Last week, we asked readers to submit possible captions for this photo:
On Friday, you voted on the finalists, and now it’s time to announce the winner of our caption contest….
Continue reading “Caption Contest Winner: Because The Pay Is Better Than Doc Review”
Ted Olson
Normally when I hear the words “legal tech,” I run away. It scares me.
– Famed litigator Theodore B. Olson of Gibson Dunn, commenting on every litigator’s most hated technological development during his keynote presentation at LegalTech New York.
(Continue reading for more entertaining commentary from Ted Olson, after the jump.)
So I went to the annual conference of the Association of American Law Schools in New Orleans this past weekend. The place was lousy with law school deans and I had a ton of interesting, off-the-record conversations that I can’t report on. I also spent a weekend in New Orleans that involved all sorts of other things I can’t report on. It was fun and informative, you just have to trust me.
One thing I can report on was an AALS panel I attended, “The 75th Anniversary of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: Looking Back, Looking Ahead.” Now… I know that doesn’t scream “drop your panties,” but the panel was moderated by Arthur Miller. Yeah, that Arthur Miller, the famous law professor who wrote Death of A Civil Procedure Rules Salesman or something. And the all-star panel he was moderating included Justice Antonin Scalia… a person Miller doesn’t really agree with when it comes to rules. I had to go. Literally, I had to.
Unfortunately, the conversation was completely over my head. I’m not embarrassed to say that. Other people in my position may pretend that they got the most out of this discussion between Miller, Scalia, Biglaw partners, district judges, and others who have advised the Rules Committee. To me it sounded like, “TWOMBLY wha wha whaa, but in IQBAL wha wha wha wha! Wha? Given TWOMBLY’s wha and IQBAL’s wha, how could you wha wha whaaa?? [Laughter]”
That doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything….
Daniel de Juan, a sales engineer from Mitratech, summed up perfectly what LegalTech was like for me this year: “Being at LegalTech is almost like being at a casino, in the sense that you lose all track of time.”
Two years ago, I found the conference to be pretty intimidating, and that was when the conference was much smaller due to the weak economy. Last year, LegalTech New York was much bigger, and I found it slightly overwhelming. This year, due to some bad planning on my part, I came home from LegalTech utterly exhausted.
It seems I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. After a quick search on the Internet, I have seen only a few things written up about the conference, so I’m guessing many people went through the same experience. (For example, I spoke with members of The Posse List on the first night, and they told me that they were gearing up to do 36 interviews during the two and a half day conference — so it must have been a whirlwind for them as well.)
That said, here are some musings from my adventure last week….
Ed. note: Gabe Acevedo will be covering LegalTech for Above the Law this year. If you are interested in communicating with someone from ATL about LegalTech coverage, please contact Gabe at gabe@abovethelaw.com. Thanks.
It seems that judges are no longer afraid to unleash the power of the gavel when it comes to e-discovery violations.
There has been quite a buzz in the e-discovery community this week about an article in the Duke Law Journal by attorneys Dan H. Willoughby Jr., Rose Hunter Jones, and Gregory R. Antine, of King & Spalding LLP. Willoughby is the partner in charge of the firm’s Discovery Center, and Jones and Antine both practice in the e-discovery arena.
The article, entitled Sanctions for E-Discovery Violations: By the Numbers, was mentioned in the ABA Journal and the WSJ Law Blog, tweeted extensively, and summarized in vendor blogs such as Catalyst and Clearwell.
So what are the authors’ findings? Let’s take a closer look…
Continue reading “Judges Making More of a Case for E-Discovery Sanctions”
This week, when I wasn’t thinking about how to crack down on lunch thieves and trying to recoup the money I paid former Judge Porteous over the last few years (which put me in a bit of a financial bind, but I’ll be fine because I’m on the short list for a job at Skadden’s San Francisco office), I found time to piece together another Rundown of legal technology for the week.
In this edition, we go back to the future to discuss “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There is also a free download addressing European privacy and e-discovery, as well as other related content.
In addition, the most famous plaintiff in e-discovery will be speaking in Boston. And have you ever wondered what the legal industry will look like in ten years?
Continue reading “The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 12.09.10″
This week, when I wasn’t taking lessons in constitutional law from Christine O’Donnell, the greatest candidate for the United States Senate ever, or honing my brief drafting skills with the help of a Ph.D., I spent the time putting together this week’s legal technology Rundown.
In this edition, we see that a lot of lawyers will be working for or against BP for quite some time, and a former Senator explains why shipping American jobs overseas is a good thing. There is also some news on Qualcomm, a little cloud talk from north of the border, Rocket Matter is in “sync,” and much, much more…
Continue reading “The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 10.22.10″
We are at the end of another busy week in the world of legal technology. A major acquisition of a legal technology company took place. The DC Bar is expanding its interest in e-discovery. I do a quick update on a conference I attended last week. There are also a few articles I want to mention — one on the interface of lawyers and technology, another on “perils and pitfalls,” and a third on prenups. Yep, prenups.
So, on with the Rundown…
Continue reading “The Rundown: The Week in Legal Technology 9.24.10″
“Hey Mike, we’re having issues with your key fob. We need to reconfigure it.”
That may seem like a pretty random quote with which to begin a blog post, but trust me, it will soon make sense.
There has been a lot of chatter recently about contract attorneys and Biglaw. Some are finding themselves getting blacklisted left and right, which is not exactly breaking news in their corner of the e-discovery industry. Other contract lawyers are more resourceful, ahem, finding other gigs to support themselves. Earlier this week, there was another article about how contract attorneys are on the rise and how the pool of contract attorneys has never looked better.
Recently, however, between celebrating July 4th and our nation’s independence, knocking back a few Cuba Libres, and watching my beloved Argentine National Soccer Team completely self-destruct against the Germans, I was reminded of another aspect of being a contract attorney. (BTW, I say my Argentine National Soccer Team because my father is from Argentina. My mother was an American of Irish descent. Somehow, that makes me a Costa Rican. I know. I don’t get it either, but I digress.)
As a contract attorney, there are only two things the agency or firm you work with will definitively tell you: the day you start (and that’s not always so definitive) and the day you’re finished.
With that in mind, I decided to open a window into the world of contract attorneys and how they meet their fates in three separate instances. One I corroborated with several of my colleagues. Another I witnessed myself. Oh, and a third I am extremely familiar with, considering the attorney in question was me. Your feel-good post of the week awaits you, after the jump.
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
Keep reading »
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