Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

In this episode, Emily Witt discusses how to transition from law firm life to in-house legal work in the tech industry. Emily is a legal recruiter with Whistler Partners specializing in health law, life sciences and tech. She is also a podcaster and hosts Beyond the Legal Lens which focuses on career advancement and how to get jobs in health law and tech.

Before she joined Whistler Partners, Emily worked as a recruiter for the Wachtell Lipton law firm in New York, but she did not have aspirations to get into legal recruiting right out of college.

Her career path took some twists and turns. After receiving an English degree from Colgate, she thought she wanted to be a journalist, but ended up finding a career in publishing. However, her publishing stint ended when she headed out on a European vacation.

When she came back, Emily started trying to figure out what she wanted to do professionally. Around this time, she found a new rock climbing partner who was a lawyer at a large New York law firm. Her climbing partner suggested she look into legal recruiting.

The twists and turns of Emily’s career ultimately informs the advice she gives to candidates searching for a job with a tech company after working at a law firm or in a different industry. She explains that to find a job with the legal department at a tech company, you need to be flexible. Specifically, she says you need to be willing to jump to a different firm if you are not getting the type of experience that tech startups are looking for.

She also says it is important to work for a firm that is already servicing technology companies. Emily also recommends networking through LinkedIn, social media, and listening to relevant podcasts to find an in with a tech company.

Do AI developers need permission to use copyrighted works and other IP before using it to train artificial intelligence?

Professor Mark Lemley of Stanford does not think so. He believes using copyrighted works to train AI should fall under the fair use exception to copyright law.

Professor Lemley is the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, an author of seven books and more than 130 articles on intellectual property, antitrust and related areas of the law. He is also a co-founder of Lex Machina and most recently Of Counsel to Lex Lumina, a boutique IP law firm.

Professor Lemley argues that AI companies should be permitted to use copyrighted works to train AI models without first getting permission from owners because of the benefits AI will yield and the impossibility of tracking down millions of copyright owners to get permission.

He also believes that it is a fair use for AI developers to use works protected by intellectual property laws to train artificial intelligence models because such a use is transformative and the more data available to the AI, the more accurate it will be.

Erik Bermudez, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for legal practice management software Filevine, visits the podcast to discuss the importance of having an internal champion to drive software adoption within an organization, as well as ongoing training and metrics tracking to ensure the software is being used effectively.

Erik also emphasizes that successful implementation of new technology requires top management’s understanding of the problem and pain points that the software is solving. Without buy in from the top, the odds are stacked against successful adoption.

Dr. Heidi Gardner of the Harvard Business and Law Schools joins the podcast to talk about about latest book Smarter Collaboration and the importance of collaboration in legal teams and in all organizations generally.

Smarter Collaboration is Dr. Gardner’s second book and a follow up to Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos. Both books are helpful to those in law because much of Dr. Gardner’s research is based on the many years she studied collaboration in professional service firms, including many law firms.

Why is collaboration across different disciplines and business units important? As Dr. Gardner explains, most importantly, it creates better client outcomes which improve revenues and profits. But collaboration doesn’t just help make clients happy and improve the bottom line, it also fosters diversity and reduces enterprise risk.

Dr. Gardner has cold hard data that supports her conclusions: Back in the 1970s, 60% of US patents were awarded to individual inventors. Nowadays, that numbers has reversed. The vast majority of patents are issued to teams and the more diverse the backgrounds of those teams, the more successful their innovation.

A conversation with former Big-Law lawyer turned tech entrepreneur, Dan Rabinowitz. After stints with law firms, the Department of Justice and time as general counsel, Dan tells us how all of that led to the founding of Pre/Dicta.

Pre/Dicta is an app that uses data science to tackle judicial analytics, but unlike other similar software, Pre/Dicta does not just look at a judge’s opinions and track record, but also looks at other factors that influence court opinions. The app looks into data like the judge’s net worth, political affiliation, education, work experience, and other biographical data points.

You may have read about Pre/Dicta recently in the legal tech press because it acquired Gavelytics–another judicial analytics company founded by Rick Merrill–who was a guest on the show way back in 2018. Pre/Dicta originally focused on federal courts, but by joining forces with Gavelytics the company acquired a trove of info about state court judges and opinions.

In this episode, lawyers Hailey Lennon and Preston Byrne discuss the current state of crypto regulation in the US and explain why being “crypto literate” will benefit lawyers.

Hailey and Preston practice with Brown Rudnick’s Digital Commerce group. Hailey counsels fintech and crypto companies on regulatory requirements and Preston advises technology companies on corporate and commercial law issues.

Both Hailey and Preston have deep crypto experience from both private practice and also as in-house counsel for crypto and blockchain companies. This episode touches on the SEC’s enforcement actions against crypto players and the importance of decentralized tools.

They also discuss the potential loss of talent and innovation in the US due to lack of guidance and the importance (and difficulty) of educating others about the industry.

The duo also explain why it is important for lawyers in many practice areas to be “crypto literate” and possess a working knowledge of blockchain concepts. They point out that crypto is not a legal discipline, but is a market sector needing the same type of legal work other businesses do.

In this episode, Felipe Alexandre, a founding principal of AG Immigration, talks about his experience growing up as an immigrant in South Florida, his journey into law, and his passion for helping newcomers to America.

He also discusses his firm’s services, including business-related visas, humanitarian work, and asylum. In addition, Alexandre talks about his firm’s move to the metaverse and the benefits of using VR consultations with clients.

Since she was a kid, Dorna Moini, the CEO of legal document automation company Gavel, knew she wanted to be a lawyer–specifically a human rights lawyer. So, right after she received an accounting degree from NYU she headed to law school and even took an internship with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

After talking to a trusted professor, she decided that before pursuing human rights law, it might be best to get other types of legal experience and she ended up working in big law for several years.

Even though corporate clients and large employers were her clients, Dorna never lost her desire to use her law degree for the greater good and took on a bunch of pro bono work–especially in the area of domestic relations.

While doing that work she figured out pretty quickly that a lot of it was repetitive, form based tasks that took time away from other work that actually required her legal skills. She asked a friend to build her an app that would automate the form creation process.

Basically she wanted TurboTax for domestic law. They called the app Self Help Law and it was a success. So much so that people within and without her firm started using it. In fact, it was so successful that people from other countries started asking her to design apps to fill out forms for the legal work they were doing. It was at that point that she figured maybe she should start a company and take her app to the masses.

In 2018 she quit her law firm job and became a full fledged legal tech entrepreneur. She changed the name of her company to Documate and the company began building a platform that would enable the automation of all kinds of forms.

Ultimately, the company turned into what is now known as Gavel and it helps its users automate the creation of all kinds of legal forms. It also automates documents related to running a law firm or legal department like intake forms and billing documents.

We talk to Nicole Clark, Co-Founder of Trellis, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform.

Like many entrepreneurs before her, Nicole came up with the idea for Trellis to “scratch her own itch”. She was burning the midnight oil on a pleading she needed to get on file for a client (prior to launching Trellis, she was a litigator). She was unfamiliar with the judge that would hear the motion so, that night, she sent an email to colleagues at her firm to find out if any of them had been in front of the judge.

In a stroke of luck, another lawyer in the office had been in front of the judge and with the very same legal issue. Needless to say, she was now armed with important background information about the judge that would help her notch a win for her client. It was that night that Nicole, said to herself, “there has to be a better way.” Why isn’t there a database of background information on state court judges she wondered.

It was then and there that the idea for Trellis came to be. Eventually, Nicole hired a developer to create a bare bones app and used her law firm colleagues as testing guinea pigs. And it worked…Trellis became a reality and started attracting users outside of Nicole’s law firm. Nicole and the Trellis team got into Tech Stars LA and started raising money, and the rest…as they say is history…well…history in the making. Nicole and the trellis team have a lot of big plans they have yet to execute.

Nathan Walter, founder of Briefpoint, joins Technically Legal to explain how his company is using technology and artificial intelligence to automate routine legal drafting tasks.

A good portion of lawyers’ time and those helping them is copying or re-using prior work. This is especially true in litigation and especially in discovery.

Thankfully more and more apps have been developed that help automate the creation of legal documents. Historically, these programs have been form based and users populated documents by selecting choices from a menu.

But with advances in generative AI maybe form based software is unneeded. That’s what Briefpoint is banking on. Briefpoint uses tech to analyze legal documents, like interrogatories and document requests, and then generates preliminary responses to give legal teams a head start on drafting.

As Nathan explains, if more legal processes are automated and augmented with AI, it will bring legal fees down and free up lawyers to focus on the complicated stuff rather than cutting and pasting prior work product.

Zach Abramowitz makes a repeat appearance on Technically Legal to talk generative AI (like OpenAI) and its impact on legal technology adoption.

Zach is a keen observer of legal tech and its trends. If you want to keep tabs on up and coming tech geared for legal, Zach is a good person to follow. He started is career at a large New York law firm where he worked on mergers and acquisitions. From there he launched his own tech company called Reply All and his latest venture, Killer Whale Strategies, is a consultancy that works with law firms and legal departments to find and utilize technology to disrupt the way traditional legal work is done.

Zach has always been a strong proponent of using artificial intelligence in the legal industry, but after the release of ChatGPT and the growth of other generative AI platforms, he believes it might be the catalyst that finally expedites legal tech adoption.

Zach explains why he thinks generative AI could make legal services cheaper, less profitable for service providers and on a timeline that is faster than most might think.

Oh…and he also has a great music video.

IP lawyer Len Hickey joins the show to discuss Litigaze, the legal tech start up he founded that helps legal teams evaluate litigation risk, make smarter settlement decisions, figure out which claims to pursue and budget for litigation.

Len has worked both in-house and at law firms. Over the course of his practice, to answer questions posed by his clients about the value of their cases, he developed sophisticated spreadsheets to analyze his clients’ odds and determine what expected outcomes might be worth.

After awhile, as many tech founders do, he said to himself, “there should be a better way to do this.” So he taught himself to code and put together a beta version of Litigaze–software that enables users to build graphical decision trees of stages in a legal claim.

Using Litigaze, lawyers and their clients can estimate chances of success and determine potential monetary values for outcomes. After he built the beta version, Len tested it out on friends, they liked it so he took the next step and hired developers to make a real app.

In January 2021, Litigaze went live. Using Litigaze, lawyers and clients can make better decisions about litigation and determine the best courses of legal action to take.

Joshua Schwadron Founder and CEO of Mighty visits  the podcast to discuss how his company and law firm are disrupting personal injury law.

Even though Joshua has a law degree, he knew he did not want to practice law in the traditional sense.

Instead, in 2010 the entrepreneur in him founded Betterfly, a marketplace where consumers found service providers to help with projects like home remodels, yardwork or wedding plans.

Betterfly was acquired by a company ultimately purchased by Microsoft and Joshua found himself with time to move on to a new venture, and that would be legal related.

After Betterfly, he launched a litigation finance company and worked on it for a few years, until 2015 when he launched Mighty.

At first, Mighty also had a litigation funding component and tried to pair plaintiffs with funders by having them compete for cases.

Gaining traction with that model turned out to be a little harder than Johsua expected, so Mighty started building tech to help plaintiffs and their lawyers track liens against recoveries in their cases held by medical providers and other attorneys.

As you will hear from Joshua, Mighty is a purpose driven company and its goal is to make the practice of personal injury law more efficient so plaintiffs can take home better settlements.

That’s why he decided to found Mighty the law firm. A firm that requires lawyers to abide by a code of conduct and work to put the most money in plaintiff’s pockets.

Looking for an in-house counsel job? Wondering what companies look for when hiring legal professionals? Well, this episode is for you. Bruce Byrd, General Counsel for cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, talks about what he looks for when he is hiring for his legal team.

Like many in-house attorneys, Bruce worked a few years at a law firm and then moved in-house when he took his first corporate legal job with the AT&T legal team. He climbed the ladder and ultimately ended up with the top job as Chief Legal Officer.

Earlier this year, he moved to Palo Alto Networks and took his current role as Senior Vice President and General Counsel. 

Bruce’s 20+ years as corporate counsel has afforded him great insight about landing an in-house job. Bruce says that he looks for a few attributes when interviewing attorneys for his company:

• Curiosity
• An understanding of what drives the company's business (especially financial aspects)
• Business Development Skills (which is really understanding what the clients/business people need)
• Being a good listener
• Adaptability and Flexibility

Ethics attorney Jim Doppke makes his fourth appearance on the show to discuss the pros and cons of liberalizing legal ethics rules like Model Rule of Professional Conduct 5.4 that prohibit people who are not lawyers from owning an interest in legal services companies and preventing them from sharing in legal fees.

In recent years, states like Utah and Arizona that are testing the waters and permitting lawyers to team up with others to provide legal services and share legal fees. Jim discusses the ethical implications of these programs and explores preliminary statistics from the programs that trac the number of people served and the number of complaints raised about the services.

Jim is an ethics attorney with the Chicago firm of Robinson, Stewart, Montgomery & Doppke. Before that, he spent most of his career as a prosecutor with the Illinois ARDC (the Attorney Registration and Discipline Commission). He also has a legal ethics focused podcast called Legal Ethics Now and Next.

Sonja Ebron found herself in a couple legal tangles over the years. From disputes with landlords to dust-ups with shady creditors, she represented herself in court a couple times and quickly figured out litigation without a lawyer can be very difficult.

So, what did she do about it? She founded Courtroom5, an app that helps civil pro se litigants with legal research, provides education about court procedures and also helps them draft and file pleadings. A “do-it-yourself” litigation support tool.

In 2019 when Courtroom5 participated in the Duke Law Tech Lab incubator program, Sonja met Maya Markovich who joined the Courtroom5 advisory board. Together with the Courtroom5 team, they are trying to bridge the access to justice gap and make it a little easier on litigants who head to court without a lawyer.

Noah Waisberg literally wrote the book on Lawyers and Artificial Intelligence. Now he is building his second company that offers AI to analyze contracts.

As many do, Noah went to a top notch law school and then to BigLaw. He ended up doing deal work at the firm and had to review of ton of contracts.

What Noah learned is that even moderately sized companies have a ton of contracts, but because lawyers are expensive, to get a deal done, they would review only the most important contracts. This often left an incomplete picture of the liabilities and risks a company might be taking on by buying another.

This got Noah thinking. After taking some off from the legal grind, he and a co-founder launched Kira Systems to build an artificial intelligence tool that would help lawyers analyze contracts. If it worked, Noah figured, the AI would give the lawyers a head start permitting them to review more contracts with the same amount of work they were putting in without AI. Because more contracts could be reviewed, companies involved in M&A deals could have a better picture of the risks and liabilities in a deal.

Kira’s AI did work, and in fact, was a smashing success. Last year, another legal tech company, Litera, bought it.

Before the Litera acquisition, Kira started working on a tool that would help in-house legal teams use AI to analyze contracts to help out with contract management. After the Litera deal, this project became a new company that Noah now runs, Zuva. Zuva’s technology permits users to embed AI into into their own applications via APIs to extract information from their contracts.

In this episode, Noah explains how he and his team grew Kira systems and why he is excited to do the same with Zuva.

Richard Mabey, CEO and co-founder of contract automation platform Juro, visits the podcast to talk about building a legal tech start up that helps in-house legal teams deal with contracts from drafting to execution (and reduce the number of software products they use while doing it.)

Richard founded Juro in 2016 with a technical co-founder he met in business school. Prior to getting a business degree, Richard received a few others that run the gamut from music to philosophy and to (of course) law.

Richard started his professional career at one of the UK’s premier law firms and while there, he was seconded to a client. During his time at that company is when the seeds were sown for Juro. As Richard explains, the legal team he worked with team included very smart people but they spent a lot of time comparing versions of high volume, low risk contracts in Word. And that was only one out of five pieces of software the company used to run an agreement through its lifecycle.

Richard, like many that have come before, said to himself, “there has to be a better way” and went on to found Juro, an end to end contract automation platform that helps legal teams manage contract lifecycles.

But Richard didn’t launch Juro right away. Before he and his co-founder started the company, he did a stint at Legal Zoom.

Angela Floessel, Global Director of Pricing and Legal Project Management at Morrison Foerster, discusses the litigation finance program she helped set up permitting MoFo to take good cases it might not otherwise take, secure good results for clients it might not otherwise help and help grow the firm’s bottom line while doing it.

Before moving to legal, Angela spent most of her career in finance. But in 2015, she took her business skills to the legal world. First to Baker Mckenzie and ultimately landed at Morrison Foerster.

Among other responsibilities, Angela was hired to build out MoFo’s pricing and practice management teams, but while doing that, her business background helped her spot another opportunity at the firm to develop–a litigation funding program.

Working with other lawyers at her firm, they developed a structured litigation funding program, with a due diligence protocol and a legal funding committee that vets good cases for which they can enlist the help of litigation funders.

As Angela also explains, to ensure the program is a success, its foundation relies on project management processes. The firm’s project management team is involved in the cases every step of the way to make sure they identify the right opportunities, staff the cases correctly and stay on budget.

We talk to New York Times Senior Economics Correspondent Neil Irwin about his book, How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: The Definitive Guide to Adapting and Succeeding in High-Performance Careers.

To write the book, Neil interviewed successful employees with companies in various industries–from Microsoft to a company running popular New York City eateries.  He wanted to understand what made these people successful in the modern economy. An economy driven by automation, “gig” jobs and dominated by “winner take all” companies (companies that dominate an industry like Google, Facebook and Walmart).

Neil figured out that the most successful professionals are “glue people.” People who can communicate across varying job types and roles. Glue people are effective communicators because they are flexible, held varying types of positions in their career and understand the economics of their company.

What does this have to do with legal tech and legal innovation? Quite a bit.

The legal industry is not immune to economic changes affecting other industries. Technology and automation are changing the way lawyers work. To be a successful lawyer nowadays, it takes exposure and skills outside traditional lawyering (like understanding project management and being tech savvy–or, being a “unicorn lawyer”).

In his book, Neil ultimately concludes that for people with the right mindset, economic changes impacting the modern career path are positive. Those that are flexible, willing to make the effort to stay ahead of industry trends and take time to understand what really drives business to their companies and firms are poised to succeed.

Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.