Dr. Ron A. Dolin is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Law’s Center on the Legal Profession. He co-edited the textbook, Legal Informatics, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Dr. Dolin wrote five chapters for the book, including “Technology Issues in Legal Philosophy,” “Information Intermediation” (e.g. search), “XML in Law: The Role of Standards in Legal Informatics,” “Measuring Legal Quality,” and “Adaptive Innovation: Innovator’s Dilemma in Big Law.”
Dr. Dolin teaches a course at Harvard Law School entitled “Law 2.0: Technology’s Impact on the Practice of Law”, first taught at Stanford Law School. For several semesters, Dr. Dolin also taught as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Notre Dame Law School, teaching a course on legal technology and informatics.
Dr. Dolin received his B.A. in math and physics from U.C. Berkeley before heading to Geneva to work at CERN, the high-energy physics lab. After a few years, he left for graduate work, obtaining a Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Santa Barbara with his dissertation on scalable search. Ron was one of the first 100 employees at Google, working on search quality, and left after several years to get a law degree. He is a licensed attorney in CA.
In addition to research and teaching, Dr. Dolin is also an angel investor, focusing on legal technology startups. He has taught MCLE courses on document automation for the CA Bar, and was on the executive committee of the Bar’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He co-founded the Program for Legal Technology and Design and worked on legal innovation at Stanford Law’s Center on the Legal Profession. Dr. Dolin has been asked to participate on panels and give talks at universities and organizations such as Stanford, COLPM, ILTA, ACC, and CLOC on issues related to legal technology and innovation. He is an internationally well-respected expert in the field of legal informatics and legal innovation. A selected list of his presentations can be found below. He was selected as one of the 2014 Fastcase 50, and 2014 ALM Recorder’s Innovator Award recipient.
Dr. Dolin has advised both legal technology companies and computer science graduate students on, and directly contributing to, core legal technology engineering efforts including the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automated bar exam question answering, and the automated classification of legal documents and general legal information.
Dr. Dolin’s areas of research include developing and analyzing legal quality metrics: definition, implementation, and assessment of the metrics; impact of standardized quality benchmarks and testing methodology on the legal system, including in-house selection and management of outside counsel, increasing access to justice, legal technology startups and general competition, latent middle-class market, and UPL regulations. Dr. Dolin’s research considers legal market analysis from the perspective of Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School) including the role of bar associations, incentives, business structures, and other factors impacting the adoption of, and barriers to, legal innovation. This research includes comparison of the legal profession with other sectors such as medicine, hi-tech, and consulting, including the use of standardized billing codes, quality metrics, and education.
Contact me: Ron.A.Dolin at radicalconcepts dot com
Presentations
Guest Lecture, “An Engineer’s Journey Through the Legal System”, Professional Responsibility Class, Prof. David Wilkins, Harvard Law School, November 7, 2016
Presentation, Harvard Law School Executive Education and Center on the Legal Profession, “Quality Metrics in Law,” Harvard Law, Cambridge, MA, October 14 & 15, 2016
Panel Presentation, Thompson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, 21st Annual Law Firm Leaders Forum and Dinner, “Open Water: A Legal Technology ‘Shark Tank,'” New York City, October 6, 2016
Panel Presentation, Financial Times/RSG Consulting Group Innovative Lawyers Summit, “Professionalism in the 21st Century: Disruption, Globalisation and the Future of Legal Practice” moderated by David Wilkins, London, June 20-21, 2016
Presentation, Gates Foundation, “New Legal Technology and Innovation,” with Dan Jackson and Margaret Hagan, Seattle, WA, June 7-9, 2016
Panel Presentation, Chief Legal Operations Institute, CLOC, \Big Thinkers Session: The Future of Corporate Legal Services,” San Francisco, May 2-4, 2016
Guest Lecture on Legal Quality Metrics and Startups, Legal Innovation Class, Eddie Hartman, Yale (joint Law/Business), March 28, 2016
Panel Presentation, Practicing Law Institute’s TechLaw Institute 2016, “How Technology is Changing the Practice of Law,” with Matthew P. Kesner, Philip Blum, and Curtis A. Meltzer, San Francisco, CA, March 10, 2016
Lecture for UC Santa Barbara Computer Science Department, “An Engineer’s Journey Through the Legal System,” Santa Barbara, CA, November 18, 2015
Presentation at Thomson Reuter’s Annual Law Firm Financial Performance Forum, “Measuring and Applying True Profitability to Drive Results” and “Assessing the Range of Law Firm Business Models,” New York, September 18, 2015
Presentation at Copenhagen University Law School, “Innovation and the Legal Profession,” Copenhagen, Denmark, August 27, 2015
Keynote Session on “Future of Legal Services,” ACC Legal Operations Conference, Chicago, June 3, 2015
Lecture for Notre Dame Computer Science Department, “An Engineer’s Journey Through the Legal System,” South Bend, Indiana, April 23 2015
Presentation at Thomson Reuter’s Annual Law Firm Leaders Forum, “The Emerging Role of Technology in the Law Firm Model,” New York, November 6, 2014
Co-ran a Legal Technology Design Workshop at Osgoode Law School at York University, see “Designing a User-Friendly Patent System,” October 24, 2014.
Presentation at Thomson Reuter’s The Law Firm Financial Performance Forum, “New Tools for New Tasks – Alternative Ways of Measuring Law Firm Performance in the New Market,” New York, October 22, 2014
Presentation at Conference on Inconsistency Robustness, Inconsistency Robustness and the Law: A Random Walk, Stanford University, July 29-31, 2014
Moderator and panelist at Stanford Center on the Legal Profession, entitled “Keep Calm & Carry On? Disruption in the UK Legal Market & What It Could Mean for the US”, Stanford Law School, May 5, 2014 with Riverview Law CEO and Co-Founder, Karl Chapman, Vice-President of Riverview, Andy Daws, and Orrick’s Chair Emeritus, Ralph Baxter. Video
Presentation at FutureLaw 2014, “Rebuilding Legal Education,” Stanford Law School, May 2, 2014. Video
Moderator and panelist at Harvard Law School Conference entitled, “Disruptive Innovation in the Market for Legal Services”, March 6, 2014.
Presentation with Margaret Hagan, Co-Founder of the Program for Legal Tech and Design, entitled “Adventures in Legal Technology and Design” Stanford Law School, January 30, 2014. Video
“The Legal Technology Pipeline,” ILTA G100, International Legal Technology Association, Fall 2013
District of Oregon Conference entitled, Innovations in the Law: Science and Technology, at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, speaking about ODR, October, 2013
Conference on Online Dispute Resolution, Stanford Law School, April 19, 2013, panel entitled “The Impact of ODR on the Practice of Law”
ReInvent Law Silicon Valley, presentation on ODR, March 2013
Investing/Advising
Here are some of the companies I have worked with.
Teaching
Harvard Law School, Spring 2018, 2019, 2020.
Notre Dame Law School, Spring 2015 and 2016, Fall 2016
Stanford Law, Fall 2012, Legal Technology and Informatics
Guest lectures at Harvard Law School and Yale Law School, 2016
Publications
Legal publications
Katz, D., Dolin, R., Bomarito, M., (eds.), “Legal Informatics”, Cambridge University Press, 2021. Dr. Dolin also wrote five chapters in the book including, “Technology Issues in Legal Philosophy,” “Information Intermediation” (e.g. search), “XML in Law: The Role of Standards in Legal Informatics,” “Measuring Legal Quality,” and “Adaptive Innovation: Innovator’s Dilemma in Big Law.”
Dolin, R., “Legal Disruption? Uhm, It’s Complicated”, Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, August 9, 2015.
Dolin, R., “Quality Metric Example: Litigation Witness Files”, Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, May 4, 2015.
Dolin, R., “A Call For Measuring Quality in Legal Services”, Bloomberg Law, March 30, 2015.
Dolin, R. “Feedback on Technology Governance, Strategy, and Funding Proposal: Executive Summary for California Judicial Branch”, submitted as public comment, June 16, 2014.
Dolin, R., Kimbro, S., “Course Correction: Training Tomorrow’s Lawyers Legal Technology Skills,” ILTA Peer to Peer Magazine, Vol 30, No. 2, pp. 58-61, Summer, 2014.
Dolin, R, “Using A Document Automation System – Authorized Practice of Law?”, MyCase Blog, August 28, 2013.
Dolin, R., “New Tricks for an Old Dog: Teaching Legal Technology”, The Bottom Line (CA Bar, LPMT Section Publication), guest editor, Vol 34, No. 2, Special Issue on The Future of Legal Technology, April, 2013.
Dolin, R., Situ, N., “Right to Privacy: Do You Have Standing?”, The Recorder, March 07, 2013.
Dolin, R., “Search Query Privacy: The Problem of Anonymization” (short version), Proceedings of the Intelligent Information Privacy Management Symposium, Privacy 2010, Stanford University, March 22–24, 2010. Dolin, R., “Search Query Privacy: The Problem of Anonymization” (long version), Hastings Science & Technology Law Journal, 2(2), 2010.
Computer Science Publications
Pharos: A Scalable Distributed Architecture for Locating Heterogeneous Information Sources, June 1998, University of California, Santa Barbara, Ph.D. Dissertation 2010.
Hill, L.L., Dolin, R., Rae, M-A, Carver, L., Frew, J., Larsgaard, M., Smith, T.R., “Alexandria Digital Library: User Evaluation Studies and System Design”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS), 51(3), pp. 246–259, 2000.
Dolin, R., Pierre, J., Butler, M., Avedon, R., “Practical evaluation of IR within automated classification systems”, Proceedings of the Eighth ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Kansas City, Missouri, USA, November 2-6, 1999, pp. 322–329.
Hill, L.L., Janee, G., Dolin, R., Frew, J., Larsgaard, M., “Collection Metadata Solutions for Digital Library Applications”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS), 50(13), pp. 1169–1181, 1999.
Dolin, R., Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A., Pearlman, J., “Using automated classification for summarizing and selecting heterogeneous information sources”, D-Lib Magazine, January, 1998; http://www.dlib.org/dlib-/january98/dolin/01dolin.html.
Cheng, X., Dolin, R., Kothuri, R., Neary, M., Prabhakar, S., Wu, D. Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A., Freeston, M., Singh, A., Smith, T., Su, J., “Scalable Access Within the Context of Digital Libraries”, in the International Journal of Digital Libraries, 1997.
Dolin, R., Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A., Dillon, L., “Pharos: A Scalable Distributed Architecture for Locating Heterogeneous Information Sources”, Proceedings of the Sixth ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Las Vegas, Nevada, November, 1997, pp. 348–355.
Hill, L.L., Dolin, R., Frew, J., Kemp, R.B., Larsgaard, M., Montello, D.R., Rae, M-A, Simpson, J, “User Evaluation: Summary of the Methodologies and Results for the Alexandria Digital Library, University of California at Santa Barbara”, Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., November 1997.
Dolin, R., Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A., “Classifying Network Architectures for Locating Information Sources”, Proceedings of the Fifth DASFAA Conference, Melbourne, Australia, April, 1997, pp. 31–40.
Cheng, X., Dolin, R., Kothuri, R., Neary, M., Prabhakar, S., Wu, D. Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A., Freeston, M., Singh, A., Smith, T., Su, J., “Scalable Access Within the Context of Digital Libraries”, to appear in Advanced Digital Libraries Forum, 97. Proceedings of the IEEE forum on Research and Technology Advances in Digital Libraries–ADL ’97, Washington, DC, May 1997, pp. 70–81.
Smith, T.R., Andresen, D., Carver, L., Dolin R., Fischer, C., Frew, J., Goodchild, M., Ibarra, O., Kemp, R.B., Kothuri, R., Larsgaard, M., Manjunath, B.S., Nebert, D., Simpson, J., Wells, A., Yang, T., Zheng, Q. “The Alexandria Digital Library: Overview and WWW Prototype”, IEEE Computer, pp. 54–60, May, 1996 (author errata in July, 1996).
D. Andresen, L. Carver, R. Dolin, C. Fischer, J. Frew, M. Goodchild, O. Ibarra, R. Kothuri, M. Larsgaard, B. Manjunath, D. Nebert, J. Simpson, T. Smith, T. Yang, and Q. Zheng, “The WWW prototype of the Alexandria Digital Library”, in Proceedings of ISDL’95: International Symposium on Digital Libraries, Japan, 22–25 August 1995.
Physics Publications – Work for these papers involved computing, not physics. L3 Collaboration papers listed below have several hundred authors.
Bales, B.L., Dolin, R.A., Schwartz, R.N., “An effective proton hyperfine tensor for di-tertbutylnitroxide”,in Liquid Crystals and Ordered Fluids. Proceedings of the American Chemical Society Symposium. Edited by: Griffin, A.C., Johnson, J.F. New York, NY, USA: Plenum, 1984. p. 579-96 of xiii+1157 pp. 25 references.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Nucl. Instr. and Methods A 289 (1990) 35, L3 preprint 000, 1989, “The Construction of the L3 Experiment”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 231 (1989) 509, L3 preprint 001, October 11, 1989, “A Determination of the Properties of the Neutral Intermediate Vector Boson Z0”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 233 (1989) 530, L3 preprint 002, October 15, 1989, “Mass Limits for Scalar Muons, Scalar Electrons, and Winos from e
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 236 (1990) 109, L3 preprint 003, November 24, 1989, “Measurements of gA and gV , the Neutral Current Coupling Constants to Leptons”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 237 (1990) 136, L3 preprint 004, December 24, 1989, “Measurement of Z0 Decays to Hadrons, and a Precise Determination of the Number of Neutrino Species”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 238 (1990) 122, L3 preprint 005, February 5, 1990, “A Measurement of the Z0 Leptonic Partial Widths and the Vector and Axial Vector Coupling Constants”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 241 (1990) 416, L3 preprint 006, February 20, 1990, “Measurement of Z0 → bb Decay Properties”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 247 (1990) 177, L3 preprint 007, June 20, 1990, “Mass Limits for Excited Electrons and Muons from Z Decay”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 247 (1990) 473, L3 preprint 008, June 21, 1990, “A Determination of Electroweak Parameters from Z0 → μ
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 249 (1990) 341, L3 preprint 009, July 14, 1990, “A Precision Measurement of the Number of Neutrino Species”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 248 (1990) 203, L3 preprint 010, June 23, 1990, “Search for Neutral Higgs Boson in Z0 Decay”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 248 (1990) 464, L3 preprint 011, July 7, 1990, “Determination of αs from Jet Multiplicities Measured on the Z0 Resonance”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 248 (1990) 227, L3 preprint 012, July 14, 1990, “A Test of QCD based on 4-Jet Events from Z0 Decays”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 250 (1990) 199, L3 preprint 013, August 3, 1990, “Test of QED +e in e − → γγ at LEP”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 250 (1990) 205, L3 preprint 014, August 6, 1990, “Search for Excited τ ’s from Z0 Decays”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 251 (1990) 311, L3 preprint 015, August 25, 1990, “Search for the Neutral Higgs Bosons of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model from Z0 Decays”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 251 (1990) 321, L3 preprint 016, August 24, 1990, “A Search for Heavy Charged and Neutral Leptons from Z0 Decays”. +e − Collisions near √ +μ −γ”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 250 (1990) 183, L3 preprint 017, August 20, 1990, “A Determination of Electroweak Parameters from Z0 Decays into Charged Leptons”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 252 (1990) 511, L3 preprint 018, September 14, 1990, “Search for the Charged Higgs Boson in Z0 Decay”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 252 (1990) 518, L3 preprint 019, September 18, 1990, “Search for a Low Mass Neutral Higgs Boson in Z0 Decay”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 252 (1990) 703, L3 preprint 020, November 2, 1990, “A Measurement of B0B0 Mixing in Z0 Decays”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 252 (1990) 525, L3 preprint 021, October 2, 1990, “Search for Excited Neutrinos from Z0 Decays”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 252 (1990) 713, L3 preprint 022, November 5, 1990, “A Measurement of the Z0 → bb Forward-Backward Asymmetry”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 257 (1991) 469, L3 preprint 023, December 6, 1990, “Determination of αs from Energy-Energy Correlations Measured on the Z0 Resonance”.
L3 Collab., B. Adeva et al., Phys. Lett. B 257 (1991) 450, L3 preprint 024, December 17, 1990, “Search for the Neutral Higgs Boson”.