Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

Blockchain. Crypto mining. Proof of stake. Smart contracts. Non Fungible Tokens (NFT). DAOs. Crypto regulation.

We talk about all of the above and more with Lewis Cohen of the blockchain focused law firm of DLx Law.

Lewis breaks down what a blockchain network is and how transactions are recorded and verified on the network. He also talks about the legal and intellectual property implications of NFTs and decentralized autonomous organizations. Lewis also touches on recent efforts to regulate cryptocurrencies and blockchain businesses.

Otto Hansen, the founder of Term Scout, visits Technically Legal to talk about the company he founded that uses machine learning to analyze and rate contracts. Specifically, it analyzes contracts to determine whether they are in line with industry standards and how vendor or customer friendly they are.

The goal of Term Scout’s rating system is to cut down on contract negotiation and eliminate the back and forth about uncontroversial terms so the parties can focus provisions that will require more give and take before they are finalized.

Term Scout is not Otto’s first start up. Otto is a lawyer who practiced for a few years before launching Term Scout, but prior to entering the legal world, he worked at a start up that was making ski gloves. It was his experience with the ski glove company that actually inspired Otto to go to law school.

“Whatever benefits advanced legal technology may bring to lawyers, I am concerned about this sort of technology seeping into the legal writing classroom,” writes Northwestern University Legal Writing Professor Michael Zuckerman in an article he penned for the ABA Journal, Law Professor Makes Case Against Automating Legal Writing in Law School.

However, Professor Zuckerman is not anti-legal tech. In fact, as he explains in the latest episode of Technically Legal, he even founded a legal tech company before joining the law school faculty at Northwestern.

His concern is that if law students are not first taught to write their own legal documents and do their own legal research, but instead rely on tech, it may very well come at the expense of their ability to employ critical legal thinking and, ultimately, be effective attorneys to their clients.

Professor Zuckerman also talks about how the Rules of Professional Conduct are also implicated by the use of legal technology.

Contract automation and building an alternative legal service provider (ALSP) within a law firm is the topic of Episode 52.

Eric Baker and Michael Case, transportation attorneys with Frost Brown Todd, talk about their journey founding Transaction Expeditors, an AI enabled contracts automation platform for the transportation industry.

Before joining Frost Brown Todd and before launching Transaction Expeditors, both Eric and Mike were in house attorneys. Eric served as GC for transportation and logistics companies SIRVA and CRST. Mike was also in-house doing legal work and running claims for a transportation insurer Protective Insurance.

There has been much talk over the last couple of years about the interplay between law firms and alternative legal service providers. Should law firms use them? If so, should the create their own?

When Eric and Michael, along with their colleague Stacy Katz, founded Transaction Expeditors, they were not thinking about those questions. They just wanted to create a more efficient contract management solution for their transportation clients. But in the end they created an ALSP within their law firm.

Having Eric and Mike on the show also brings the podcast full circle because Transaction Expeditors’ technology partner is the AI engine Legal Sifter, a company we had on the show way back on Episode 15 in 2018.

Cyber incident response. Cyber attacks. Unfortunately, we hear these terms daily nowadays. But what really goes on behind the scenes in a cyber incident?

To answer that question, we asked Luke Green, a Breach Response Services Manager for cyber insurer Beazley Group and Josh Sudbury, Managing Principal of Forensic Investigations at Lodestone, a leading cyber defense and incident response company, to come on the show.

They break down step by step what happens when an organization is hacked. From containment to remediation, Luke and Josh explain the stages of a cyber incident response plan. They also explain how cyber insurers and incident response teams work with companies to minimize cyber risk and damage.

They also discuss cybersecurity and what companies can do ahead of time to prevent cyber attacks including education initiatives and implementing cyber incident policies.

Data analytics maturity models (and legal operations maturity models in general) are the topic of discussion with Peter Eilhauer, Managing Director for Legal Spend Solutions at Epiq.

Peter knows his stuff about legal spend management–he’s been working in and around it for 16 years. He started as a consultant helping law firms manage costs and then jumped ship to help corporate legal departments manage their legal spend. Most recently with Epiq and just before that with Elevate Services.

Peter describes a maturity model as “a set of structured levels that describe how well the behaviors, practices and processes of an organization can reliably and sustainably produce required outcomes.”

Stated another way, a legal operations maturity model is a way of measuring how well a legal department is using their people, processes and technology to handle legal work.

Although Peter mainly discusses maturity models as they relate to data analytics (and specifically how to use data analytics to monitor and control legal spending), maturity models can be applied to many legal operations functions.

Using artificial intelligence to help make hiring decisions is the topic du jour of Episode 49. Matt Spencer and Aaron Meyers, the CEO and CTO of Suited, respectively, explain how their AI powered, assessment-driven recruiting platform helps law firms and corporate legal departments find the best candidate for legal jobs and also increase diversity hires.

After a career in investment banking, Matt and his co-founders launched Suited to address the major difficulties in finding the right job candidate: limited time, limited budgets and limited information.

Suited trains its AI with assessments taken both by hiring parties and candidates to identify potential hires who have the best chance at thriving in a particular firm or company work environment.

Suited’s assessments collect three categories of information: psychometrics, skills and academics. Once candidates take the assessment, the app ranks them for a particular firm to predict whether the candidate will work well in that environment.

To better identify the right legal job candidates and create a more diverse hiring pool, Suited’s engineers worked hard to develop software that mitigates bias in the hiring process. To do that Suited’s A.I. models models exceed the standards for fairness set forth by the EEOC.

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

"The fundamental tool of lawyers is language" explains Serena Wellen in this episode. Serena is a Senior Director for LexisNexis and works on the Context legal analytics platform. Context leverages machine learning and natural language processing from Ravel, a company LexisNexis acquired in 2017.

Using Ravel's analytics engine, Context sits atop many of the LexisNexis databases and analyzes information about judges, lawyers, expert witnesses and companies compiled in "entity authorities."

With Context, lawyers can craft their best arguments using analytic insight about the judges they are in front of and opposing counsel they face. Context can help identify the case law judges and adversaries rely on the most, and how likely a court is to grant their motions.

Context is also a helpful tool outside of the courtroom. In-house legal teams can use it to vet outside counsel and attorneys can use it to figure out if the expert witness they want to hire has ever been disqualified and if so, why. Learn more about Serena.

Online Dispute Resolution.  That is the topic of discussion with New Era ADR cofounders Collin Williams and Rich Lee. New Era ADR is an online claims dispute resolution platform that provides online mediation and online arbitrations.

Collin and Rich came up with the idea for New Era after they both served as General Counsel for a couple of Chicago based tech start ups. Collin was GC for online music instrument marketplace Reverb and Rich's last role was general counsel for Civis Analytics. A data science company founded by technology vets from the 2012 Obama reelection campaign.

Collin and Rich are buddies and a couple of years ago they were commiserating about inefficiencies in dispute resolution they dealt with as GCs. That is when the seeds for New Era were sown.

Fast forward to 2020, and the two got serious about launching an online dispute resolution company. The company teamed up with the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals and provides experienced neutrals to oversee online arbitrations and mediations. The rest, as they say, is history (or at least history in the making).

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

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr and WooCommerce (among others), is a distributed company by design. In fact, the company’s creed spells out its commitment to a distributed workforce. They have 1500 employees spread across 80 countries.

In the latest episode of Technically Legal, Paul Sieminski, Automattic’s General Counsel, discusses how legal work, which has traditionally been performed in offices, is prime for distributed teams because it is quintessential knowledge work.

And… the legal industry, like all others, must face the new post-Covid reality where people will likely spend much less time in an office (if at all).

Paul explains why effective communication is key to working with others outside of an office environment, and how this is good for lawyers because communication is a “legal superpower”. He also shares tips and suggestions on how to create productive and successful distributed legal teams.

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

The history, current state and the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) is the topic of conversation with George Socha. George currently serves as Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness for e-discovery software company, Reveal Data, but back in 2005, he founded the EDRM along with Tom Gelbmann.

What is the EDRM?

It is a model that outlines the stages of the Electronic Discovery process.  The EDRM discovery stages are:

• Information Governance Identification Preservation and Collection
• Review and Analysis
• Production and Presentation

In the 16 years since the inception of EDRM, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is much more prevalent in e-discovery, and as George explains, can be used in nearly every EDRM phase.

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

Using intellectual property management software and automation is the topic of conversation for Episode 43. We talk to Jeppe Hudtloff Viinberg Rightly.io co-founder and Rightly user Michael Ro Mejer Interim General Counsel for Danish clothing company, Masai.

Rightly is IP management software that automates and tracks tasks across the IP management lifecycle. Such as docketing, renewal management, and brand protection. The app also provides IP registration metrics and reporting.

Jeppe and Michael explain how through the use of technology, IP management can move from manual processes and tracking deadlines on spreadsheets to automating tasks necessary to the intellectual property lifecycle.

Using technology to manage intellectual property also makes it possible to leverage metrics and maximize return on IP investments.

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

In the first episode of 2021 we talk to a fellow podcaster and legal blogger Greg Lambert. He is co-host of the Geek in Review Podcast and also writes for Three Geeks and a Law Blog. Both the Three Geeks podcast and blog focus on legal innovation and change in the legal industry.

Greg’s day job is Chief Knowledge Services Officer for the Dallas based law firm Jackson Walker. Although Greg still considers himself a law librarian, as Greg explains, the role of a law librarian in the 2020s is way different than it was in the late 90s when he started his career after a stint in the army, law school and with a masters degree in library sciences in hand.

If the term law library conjures up visions of books and an old school card catalog, think again. Modern law librarians are often legal technologists and the role of law librarians overlaps with knowledge and information management professionals, among other functions in a law firm.

In fact, Greg oversees several non-library functions at his firm that involve the use of tech and data. Greg is a member of the firm’s C Suite and is in charge of its research team, the firm’s conflicts and intake team and he also helps with marketing and business development.

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

The modern legal ecosystem and all its allied professionals is the topic of discussion with Lucy Bassli, founder of InnoLaw Group (formerly InnoLegal Services) and Chief Legal Strategist at Law Geex.

Lucy started her career in Big Law (at Davis Wright Tremaine) and ultimately landed a job in Microsoft’s legal department where she served as Assistant General Counsel. At Microsoft, Lucy was responsible for, among other things, the legal department’s procurement operations and contract management systems.

Lucy left Microsoft in 2017 and started InnoLaw Group–part law firm and part consultancy–where she helps law firms and law departments develop new ways to deliver and receive legal services.

In her role as Chief Legal Strategist for Law Geex, Lucy advises on the use of artificial intelligence in contracting, helps with product roadmaps, consults with corporate customers, and assists with the development of go-to-market strategies.

Lucy discusses the players in the modern legal ecosystem (regulators, industry groups, service providers, consumers of legal services and educators) and why to be really successful and efficient, all of them should work together.

She also explains what it means to be a unicorn lawyer–a lawyer that knows law, but also loves, understands and values process and technology.

We also talk about the “Big 4” entering the legal market and how law firm associates have a real opportunity to push for change.

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

Workflow automation for lawyers and legal teams is the topic of Episode 41. Our guest is Scott Kelly, one of the founders of Community.Lawyer, which is “no-code” workflow automation software with an app builder designed with attorneys in mind. 

Community.Lawyer is a way for law firms, corporate legal departments and legal aid organizations to automate common and repeatable tasks to save time and resources. Among other uses, Community.Lawyer can be used to create forms to collect data, create portals for both internal and client use, automate document creation and even collect payments.

The app is centered around databases that legal teams can use to collect and reuse data relating to their clients and legal matters.

As Scott discusses, Community.Lawyer is being put to some pretty cool uses both for public and commercial purposes. Law firms and legal departments are using it to create better client experiences and it is also a great tool for legal aid organizations to tackle access to justice issues.

Speaking of access to justice and public sector legal work–Scott is no stranger to that. With an Ivy League law degree in hand, he started his career working for the American Civil Liberties Union.

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

Episode 40 is a great conversation with Matthew Holland, CEO of Field Effect Software, a cyber security company providing tools and managed detect and response (MDR) services to protect against cyber attacks.  

Field Effect is Matthew’s second company.  In 2007 he founded Linchpin Labs, a company that offered ethical privatized intelligence to governments and companies.

Matt started his cyber security career with an internship at Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE). Canada’s CSE is similar to the NSA in the United States. The CSE ultimately brought Matt into the Tailored Access Operations group to gather signals intelligence for the agency (intelligence from communications and information systems).

Matt explains why law firms and legal departments are prime targets for hacking. He thinks of law firms and legal departments as “the formalization of relationships between businesses and people and the documents, the communications around all those resources.” And, in those documents and communications, is the type of very sensitive information hackers hunt for. That is why law firm data security is key.

Matthew also discusses cyber security best practices for law firms and corporate legal departments (cyber security best practices for all businesses, really).

Matthew’s first and foremost suggestion to prevent against cyber attacks? Education. The majority of cyber incidents have a root cause in human error and cyber security education goes a long way. He also suggests the use of multifactor authentication (MFA), VPNs (virtual private networks) and password managers. 

He also explains that an organization’s first step in implementing a cybersecurity policy or program is to designate a point person and figure out what kind of budget is available. Once a budget is known, organizations can then start to figure out the best approach to cyber security (what software to use and whether security efforts should be handled in-house or outsourced, like an MDR solution).

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

Virtual court hearings are the subject of Episode 38. We talked to Magistrate Judge Tony Leung via Zoom about using Zoom videoconferences for court.

Judge Leung sits on the bench for the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota and has a pretty impressive background. He emigrated from Hong Kong to the United States at the age of 6, was valedictorian of his high school class and then headed to Yale for college.

From Yale he went to New York University law school, worked as an attorney at BigLaw for a few years and then became not only the first Asian American state court judge in Minnesota, but also the first Asian American federal judge in the state.

Judge Leung talks about his experience with virtual court hearings and the pros and cons of holding court hearings by videoconference. He also offers some best practices for appearing before a judge via video (test your equipment ahead of time, make sure you have a stable internet connection and good lighting, take time to mark and ready your exhibits and... make sure you are out of bed before hopping on the video call!).

Judge Leung also talks about how internet access for all also implicates access to justice issues. Specifically, if not everyone has access to the internet, it may limit their ability to have their day in court.

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

Ethics attorney Jim Doppke returns to Technically Legal to talk legal ethics and technology.

Jim is a former prosecutor for the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission and is now in private practice with Robinson, Stewart, Montgomery and Doppke. Jim counsels attorneys and businesses on legal ethics issues and represents attorneys and attorney candidates in ARDC proceedings.

Way back in 2017, Jim was our first guest and he talked about what was then a fairly recent change to Comment 8 to Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1 (a lawyer’s duty of competence).

In response to changes in technology, the American Bar Association added language to MRPC 1.1 , Comment 8 stating attorneys must understand “the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.”  (To date, more states than not require attorneys to be “technologically competent.”)

We brought Jim back to talk about what has changed since he first appeared on the podcast because his original episode is still one of the most downloaded.  Jim says a few things have changed since the tweak to the Rule 1.1: More lawyers using artificial intelligence (AI), especially for contract review and litigation, more lawyers using tech in general (especially since COVID-19) and that there are now other legal ethics rules that touch on the use of technology (like MRPC 5.3 (Responsibilities Regarding Nonlawyer Assistance).

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

Attorney Michael Volkov, head of the Volkov Law Group, is our guest for Episode 38. He discusses the use of technology, software and data analysis in corporate compliance and ethics programs. Michael and his firm focus on regulatory compliance issues, internal investigations and white collar crime.

Michael explains that it is very difficult to implement a successful ethics and compliance program without using technology to analyze data.

In fact, recent updates to the U.S. Department of Justice Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs (the “DOJ Compliance Guidance”) emphasizes that corporate compliance officers must be given access to relevant compliance and human resources data so they may properly monitor and assess the effectiveness of compliance programs.

Michael discusses the types of data that should be measured to ensure the effectiveness of a corporate compliance program, where to find that data and the future of compliance software and “RegTech” (Regulatory Technology).

Michael has his own compliance podcast, Corruption, Crime and Compliance and a great blog focused on compliance, internal investigations and white collar crime.

Things We Talk About in This Episode

• DOJ Compliance Guidance
• Compliance Dashboards
• RegTech Software
• Association of Corporate Counsel Legal Operations Maturity Model for Compliance
• Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)
• Mr. Roboto

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

Bryan Cave data privacy attorney Christian Auty returns for Episode 36 to talk about the real world implications of the Schrems II opinion from the European Court of Justice.

What is Schrems II? It is shorthand for Case C-311/18 Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook Ireland Limited and Maximillian Schrems. In it, the Court of Justice reaffirmed that generally, transfers of personal data from the EU to non-EU countries are prohibited unless sufficient measures are taken to protect it.

The court followed law found in the European Data Protection Directive and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Both say that personal data of EU citizens may not be transferred to non-EU countries unless proper safeguards are in place and only if the Non-EU country ensures an adequate level of protection for the personal data transferred.

In short, Schrems II invalidated the EU/US Privacy Shield Framework that many companies used to legally transfer data between the EU and US. The EU and US governments created the Privacy Shield so companies could become certified to securely transfer data between the EU and US.

The Schrems II court did not believe that the Privacy Shield did enough to protect EU personal data because, among other things, even under the program, EU citizens have no right to challenge government requests for their information under the Foreign Information Surveillance Act.

As Christian explains, although Schrems II invalidated Privacy Shield, it did not invalidate Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) and he suggests that if you do not have SCCs in place and you transfer data from the EU to the United States, you should look into them.

Standard Contractual Clauses are model contract clauses officially sanctioned by the European Commission that address how companies must handle and protect personal data of EU citizens.

Christian says too that companies can bolster their contracts and SCCs by implementing a law enforcement policy–a specific policy about how a company will handle inquiries from intelligence agencies or law enforcement regarding data.