This month CNBC Journalist Eric Rosenbaum interviewed me for an article entitled “Can elite law firms survive the rise of artificial intelligence? The jury is still out“. Below is one of several sections in the article in which I am quoted. Dolin noted that Google has a dashboard that allows its legal counsel to monitor the billing […]
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Law Librarians: The Hidden Bastions of Data-Driven Innovation
It is not uncommon to hear of venture capital’s hesitancy to invest in legal tech startups. The challenges are many: a long sales cycle, cultural conservatism and entrenched processes to name a few. Within the academic community, we’ve heard a similar reason for not investing in evolving and increasingly important legal tools. A law school […]
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Legal Disruption? Uhm, It’s Complicated
A few months back, while I was still at Stanford (I’m now at Harvard Law’s CLP), I explored the nature of disruption in Big Law. I wanted to focus on Big Law because it is perhaps the component of the overall legal system at least as likely to experience disruption as any other. At the end […]
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Measuring the Subjective
Abstract This article describes a generalized approach to measuring subjective notions of quality. It shows how using a particular mathematical framework can yield several beneficial properties. These properties allow for measurements of complex, subjective notions of value or quality that are intuitive and easily tailored to a particular individual and data set. This example shows […]
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UPL, Technology, and Access to Justice
I was asked to participate on a panel at the ABA’s Center for Professional Responsibility’s 2nd UPL School in Chicago on April 17th. The panel topic was “The Users and Abusers: Technology and the Unauthorized Practice of Law“. I’d written a guest blog at MyCase in 2013 called “Using A Document Automation System – Authorized […]
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Quality Metric Example: Litigation Witness Files
I recently discussed the importance of standardized quality metrics. I’ll work through the process of how to define such metrics — this is an exercise and not intended to be a definitive solution. As a starting point, I recently met with Novus Law to see what types of metrics they were using for quality control. […]
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Getting To New Law: Standardized Quality Metrics
I was at a gathering a while back that happened to include the General Counsel of a Fortune 100 company. I asked him if he measured ROI on his legal spend. “No,” he said, “I can’t.” Why not? “I can’t measure quality.” I suspect, though, that he meant “I can’t measure quality yet.” At various […]
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Big Law as Legal Fiction and the Lack of Innovation
We often come across the concept of “legal fiction” in law: corporations, survivorship, adoption, real property, etc. In particular, large law firm partnerships are a legal fiction, and the fiction becomes paramount when one views the decision-making processes involved in keeping a firm viable under today’s changing ground rules. Decisions that would be in the […]
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