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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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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