experience to things like contract lifecycle management

 

A little lost in all the comings and goings at the recent LegalWeek was the release of a Report on legal operations from Ari Kaplan and Cimplifi. Kaplan and Marla Crawford, the General Counsel of Cimplifi, presented the findings of the Report at an educational session during LegalWeek.

 

Cimplifi calls itself an integrated legal services provider. It claims to leverage technology and expertise to simplify e-discovery and, more recently, contract analytics. According to its website, Cimplifi’s goal is to help manage risk, control costs, and get more done with less stress.  Cimplifi used to be called Compliance. It rebranded itself earlier this year.

Continue Reading New Study Shows Legal Ops Becoming More Well Defined & Accepted

 

Pre-pandemic, I faithfully attended ALM’s LegalWeek every year. The event was traditionally held in late January, in the dead of New York city’s winter. So every year, it would snow sometime during the conference. Attendees were fond of saying: it ain’t LegalWeek unless it snows.

 

This year, the conference was moved from late January to last week due to the Omicron surge and finally kicked off this past week. I figured it wouldn’t snow (and it wouldn’t be the normal LegalWeek) since it was mid-March and the crocuses were already in bloom. But sure enough, on the first full day of the conference, just like the swallows returning to Capistrano, on cue, it did indeed snow.

 

And just like the weather, the Show itself provided a sense of normalcy finally after two long years.

Continue Reading It’s Not LegalWeek Unless It Snows

The first ABA 2022 live TECHSHOW since 2020 concluded this past Saturday, and from all indications, a good time was had by all.

 

Maybe the best description of the Show I heard came from Jim Calloway, the Director of Management Assistance at the Oklahoma Bar Association. Jim said the Show felt like one half tech show and one half family reunion. And so it was. Lots of people seeing each other for the first time since 2020. Lots of smiles. Lots of hugs. Lots of random meetings in hallways and on the Exhibit floor.

 

One of my other friends remarked that he thought it was so nice to not travel and be with his family during the pandemic. That he might just keep doing that as we come out of it. And then he arrived at the Show, and as he put it, “It dawned on me how much I missed all this.” I think it was true for all of us, myself included. Jim was right: it felt like a good family reunion.

Continue Reading TECHSHOW 2022: It’s a Wrap!

A recent article in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson caught my eye. In the article entitled The Five Day Workweek Is Dead, Thompson opines that the future of work, at least for those not saddled with having to work at a specific place, will be radically different. The pandemic has introduced millions of workers to the new freedom of remote work—be it at home, at the beach, or Starbucks. And, says Thompson, they ain’t going back.

 

Instead, workers may return to the office part time-say Tuesday through Thursday. The rest of the time, they will work wherever and whenever they want.

Continue Reading A Three Day Lawyer Work Week?

Want to know what legal tech shows and conferences will look like in the new normal? We are about to find out. In less than 2 weeks, TECHSHOW, the American Bar Association Law Practice Division’s premier tech event, will kick off in Chicago. And the week after that, American Law Media’s LegalWeek will be held in New York City. TECHSHOW runs from March 2-5, while LegalWeek will run from March 9-11. (LegalWeek was postponed from early March due to the Covid surge).

 

TECHSHOW was one of my favorite legal technology events even before I became part of the leadership of the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Division. (I am currently Chair-Elect of the Division, which has some 20,000 members. LP is responsible for and puts on TECHSHOW). This year is the 35th such Show. Since its geared more toward smaller firms and solo lawyers, there is less high-power selling like LegalWeek. This creates space for more substantive discussions and learning from vendors. The last in-person Show in 2020 featured multiple substantive tracks, over 2000 attendees, countless exhibitors, a startup competition, and even a silent disco.

Continue Reading TECHSHOW 2022: Game On!

The Blackberry is dead. Officially. The Company recently announced that the remaining Blackberry operating system and software would no longer be available. And Blackberry warns, “devices running these legacy services and software …will no longer reliably function.” (Were there any such devices left?) Ah, the Blackberry. Rest in Peace. You served us well, at least for a time. And you ushered in the era of remote work.

Continue Reading The Blackberry: It Showed Us the Promised Land of Remote Work

There’s nothing worse than someone saying about your post, TL,DR. (meaning of course too long, didn’t read). It’s a kiss of death for a blogger.

 

There’s nothing worse than someone saying about your post, TL,DR. (meaning of course too long, didn’t read). It’s a kiss of death for a blogger.

 

But now, some members of Congress want to legislate this concept at least for those pesky app terms and conditions. Those terms and conditions that app developers make you accept to use their app. I mean who reads those things? Who knows what we really are agreeing to? And even if you did read and understand them, would it make any difference?

Continue Reading Legislate “Too Long Didn’t Read”?