Bloomberg, Technology

Legal + Tech + Data = Possibilities

Legal technology continues to attract a small community of passionate individuals, like David Perla of Bloomberg BNA.

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Legal technology continues to attract a small community of passionate individuals, even if you consider the expanse of the community at Legaltech New York.

Veteran entrepreneurs, such as William Bice (ProLaw and Exemplify) and Graham Smith (LiveNote and Opus 2), continue to bring new products and services to the legal tech market, and industry leaders, such as World Software Corp. Chairman and CEO Tom Burke and LexisNexis CEO Mike Walsh, continue to guide companies and products to market.

Take the legal tech community on Above The Law. ATL has trial technologist Jeff Bennion, Nicole Black, author of “Cloud Computing for Lawyers” and “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier,” and Kevin O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Lexblog. And coming to this community on September 29 is David Perla, president of Bloomberg BNA’s legal division and Bloomberg Law, subsidiaries of Bloomberg LP that provide legal professionals and law students content, data analytics, technology, and workflow.

Perla, who was recently elected to the College of Law Practice Management, has a history of innovation in the legal industry. He co-founded Pangea3, an Indian-based legal process outsourcing firm, with Sanjay Kamlani. At Pangea3, Perla and Kamlani convinced law firms and corporate legal departments to outsource common legal tasks to Pangea3 to reduce costs. When Thomson Reuters caught on, it bought Pangea3 when LPO was growing more than 20 percent per annum. (See ATL’s Zach Abramowitz’s recent interview of Thomson Reuters’ global director of Pangea3, Joe Borstein.)

Perla has been recognized as an innovator by The Wall Street Journal and The American Lawyer. The National Law Journal named him a Legal Business Trailblazer and Pioneer and the ABA Journal listed him as a Legal Rebel. Over the course of his first year at Bloomberg BNA, the legal division launched an array of new products and information services, including Corporate Transactions, a Web-based product that informs corporate lawyers what deal terms are “market standard,” an online bankruptcy treatise, and Bloomberg Law: Banking, which provides banking news, analysis, primary and secondary sources, and practical tools.

Perla’s history in the legal industry goes deeper than Bloomberg BNA and Pangea3. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and started his legal career as a transactional lawyer at Katten Muchin Rosenman, where he gained experience in contracts, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate finance. After Katten Muchin, Perla moved in-house to Monster.com when new media and the Internet were, at once, nascent and ubiquitous.

At Monster.com, Perla gained an appreciation for the interplay between technology and content and realized how information was consumed differently by lawyers in corporate legal departments and law firms. And prior to joining Bloomberg, Perla served as chairman and CEO of Matterhorn Transactions Inc., a Web-based financial and legal information service used to search and compare market terms of mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, and other transactions. Matterhorn’s software and content, which is largely derived from Securities and Exchange Commission documents and public filings, now drives LexisNexis’s Lexis Market Tracker, a Lexis Practice Advisor product.

Sponsored

When I asked Perla for his initial take on his first year at Bloomberg BNA, he was impressed with the depth of technology and analytics expertise at the privately held company. Being privately owned, he said, you can play a longer game, listen to clients, and view the long-term health of product offerings. “If we get it wrong,” Perla said, “We can be frank about that rather than hide things in a quarterly or annual number.”

Asked whether there was a conflict between data-driven technologies and lawyers’ ethical duty not to have a third person or organization interfere with their professional judgment, Perla was candid. “That ship sailed 20 or 30 years ago,” he said. Now it’s a matter of degree. Whether it’s done analytically by a curator or editor, or by an algorithm, there is always some level of reliance on someone else to help you get to source material, said Perla. Data analysis ultimately gets you to the source material or market standard, but at the end of the day, he said, what to draft or what precedent to use is up to the attorney.

“What I don’t think you will have will be the entirety of ‘it’s been lawyered by a machine,'” said Perla. So the question becomes how far can you go with a machine or algorithm doing the work, and then where does a person take over and say, now it’s legal judgment.

“It’s all about possibilities,” said Perla. “What is possible with data, technology, even your [legal] career,” he said. Perla’s new column will look at the possibilities that result from the competitive pressures presented to the legal industry resulting from new technology, the economy, or paradigm shifts.

When you look at some of the things law firms are doing today, they are suddenly getting into businesses that are no longer just about the production and consumption of legal work. “It’s all about possibilities and change,” said Perla.

Sponsored

Check out the possibilities in Perla’s new ATL column on September 29.

Attorney Sean Doherty has been following enterprise and legal technology for more than 15 years as a former senior technology editor for UBM Tech (formerly CMP Media) and former technology editor for Law.com and ALM Media. Sean analyzes and reviews technology products and services for lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal departments. Contact him via email at sean@laroque-doherty.net and follow him on Twitter: @SeanD0herty.

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