I will be mixing up the format of posts for this alt.legal column a bit, just to shake things up. Above The Law does a great job with Morning Dockets, Non Sequiturs, and Everybody Else Is Reading This posts, which are a combination of aggregation, curation, and some newsjacking. I don’t seek to achieve anything with that level of regularity, but if you will indulge me, I will look to curate what has now become a cacophony of voices in legal tech and innovation.
So don’t just read anything, just read this. I welcome your feedback, as always.
Recently, in the alt.legal world
What Even Is AI ‘Competence’? It Depends.
Takeaways from a Legalweek panel on evolving malpractice risks.
ILTACON IS OVER — There were many panels. There were boats at sea. There might have been some karaoke. ILTACON 2018 feels like an era ago, but last week was the week for various outlets to put on the post-game show. I have a summary piece on Legal Executive Institute about how ILTACON reinforced the real progress being made in legal innovation, feeling more substantive than before. It’s a messy trail to get to the promised land, and we might lose some to dysentery along the way, but always onward we go.
- For more on ILTACON18, check the hashtag on Twitter (#ILTACON18 or some variant) and check out Christian Lang’s podcast of ILTA voices.
- I also got into it with Noah Waisberg and others on Twitter about whether old lawyers are the problem, covered here.
Talent and legal innovation — Jae Um, the newest opinionated writer to arrive on the legal innovation scene, has finished a three-part series on innovation. Her third post is on legal innovation talent. I’ll be honest, it is real long, but should you get all the way through it (odds are that you won’t but I challenge you to concentrate for a minute), you will find a comprehensive and insightful view on the talent pool for legal innovation. Jae is a veritable paladin of dataviz, but these posts fall far deeper in the territory of well-researched longform than quick-hit infographic, and her style makes a long read an easy one.
Lawyers and software coding — For some reason, the should-lawyers-code topic has reared its head again on social. Can someone tell me who sparked this? The opinions fell along the expectedly drawn lines — lawyers who don’t code think not coding is fine, while lawyers who do code think that coding is better, and lawyers in the middle expressed opinions in both directions. Confirmation bias much?
Keeping Law School Accessible When Federal Loans Fall Short
As federal borrowing caps tighten financing options for law students, one organization is stepping in to negotiate the terms they can't secure alone.
Also, for the record, Zach covered this years ago.
The Rebellion grows — the ABA Journal released the names of this year’s class of Legal Rebels. Congratulations to all of them for pushing things forward!
Geeking out for a minute
Dispute resolution in crypto — For people keeping up with blockchain and crypto, it’s worthwhile spending ten minutes catching up on what Amy Wan is doing for dispute resolution in crypto. There are people who say much and there are people who do much — what Amy is doing is the latter. Also, some other worthwhile blockchain advancements in legal noted here.
Law firms and software design — Nicole Bradick has a solid post about how law firm-built products often claim to do much and end up doing little, and how to make something that might possibly last. To quote her, “I can’t say this enough — when developing products that need to reflect well on your brand, more is not better. Better is better.” All her posts are witty and worth reading; there’s a real consciousness growing around software development practices specific to the legal market.
Quasi-ediscovery in real life news — As you may know from my previous posts, I like to sniff out areas of pseudo-discovery in real life, like the Hillary Clinton Benghazi emails and Tom Brady’s cell phone. Allow me to add two recent examples to the mix, both of which are worthy of their own posts sometime.
- The question arose during the Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings as to whether it’s possible to review 42,000 pages in a day; see my response on Twitter to David Lat’s view on this. I mean, come on!??
- It was recently discovered that Urban Meyer’s cell phone was set to delete all text messages older than a year. This includes some messages, forwarded by his wife, from the victim of domestic violence being perpetrated by Zach Smith, a member of his staff. The Ohio State records retention policy has been called into question by some. (By the way, here’s how to change your iMessages retention period.)
- But also, to be absolutely clear, if a text is informing you about the present suffering of a victim of domestic abuse, maybe take an ounce of responsibility and do a thing about it, instead of literally erasing it from existence. Hope that comes off as common freaking sense more than being preachy.
DIY text classification — I recently discovered Google’s AutoML dropped a beta of its text classifier. AutoML is a no-code solution that you can train on a set of labels and then predict labels for new text. Google can also detect sentiment (is the statement positive or negative) and salience (to what extent the text is related to the predicted topics). Underneath every technology-assisted review algorithm is something like what’s powering AutoML. This doesn’t mean that those ediscovery products don’t have value — they do, lots. But the same tech is at work every day in your Internet life, whether it’s your Google search results, Instagram ads, Netflix’s suggestions, anything.
It is prevalent, it is everywhere, and now you can mess around with it for free. Point some text at it and let me know what you find (@edsohn80)! I may share some of my own results shortly.
Heard recently
“Your best thinking is when you are alone. Very few people say their best thinking is at work, or in a conference room…. Thinking is a daring act.”
Taken from ILTACON keynote by Lisa Bodell, author, Kill the Company.
Hey, that was a really fun post to write! Let me know if you liked it.
Ed Sohn is VP, Product Management and Partnerships, for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at [email protected] or via Twitter (@edsohn80). (The views expressed in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, Thomson Reuters.)