Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

Using legal tech to scale a corporate legal department is the topic du jour in Episode 45. The guest: Mel Scott, Senior Legal Counsel for Megaport, a global technology company offering scalable point to point connectivity for public and private cloud connections. Mel is also the host of a great podcast called Counsel about in-house lawyer life.

Mel talks about her journey from law firm lawyer to an in-house role. She also talks about her experience scaling Megaport's legal department not only with specific legal technology (contract management app Ironclad) but by starting with technology the company was already using. In this case, Slack and Jira (issue and project tracking software).

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

Brightflag COO Alex Kelly discusses the AI powered legal operations platform he co-founded that helps legal teams get a handle on legal spend and gain insight into their legal operations as a whole.

By collecting information from legal bills and other sources, Brightflag provides analytics about how legal work is being resourced which can then be used to inform procurement decisions, help determine which legal service providers to add to panels and help create legal pricing models.

It is interesting that Alex ended up cofounding Brightflag because he never worked in-house and instead spent seven years in private practice at one of Ireland’s premier law firms representing financial institutions.

But, that Alex is a lawyer turned entrepreneur is not surprising. Both his father and stepmom are lawyers and his mother’s family founded one of Ireland’s preeminent bespoke carpet manufacturing companies.

Daniel Linna, Senior Lecturer & Director of Law and Technology Initiatives at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law & McCormick School of Engineering visits the podcast to talk legal education, artificial intelligence and intersection of computer science and law.

Professor Linna teaches classes at both Northwestern’s law school and engineering school that relate to tech and law including a couple on artificial intelligence. Dan is also heads up the University’s Legal Innovation Lab.

Dan also does a fair bit of research including his most recent project that is testing conversational AI that tenants can use in disputes with landlords.

Prior to Northwestern Dan held positions at both the University of Michigan and Michigan State. Before he was a professor Dan practiced law at a large law firm.

In this episode Chris Handman, COO and Co-Founder of data privacy management app TerraTrue, talks about Shifting Left with data privacy. “Shift left” is a concept used to identify defects and bugs early in the software development process before deployment.

This is also how Chris and his team think legal departments, privacy officers and compliance professionals should think about data privacy.

TerraTrue is a data privacy management platform that companies can use and integrate with the other software (like Jira and Slack) to get people thinking about the data privacy implications of products they are building while they are building them.

Chris explains that with the continued growth of privacy regulations, companies cannot just ship software and hope to deal with privacy issues after the fact.

Chris ended up in the data privacy world after a successful career as a lawyer in private practice. Chris worked as an appellate lawyer right out of law school and handled high profile cases in front of federal appellate courts including the United States Supreme Court.

After a few years, an executive search firm contacted Chris about becoming Snapchat’s first general counsel. He had been doing more and more privacy work in his appellate practice and people began to notice. Chris made the jump to Snapchat and hit the ground running.

Among other intense and high profile legal cases he had to deal with, the FTC was all over Snapchat about data privacy issues that ultimately ended in a consent decree.

In 2017 Chris left Snapchat, took a little time off with his family, and began talking to some of his old Snap colleagues about building a new company. That is when TerraTrue was born.

Blockchain lawyer and fellow podcaster Jacob Robinson visits Technically Legal to talk about how blockchain technology is impacting the law now and how it will in the future.

Jacob hosts the Law of Code Podcast covering blockchain related legal issues and hosting a Who’s Who of #Cryptolaw as guests.

On this episode, Jacob discusses the interplay between blockchain technology and legal rights (such as property rights). He also explains how, for some endeavors, blockchain might change the look of business organizations. Specifically, Jacob covers legal issues implicated by NFT (non fungible token) ownership and participation in a DAO (distributed autonomous organizations).

Jacob also fills us in about interesting legal questions arising in the metaverse.

Krystal Kovac, Head of Legal & Compliance at Oncore, visits Technically Legal to share her story about building a legal department from the ground up.

Like many, Krystal decided to become a lawyer without a good understanding of all that entails. Also, like many, she didn’t like her first legal job that much, and when it ended, she went to Canada and became ski instructor. She also got another legal job in Canada that she actually liked, but her Visa ran out and she headed back home to Queensland.

When Krystal got back to Australia, she did a stint as a temporary attorney working for a tech company but ended up at Oncore for what was supposed to be a temporary gig helping the company clean up their contracting process.

Well…it turned out Krystal did such a good job, they asked her to be be general counsel and build out their legal and compliance functions.

Krystal explains that to build a legal department from the ground up, you need to first map out operational processes that touch legal. She says lawyers should also get out and talk to people to not only learn more about the company, but to actually build relationships.

Krystal also is a big proponent of meeting clients where they are, communicating with them via methods they already use and using tech that is accessible.

Aaron Powers, CEO and co-founder of Hunit, talks SLCs or, Smart Legal Contracts, that are natural language contracts but utilize blockchain technology to record certain aspects of contractual relationships.

Hunit enables users to create text based contracts in Microsoft Word, but tie the document to a blockchain creating an immutable record of certain contract components, like successful performance and the fact that a contract even exists between two parties.

Aaron is an entrepreneur first and foremost and started his career in wireless communication technology in the early 2000s, but ultimately joined the founding team of a biostimulant company.

After almost a decade in the biostimulant industry, in 2018, Aaron jumped over to legal tech and founded Hunit.

Do you want to spend less time dealing with email? Are you interested in automating repetitive work tasks?

Cyndi Wheeler and Mark Pike offer some tips on how to do just that in this episode from 2020. Cyndi and Mark are both in-house lawyers at collaboration software company Slack.

Cyndi and Mark discuss how they moved almost all of their communications with outside counsel away from email and into Slack channels and how that has increased the productivity and the effectiveness of their legal team.

They also explain that Slack is more than just a communication hub, but has many other features including workflows and bots that the Slack legal department uses to automate common legal tasks. They use Slack workflows to field questions, review documents and contracts for legal issues and help sales close deals. 

Finally, the two lawyers offer tips about how to organize and prioritize Slack channels and messages to stay sane and not become overwhelmed by the barrage of electronic communications we all get everyday.

This episode originally aired on June 23, 2020.

Victor Bornstein tells us how Justpoint, the company he co-founded and now heads, is taking advantage of changes to Rules of Professional Conduct to build artificial intelligence that matches personal injury clients to the best attorney for their case.

Specifically, the company is taking advantage of changes to Rule 5.4 in Arizona that now permits people other than lawyers to have an ownership stake in law firms and legal services companies.

Justpoint lets potential clients leverage AI to find the right attorney for their claim. The company uses a combination of human intake by medical professionals and predictive analytics to identify the right attorney for the job.

Before launching Justpoint, Victor and his co-founder had nothing to do with the legal industry. Victor has a PhD in biomedical sciences with an emphasis in immunology and worked in medical, his co-founder worked at Google before launching Justpoint.

The pair started the company in 2019 and recently closed a $6.9 million fundraising round.

Right out of college with a computer science degree in hand, a buddy helped Andy Wilson (now CEO of SaaS based e-discovery software company Logikcull) get a job at a printing company because Andy’s friend said there was a technology component to the job. 

It was the early 2000s and what the printing company was actually doing was printing out email messages so they could be used in a legal matter. The absurdity of printing out something that is inherently digital was not lost on Andy. So, after a couple of years at the printing company, he and a college classmate that also happened to work there launched Logik Systems. At Logik Systems, Andy and his co-founder created software that processed email to make it easier to transfer and review electronically rather than printing them out.

Logik Systems was doing great until the economy crashed around 2008. But, it was during this downturn that Andy and his co-founder saw the future of e-discovery software and that future was the cloud. That is when the duo launched Logikcull. It took 4 plus years to develop the software, but they persevered and in 2013 Logikcull went live.

Logikcull is an eDiscovery solution that provides user friendly legal software for processing, reviewing, and producing data.

The company just celebrated it’s 10th birthday and it continues its upward trajectory toward its goal of democratizing electronic discovery.

“You’re marrying a firefighter. That’s all I’ll ever be.  I’m never going to finish college.” 

That’s what Bill Henderson told his soon to be wife many years ago, but thankfully that was not true.

Fast forward to today and Bill is now Professor William Henderson, the Stephen F. Burns Chair on the Legal Profession at Indiana University and he has been a law professor for nearly 20 years.

Professor Henderson is also the moving force behind Legal Evolution, an online publication focusing on changes in the legal industry with the stated mission of providing lawyers, legal educators, and allied professionals with high-quality information to solve very difficult industry-specific problems.

It was almost true that Professor Henderson did not finish college. He dropped out and got a job as a firefighter. But… it was only because he was a firefighter that he ended up going to law school.

In the early 90s, during firefighter union negotiations, Bill’s union rep asked him to tag along and take notes. Foreshadowing his career as a professor, not only did Bill take notes, he also did in depth research into prior collective bargaining agreements and into state law so the union team could strike a better bargain.

In the end, Bill moved on from note taker to union vice president and eventually took over as lead negotiator.

Because of all of this, Bill decided to go to law school at the University of Chicago and became a legal professor.

Since entering academia, Bill has done a ton of research and writing on the state of legal services in general, but more specifically, how legal innovation can improve it.

In a nutshell, Bill’s research has determined that more and more legal work is focused on commercial law at the expense of “PeopleLaw” –a term he uses to describe legal work done on behalf of individuals (like criminal law, domestic relations law and the like).

50 years ago, legal work was pretty much split 50/50 between PeopleLaw and commercial law. Now that division is 75/25 in favor of commercial law which is causing an access to justice issue.  There is a great need for legal services related to PeopleLaw, but it is too expensive or just doesn’t exist.

However, Professor Henderson thinks there are a few things the legal community can do to address this problem: Better use of project management techniques, use of allied professionals, and leveraging legal technology.

SCENE: Afternoon. Early 2000s. Because the first internet bubble is popping, two tech lawyers find themselves with not much to do so they go to a matinee showing of Black Hawk Down. Those two attorneys are James Fisher and Kevin Broyles.

That particular afternoon was not the only slow one for them.  Work for them had dried up and colleagues at their law firm were getting laid off left and right.

Although they had opportunities to go to different firms, they started looking around at how their current firm was set up and knew there was a better way of doing things.

That is when the seeds were sown for Fisher Broyles. A firm that started with five lawyers and would ultimately join the ranks of the AmLaw 200.

From the get-go, James and Kevin concluded law firms had a lot of overhead they probably didn’t need which in turn, required them to charge high rates. Not the least of which they figured, was paying rent. They also understood that while support is important, lawyers are hired for what they know, and not based upon how many support staff a firm has.

As a result, they decided Fisher Broyles would be a fully remote, distributed law firm that would run lean and mean. Their business model would permit lawyers to pocket most of their hourly rate rather than it going to pay rent and other office expenses.

Fast forward to 2021, Fisher Broyles has almost 300 attorneys and had one of their best years ever bringing in $136 million in revenue.  And they did it by leveraging technology and doing remote work before it was even a thing for most other firms. 

Thibault Schrepel joins the podcast to talk blockchain, antitrust and competition law.

He is a professor at the Free University in Amsterdam and on the faculty of the Codex Center at Stanford University. At Stanford he is involved in the Computational Antitrust Project which works to foster the automation of antitrust procedures and the improvement of antitrust analysis.

Thibault knew he wanted to pursue a career in antitrust on the very first day of his very first antitrust class during law school.

As Thibault recalls, "I remember the very first day when I went to the antitrust class in law school. It was a two hour long class and after one hour, we had a break. I went to my friend, and I said, Well, that's it. That's what I want to do."

Thibault is not just into antitrust. He is also really into tech and has a certificate from Harvard for Computer Science for Lawyers, so it makes sense that he likes to study the intersection of antitrust and blockchain technology.

Through his study and passion for law and tech, Thibault has concluded that the maxim "code is law" might be true, but there is still a need for external rules to govern tech and computer code.

This is especially true for blockchain because he believes that too can be used for anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices.

But, Thibault also believes that technology also provides a unique opportunity to identify and protect against antitrust behavior.

In fact, he just put out a book entitled Blockchain + Antitrust The Decentralization Formula that explores the relationship between blockchain and antitrust, providing a unique perspective on how law and technology could cooperate.

De-escalation. That is what Jazz Hampton and two friends from college set out to achieve when they co-founded Turnsignl. An app used during traffic stops to access legal help in real time to de-escalate what is often a very tense situation. Prior to becoming Turnsignl CEO, Jazz was a public defender and ended up doing commercial litigation at a top Minneapolis law firm. It was there that he began to question whether he was putting his law degree to its best use. 

While Jazz was still in private practice, Philando Castile, with whom two of three Turnsignl co-founders grew up,  was killed by police during a traffic stop near Minneapolis in 2016.

While at a vigil for Castile, Jazz began ask himself how he could use his legal skills for social change.

(Jazz is no stranger to police stops either. He has been stopped 12 times in his life and never been cited for anything.) 

Although it was Castile’s death that planted the seed for Turnsignl, it wasn’t until the 2020 killing of George Floyd that Jazz and his co-founders decided they could wait no more and founded Turnsgnl. 

As Jazz explains, they set out to create a “telelegal” mobile app to connect users with attorneys to advise them during police stops to protect their rights and diffuse the encounters.

Despite being a newcomer to the legal tech space, Turnsignl is already making waves. It is one of 15 legal startups in the Startup Alley at the ABA Techshow. Opening night, the companies will face off in a pitch competition. The winner receives a bundle of marketing and advertising prizes.

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

Michael Callier, Head of Legal Solutions and Consulting and colleague Edward Sohn, Head of Solutions at legal services company Factor discuss how in-house legal teams, their outside counsel and new law players like alternative legal service providers (ALSPs), can collaborate and maximize productivity by leveraging the strengths of each.

Factor is a new law company (sometimes described as a managed legal services provider) providing legal and contracting solutions to in-house counsel and their lawyers. Factor describes what it does as “having a niche focus on the mid-to higher complexity transactional legal work that forms the core workload of most in-house legal and contracting functions.”

In this episode of the Technically Legal Podcast, Michael and Ed and explain how all players in the legal ecosystem can and should work together to turn out efficient and quality work product for clients.

While much of Factor’s focus is contract lifecycle management (CLM), Michael and Ed point out that efficient processes and appropriate use of software solutions may be applied to many areas of legal work.

In fact, when collaboration and legal processes are done right, Michael says it can solidify the position of legal departments and legal teams as “legal integrators” connecting and influencing various parts of an organization and providing positive impact on business results.

Ed takes it a step further and points out that ALSPs should become seamless integrated extensions of legal departments and become not vendors being managed, but just another member of the legal team.

Casey Flaherty, Chief Strategy Officer for Lex Fusion, makes his second appearance on Technically Legal. This time around, Casey discusses his thesis that organizations often turn to technology as an avoidance mechanism for addressing issues with process and culture.

Casey has deep experience with legal process from all angles, he started his career as a commercial litigator before moving in house at Kia Motors.

From there he launched a legal operations consultancy and started Procertas, a technology training and benchmarking platform.

Since Casey was last on the podcast, he has taken on a couple of other roles. He served as Director of Legal Project Management for one of the world’s largest law firms, Baker Mckenzie, and recently took on his current role at Lex Fusion.

Casey talks about his legal industry experience, his writing process and explains why it is not a good idea to implement technology before taking a step back to map processes and making sure organizational culture supports change.

In the first episode of 2022, Mike Suchsland of the LegalTech Fund and Bridge Investments talks about investing in legal technology.

Mike has been in legal tech before it was even a thing. He started his career with Wolters Kulwer in the 1990s and ultimately ended up climbing high up the corporate ladder at Thomson Reuters.

He started as Thomson’s head of legal strategy, moved to the small law business group, ended up running the corporate legal unit, the legal education division and ultimately became President of Legal Business. In that role, Mike was responsible for 10,000 employees and over 3 billion in revenue.

In 2014 Mike left Thomson but did not leave the legal tech world. He is and was a board member for several legal tech companies and now spends most of his time investing in legal tech companies as a venture capitalist.

Mike explains how he got into venture capital, what investors look for in legal tech companies, the state of legal tech in 2022 and if there really is such a thing as a legal tech unicorn.

Legal ethics attorney Jim Doppke returns for an encore appearance to discuss the impact that legal tech and legal innovation have on the Rules of Professional Conduct and other rules that govern how lawyers practice law.

Jim explains how Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.1 (Lawyer’s Duty of Competence) and 5.3 (Responsibilities Regarding Nonlawyer Assistance) are implicated by advances in legal technology and legal innovation.

A comment to Rule 1.1 (and adopted by most states) says that as part of a lawyer’s duty of competence, lawyers must stay abreast of changes in technology. MRPC 5.3 states that lawyers must actively supervise “non-lawyer” assistance they engage to help out on legal matters. Historically, this meant that lawyers needed to supervise others lending them a hand–like a paralegal.

However, Jim points out that the rule specifically relates to “assistance” and not just “assistants”. This is significant, because certain legal tech, like artificial intelligence (AI), is really non-lawyer “assistance.” So, as Jim points out, if lawyers are going to use AI, they must supervise the training of the algorithms to ensure accuracy, just like they are obligated to supervise the work of their paralegals and other assistants to make sure their work is accurate.

In a similar vein, Jim points out that as the use of ALSPs (alternative legal service providers) increases, there too is another situation in which lawyers must supervise work done by those who may not be attorneys.

Eric Farber, attorney and writer, visits the Technically Legal Podcast to talk about Creators Legal, a LegalZoom like app for creators and those in the entertainment industry. Creators Legal offers self serve industry contracts drafted by experienced lawyers.

It makes sense that Eric launched a legal tech company for creative types. He started his career in the entertainment industry working for a talent agency and then headed up business affairs for a movie studio. Ultimately he moved to private practice and represented entertainers and athletes. In fact for many years, he represented Amaru Entertainment which released Tupac Shakur’s posthumous music.

In 2008, with the economy in shambles, Eric, like many, had to pivot and launched Pacific Workers which was initially a workers compensation law firm for athletes, but later came to represent workers from all fields.

So, how is that Eric decided to launch a legal tech company? One of Eric’s law clerks pointed out that Eric always had great business advice, but he never used it himself. That comment resonated with Eric and that’s when he decided to launch Creators Legal. Based on his experience in the entertainment world, he knew the vast majority of those creating art and intellectual property could not afford proper legal representation to protect their rights.

What Eric saw is an access to justice issue and set out to do something about it. The result is a site that creators can go to and find legal documents to help them protect their rights and create businesses around their art.

Although historically Eric was on the legal side of the entertainment industry, he is also a creator. He wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Case for Culture: How to Stop Being a Slave to Your Law Firm, Grow Your Practice, and Actually Be Happy.

The ransomware episode.

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so how couldn't we do this episode?

Our guests are Kelly Geary, National Practice Leader of Executive Risk & Cyber/Professional Services Claims for EPIC Insurance Brokers, and Rich Gatz, Claims Counsel for Coalition, a Silicon Valley cyber insurance company.

While both Kelly and Rich have law degrees, they have worked in insurance for a long time. Both got started with cyber insurance and incident response in the early days.

On the show, they talk about the history of cyber insurance coverage and what parts of ransomware and cyber incident response insurance covers. To close out the conversation, they explain what goes on behind the scenes in a cyber attack response.