I’m in Las Vegas this week for the annual CLOC conference at the Bellagio Hotel. CLOC (which stands for the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) is a network of businesses devoted to advancing in house legal operations. As its name implies, it’s membership and benefits have traditional been open only to corporations. Not law firms. And that may be about to change. Maybe. Well maybe sort of.

CLOC and its conference have grown substantially over the past 4 years; the conference is rapidly becoming a “must go” not only for legal ops people but for anyone in legal tech and innovation space. But with growth and notoriety comes new and thorny issues that CLOC is now grappling with, issues that are bubbling up just as CLOC has named a new President, Mary O’Carroll. Continue Reading CLOC’s 2019 Growing Pains

 

TechLaw Crossroads is happy to announce a new partnership with ediscovery service provider PageOne to sponsor a series of Roundtables to discuss burning issues in the ediscovery space. The idea is to bring together Lit Tech support personal, litigators (yes lawyers are invited ) and paralegals, among others, to talk about what’s working and to network in a relaxed setting.
Lunch will be provided and we plan to offer an agenda in advance. We also welcome participants to submit topics to us as they arise.
We all have good ideas and can learn from one another in a rapidly evolving space. We ask only that you come with the mindset that (a) there are no bad ideas and (b) all egos will be left at the door. We also ask that you come prepare to offer ideas and thoughts and if you like, even some humor. PageOne has been doing these for some time and by combining efforts within TechLaw Crossroads, we hope to broaden the appeal and converasation.
The next roundtable will be at the offices of Taft Stettinius & Hollister in Indianapolis on May 29th. We plan to discuss the following topics:
*Emojis.   How is your firm handling them in discovery?   Tech to identify them correctly?
*Cell phone discovery / Social Media Capturing.  (FRE 902(13) and FRE 902 (14))?
*Best CyberSecurity Practices / ways your firm is protecting itself from bad actors?
*Selling A.I., Analytics, Predictive Coding to your clients…best practices and what’s working?
*Moving client data to cloud—Infrastructure / SAAS…what’s everyone doing?
Of course, Chatham House Rules will apply. Interested? Want an invitation? Contact me at sembry@techlawcrossroads.com or Rich Smith of PageOne at rsmith@pageonelegal.com
We look forward to your thoughts and ideas!

Not long ago, I climbed on my soapbox about the lack of diversity among speakers at a recent technology conference I attended. Here’s the picture that prompted that post.

 

At the risk of revisiting this, I have had three recent experiences that brought to mind related issues of women, how men treat and view them and more particularly what the legal profession is or should be doing about our embarrassing women and diversity problem. Continue Reading A ManPic Worth a Thousand Words: Women and Law

Yesterday, the AmLaw 100 Annual Financial Survey came out, and it offers an interesting picture of where the bigs are and perhaps where the industry is going.

I also listened to an ALM webinar yesterday in which there was a fascinating discussion about the findings among Nick Bruch, am ALM analyst, Dan Packel, an ALM reporter and Gina Passarella, Editor-in-Chief of The American Lawyer. One of the big topics of discussion by the panel: what happens if and when there is a recession.

Here are some takeaways from the data and the discussion and then some of my predictions. Continue Reading The AmLaw 100 Annual Financials: A Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

A couple of years ago, I decided to go bare ass screenless for one day a week in efforts to get away from social media, emails, text message and visual noise pollution.

I thought about my decision and its impact recently as I was listening to Nicole Abboud’s podcast episode about her 30-day detox (as she calls it) from social media. I’m a big fan of Abboud’s Gen Y Lawyer Podcast even though I’m a bit removed from Gen Y at least chronologically. Abboud’s podcasts are always thought-provoking and stimulating no matter your age or status in life. Continue Reading I Go Bare Ass ScreenLess…For A Day

It’s funny the lessons diversity can teach you about blind spots. About your unconscious bias. Even when you don’t know you have them.

Yesterday, I posted an article on a tech conference I attended where there were no women speakers and where I thought there was a lack of persons of color presenters. I included a picture of a panel which I thought demonstrated this point. Except it didn’t.

Unquestionably, there were no women on the panel or presenting at the conference. But shortly after posting, one of my Asian friends pointed out that there was indeed an Asian American on the panel. Second from the right. Continue Reading I Stand Corrected: A Lesson In Unconscious Bias

“The future of AI is being built by a relatively few like-minded people within small insulated groups”
Amy Webb, The Big Nine.

Today I attended the a conference called SAS Analytics Day: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Symposium at University of Louisville. (Or as explained below, I attend part of the Conferance). This was a technical conferance for the most part; I grasped maybe 10% of what was discussed but I thought it would be worth the effort. Continue Reading What’s Wrong With This Picture?

LexisNexis yesterday announced that its subsidiary client relationship management (CRM) product, Interaction would  now work seamlessly with Microsoft® Outlook, Excel and Word-three applications that many lawyers typically use. InterAction® for Office 365® is available for both desktop and subscription versions of Office, including those running on Mac and IOS. It allows you to access your firm’s client relationship data and information about clients and potential clients while using Outlook, Excel and Word with a click or, eventually even automatically. Its compatible with 365 or the 2016 and 2019 versions. This is a significant new tool which should aid firms in business development. Continue Reading LexisNexis Announces Interaction— Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel Integration

Is AI real in law? Are most successful legal applications just software? Micah Grupp  raises some interesting points in his recent article entitled Facts About AI and Law You Always Wanted to Know. I’m not sure I agree with everything he says (Headline: Grupp takes a pretty jaundiced view of AI in law).  But it is true that what a lot of companies call AI really isn’t as they seek to capitalize on AI as a hot topic.  This doesn’t necessarily make their products bad (some are quite good) but it does confuse the concept of what AI is and can do. (Most have heard the old joke: its AI until we understand it. Then its just software). Continue Reading AI and Legal Application

Wilson Sonsini and its new tech ancillary business, SixFifty, may be ushering in a new wave for providing legal services and law firm marketing. The combination promises to provide automated legal services for more commodity type services under the Wilson Sonsini brand in hopes that it will generate more lucrative business for Wilson Sonsini later.

 

Background
 Continue Reading Wilson Sonsini/SixFifty: a New Wave for Legal Services (And Damn Good Marketing)