Marty Smith is probably the most interesting and influential legal innovator you’ve never heard of.
A premed student who discovered he was afraid of blood, Marty made the shift to legal, and initially environmental law, rather late in his undergrad studies. Starting his legal career at the law firm of Bill Gates Sr (father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Jr.) Marty had an early opportunity to join (what would then have been considered) a fledgling Microsoft as one of it’s earliest lawyers but was persuaded by Gates Sr. to stay at the firm. Innovation was never far as Smith was later very early to the eDiscovery market, incubating an eDiscovery company at the law firm before helping the firm to divest itself of it and, ultimately, sell it years later. 
More recently, Marty has been one of the driving forces behind the ABA Center for Innovation. He’s also started and is running a new tech company in legal, MetaJure, that is hoping to change the way legal professionals keep and find documents.
In this special episode, Marty Smith and host Ian Connett (@QuantumJurist) with co-host Dan Lear (@RightBrainLaw) discuss Marty’s entrepreneurial journey from law firm to technology to legal tech, to industry thought leader and back to legal tech.
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Connect with Marty Smith https://metajure.com/about-us/
Connect with Dan Lear at http://rightbrainlaw.co/
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Show Notes
- Marty started as a pre-med major but transitioned to pre-law, with an interest in environmental law, after realizing he fainted at the sight of blood and didn’t like being around sick people.
- Quick aside about how a law firm partner told Marty “Your writing is atrocious,” and enrolled him in a remedial writing course as a first year associate.
- In the early 80’s Marty’s firm had one of what had to be the earliest law firm email accounts as a result of working with the then rapidly growing Microsoft.
- In early 1987 Marty had an opportunity to go to work at Microsoft but the caveat was that Marty had to meet with Bill Gates’s father, Bill Sr., for lunch. Bill Sr. convinced Marty to stay at the firm.
- How Microsoft’s antitrust challenges inspired Marty to rethink due diligence and, ultimately, found an early eDiscovery company Attenex.
- How an early law firm associate, now partner, wrote code that significantly reduced the due diligence required on the Microsoft antitrust litigation.
- Background on the founding of the Gates Foundation.
- The challenges of knowledge management in legal and the founding of MetaJure.
- Marty has sat on the board and, subsequently, now sits as vice-chair of the Center for Legal Innovation at the American Bar Association.
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