I was reminded through a couple of examples this week of the importance of listening to your customers if you are a product or service provider. It’s stating the obvious: if you want to sell something to someone, you ought to know what they think, Duh…
Yet, lots of lawyers seem to resist the notion of asking their clients what they think of the lawyer’s work, the lawyer, and the law firm. Like its somehow beneath the lawyer to ask what can be done better? What was done poorly?
I chat periodically with David Carns, Chief Revenue Officer of Casepoint, to find out what his company is up to. But also to get his take on what’s going on in the legal tech world.
I’ve been re-reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I know there are criticisms of the book, but Isaacson is a good writer/storyteller. I realized Jobs engineered a return of Apple to dominance by doing two things really well. He forced the organization to make decisions quickly without endless debate.Second, the organization was decentralized. There weren’t silos or profit centers. These attributes let Apple get ahead even though it made mistakes along the way.
Of course, Apple was able to do these things because Jobs forced the whole organization to work together for the good of the whole organization. He had a vision for the organization—to make high qualitative usable products—that he and Apple relentlessly adhered to.
Continue Reading Law Firm Leadership: How To Knock Down Silos
I have talked before about legal tech products that either try to do too much or are so nonintuitive that lawyers who bill by the hour won’t use them. One problem often begets the other: in attempting to do too much, a product often becomes too cumbersome to learn and use. I have found examples though of legal tech developers that get it right. Casepoint, for example, which I have written about before. More recently, LexisNexis’ Product Liability Navigator has found the sweet spot as well. Continue Reading Trellis: The Google of State Court Analytics?
Designing is not a profession but an attitude.
I talked last week to David Carns, the Chief Strategy Officer of Casepoint. Casepoint is an e-discovery cloud based provider that offers data-based intelligence and full-spectrum eDiscovery, including cloud collections, data processing, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, along with review and customizable productions.
I first met David and was introduced to the product earlier this year at Legalweek and mentioned it in my post about that conference. As I discussed in that post, I found the Casepoint product to be intuitive and enables litigators to find documents and materials they need to take meaningful depositions, respond to discovery and prepare for trial. I was so impressed by what it could do, I remarked, after playing around with it, that I got the itch to return to litigation just to use the tool to prepare for a document intensive deposition.
Today, at a relatively sparsely attended session at its annual meeting in San Francisco (the session did take place at 2 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon), the American Bar Association released its 2019 Profile of the Legal Profession Report and offered a blunt panel discussion on the findings.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to and attend last week’s Solid West Summit on Legal Innovation and Disruption in San Francisco. The Solid conferences are the brainchild of David Cowen, who runs the Cowen Group, a legal recruitment, professional development and thought leadership agency. The Summit describes itself as a “TED Talk style summit focused on innovation and the business of law”. David holds Solid Summits at various national and international locations throughout the year.
The Summit Format
The conferences are by invite only and Dave routinely draws some of the top thinkers in the legal tech and innovation space including Chief Innovation Officers from some the country’s largest firms, practicing lawyers, leading product and service providers and thought leaders. Primarily– although not exclusively– geared toward larger business and commercial firms, it’s one of those conferences that you leave tired, stimulated and a little intimidated by the smarts of the people you hear from. Continue Reading Solid West Summit:10 Legal Innovation & Disruption Highlights
Legalweek is one of the preeminent legal tech shows. For years it primarily was directed to the ediscovery community; while there is still a heavy emphasis on ediscovery, the Show has branched out signigificaly in recent years. Put on by the legal media Goliath, ALM, it occupies 4 full days of programming, mammoth exhibit halls and, of course, numerous vendor parties.
As it began to wind down on cold Thursday afternoon, I took a break and sat down in the Plaza Hotel lobby bar to reflect. The Plaza of course is a grand dame of New York hotels featured in movies as diverse as North by Northwest and Home Alone 2. It’s a great place to sit, reflect, people watch, have a glass of wine and write. Continue Reading Legalweek Musings on a Cold Day in New York
Last week, Google announced the results of its new AlphaZero (aka AlphaZ) AI program that may revolutionize the use of AI in all fields including law.
Here’s the deal: we all remember Google’s AlphaGo, an AI program Goggle developed that beat the world’s human champion of Go, which is called the most complicated game yet developed. Unlike, say chess, Go is a very difficult open ended game. Continue Reading AlphaZ: The Ultimate Legal Disrupter?
