The Geek In Review

While most of us in the legal industry were still finding their sea legs when it came to working from home, today's guests were planning a moon shot experiment of creating a virtual legal conference completely from scratch. Haley Altman and Alma Asay from Litera Microsystems talk with us about their experiences in creating and producing The Changing Lawyer LIVE! virtual conference back in April. There were some victories, and some challenges along the way, but the end result was pretty impressive. As we enter the Summer, many other organizations are looking to do some type of online/virtual conference to make up for the cancellation that most organizations had to do because of the pandemic. There's a steep learning curve, so we are grateful that Haley and Alma shared their experiences with us. Information Inspirations Google is shutting down some of their diversity and inclusion training programs because of either political pressure (which Google denies) or to establish global, scalable diversity programs (whatever that means.) Diversity and inclusion don't just make the workforce look better, many studies have shown that it actually creates a more effective workforce, and drives profit to the bottom line.  Harvard Law School helped its incoming students with an online preparatory program called Zero-L. This series of videos and online training helped incoming students understand the processes behind the daily activities of a law student. Now that program is available this summer to everyone. We ponder if a top BigLaw firm might think of creating a Zero-Year Associate online training course that would prepare law students to understand the daily life of an associate and help them understand what the business of running a law firm looks like. Listen, Subscribe, Comment Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

It's episode 75!! We think we look fabulous and that we definitely don't look a day over 50.  While most professional associations are experiencing significant changes due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, today's guests have launched a brand new network and say that this might be one of the best times to enter the market. The Legal Value Network (LVN) focuses on the delivery of services and connecting professionals from law firms, corporate legal departments, alternative legal services companies, and technology providers. Kristina Lambright and Purvi Sanghvi are part of the LVN Executive Board and discuss the launch of the network, and how they are providing content and connections to those in the network.  Information Inspirations Denton's Managing Partner wrote an excellent article in The Hill entitled "Let's stop asking 'When are We Going Back to the Office?'" The leader of the world's largest law firm had some sharp criticism for many of the partners at his firm who are pushing for a return to the office. He points out the privilege that many of these partners are expressing without consideration to the staff, and the gender disparity that will occur if there is a rush to get back to the office.  It turns out that "Don't let an emergency go to waste" is a Rahm Emanuel reference, and it turns out that we've been saying it wrong... and incompletely. According to Emanuel's interview on Freakonomics, the quote was, “Never allow a good crisis to go to waste. It’s the opportunity to do the things you never thought possible and make them possible.” Our friend, Cat Moon, through her Make Law Better initiative, is looking for volunteers who are legal innovators and are looking for ways to help during this pandemic. Check out Marlene's ILTA co-committee members, Amy Monaghan and Mike Ertel's article on Empathetic Human-Centered Design Overlay on Design Thinking Post COVID-19. Listen, Subscribe, Comment Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

It's not unusual for law firms to invest around $1M in recruiting, hiring, training, and retention of Associates over the first four years of their legal career. However, if you look at the actual retention rates through the fourth or fifth year, it is essentially a coin flip on whether the firm retains, or loses that talent. Bryan Parker, CEO of Legal Innovators thinks that it is not a good return on the law firm's (and the Associate's) time and capital investment. Parker believes that you can take a more holistic approach to the recruitment process and evaluate the best talent out there, in particular, women, minorities, and those from underrepresented backgrounds through a two-year process that more resembles the European apprenticeship model than the US on-campus recruiting and Summer Associate method. In addition to this fascinating discussion, we also have a deep (and fun) discussion of Bryan's sneaker obsession. Information Inspirations The cancellation of in-person conferences is on the mind of all of us who usually attend these conferences for our professional development and networking needs. There are alternatives, however. For example, Stanford's CodeX conference is available online, and Greg is on a panel for Litera's April 23rd online event called The Changing Lawyer LIVE! Go check out both conferences. We want to say how happy we are in David Lat's recovery from his COVID-19 hospitalization. Bob Ambrogi interviewed David after his release from the hospital for his LawNext podcast.  Listen, Subscribe, Comment Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

Heidi Gardner, Distinguished Fellow and Lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Brian Stearns, Chief Commercial Officer at Workstorm, talk with us about collaboration when most of us are under a shelter-in-place order. There are definitely tools to make it easier to collaborate remotely, but there is a process that must be evaluated first. There's also a human element that must be considered in who people react to the stress they are currently under.  As we have said before, never let an emergency go to waste, and Gardner and Stearns have some insights on how to evaluate your current structure, determine what works best for your environment, and to remain vigilant and empathetic to those who may be struggling.  It's not all doom and gloom, however. This is an excellent opportunity to be creative. If you are looking for the right time to introduce new processes, tools, or ideas, now may be the perfect time to pitch those. The worst thing you can do right now is to try and stay the same. Listen, Subscribe, Comment Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

There is no reason why we should let an emergency go to waste. So, we've both taken on a side project while we work remotely. Marlene's new daily ILTA blog presents a quick update on the skills we need to work on while we're working from home. Her first post, Be Sheltering: Not Sheltered discusses a number of initiatives going on which we all can contribute. You can find out more on the ILTA blog page. Greg began his daily podcast miniseries, In Seclusion, this week. These are short, less than 15 minutes, interviews of an eclectic group of people ranging from bar and professional association leaders, legal information professionals, vendors, consultants, lawyers, etc. Pretty much anyone who works in the legal industry and has a story to tell about their new work from home situation. The first episode is included in this podcast. Greg talked with Jim Calloway from the Oklahoma Bar Association regarding how they are helping their lawyers, courts, and community continue to work in this new environment. You can subscribe to In Seclusion on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, or where ever you listen to podcasts. Stay safe everyone! Listen, Subscribe, Comment Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.  

We try... and fail to stay off the COVID-19 topic this week, but it's just too ingrained in our lives right now. For those of you out there doing the remote work thing, we understand and hope you are adapting to the new work mode with little interruption. We, too, are working remotely, and hope there are not too many background noises of kids, refrigerators, or pets making cameo appearances on this week's show. We have a great talk with Charlie Uniman, Legal Tech Startup Evangelist, and founder of Legal Tech Startup Focus. LTSF is an online community of nearly 1,000 legal startup professionals that gives its members a place to find like-minded individuals and bounce ideas off of one another. Charlie also produces the LTSF Podcast. We cover the issues of how law firms and legal startups communicate with each other. Charlie details the basic processes that law firms and legal startups need to take to build a solid relationship that is beneficial to both parties. While some of what he lays out may seem like common-sense to Charlie, it is insightful to those of us who may not have the constant relationships with startups like he does.  Information Inspirations PwC launched its COVID-19 Navigator this week. This online resource shows some of the flexibility that the Big 4 accounting firms may have over law firms. The COVID-19 Navigator allows business leaders to answer a survey of questions to determine how prepared they are for the COVID-19 business disruptions. PwC says that this "digital tool contains 3 sections of questions that will help you understand where your company stands as you respond to COVID-19 in the areas of: crisis management and response; workforce; operations and supply chain; finance and liquidity; tax and trade; and strategy and brand." Can you imagine law firms using an iterative software design like this to leverage their subject matter expertise with technology to assist customers and potential customers with major issues like COVID-19? If not, it's time to start thinking about it.  Marlene's inspiration this week is for all of us to stay healthy and work through our transition to the remote working that many of us are not accustomed to doing. If you're struggling or want to share your experiences, please reach out to us and we'd love to have that conversation. Listen, Subscribe, Comment Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

Using Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Natural Language Processing to hold a conversation might seem like a far off idea when it comes to the legal industry, but it is not. We sit down with Baker Hostetler's Katherine Lowry, and Puerto Rico defense attorney Diego Alcala to get a better understanding of how chatbots work, and what value they can bring from legal practices ranging from BigLaw Bankruptcy practice to a solo attorney's criminal law practice. Katherine Lowry won the American Association of Law Libraries' Innovation Tournament in 2018 with her attorney-facing chatbot. In the nearly two years since that recognition, she has created a chatbot for her Bankruptcy practice that answers thousands of potential questions and helps her attorneys find information quickly and frees up her researchers' time for more complex questions. Diego Alcala is working on chatbots which will assist him in his practice by answering basic questions that family members need to know about the clients he is representing. While Diego is not a programmer, he has learned the concept of chatbots through numerous platforms that allow for those with no coding skills to still create powerful chatbots to answer practical questions.  Listen in and see if the ideas shared by Lowry and Alcala spur any ideas of how automating a conversation might help you in your practice. Information Inspirations There's another bill in Congress that creates a FREE PACER! Congressman Hank Johnson, D-GA, is not stopping there. He is also requiring more transparency in the Federal Courts by requiring audio and video recordings are made available of court proceedings. While the bill creates a FREE PACER for most, there is a surcharge for power users who have $25,000 or more in quarterly usage. That means some BigLaw firms will have to pay that surcharge. COVID-19 continues to dominate the conversations (check out our episode). The World Health Organization is testing its messaging to the youth through Tik Tok. It's a novel approach for a novel virus. We are all updating our business plans to prepare for the worst when it comes to COVID-19, but a recent report says that businesses are more likely to suffer from the slow burn of the everyday risks which traditionally bring businesses to their knees. Listen, Subscribe, Comment Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

With all of the news about COVID-19 (Coronavirus) making its way into the United States, it is time for law firms to think about what they are going to do to prepare for a possible outbreak that will affect their business operations. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans need to be dusted off and updated to manage the different scenarios that may come our with over the next few months. We asked the Association of Legal Administrators interim Executive Director, April Campbell, to discuss what law firms need to be doing to prepare. There are definite immediate and local actions that should be implemented such as: Restrict travel to hotspots 14-day work from home policies for personnel who have traveled to those areas, or were exposed to others who may have traveled to hotspots Stress that sick employees stay home Explain proper handwashing techniques And LOTS OF HAND SANITIZER The CDC released communications resources on these actions. While these may be common sense approaches to reducing the risk of exposure to COVID-19, the firm's leadership must go deeper and layout a strategic plan for what to do if the epidemic becomes a pandemic and affects the overall business operations of the firm and the firm's clients.  There will most likely be a significant increase in those working from home. The firm needs to test the ability of the firm's infrastructure to handle that type of stress. While many of the lawyers may be set up to work from home for a prolonged period, but what about the other employees of the firm? Are they properly trained? Do they have the right equipment? How do you manage personnel who may have never worked from home before?  There is a multitude of issues facing law firms should COVID-19 become a serious epidemic. The better prepared the firm is now, the better the firm will react should the event come to fruition. As the saying goes, no emergency should go to waste. Now is the time to act and test where the firm needs help, or where there needs to be more flexibility in business operations. If you do not have a disaster recovery plan, reach out to your colleagues in the industry to ask them for help.  If your firm has created new policies or is testing scenarios based on a COVID-19 outbreak, we'd love to hear more. Send us an email or voicemail and share your experiences. Listen, Subscribe, Comment Special thanks to Gabriel Teninbaum for his inspiration on this issue. Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

The legal industry relies upon the writings and communications of lawyers, judges, and lawmakers. For the citizens and clients who are subject to these legal writings, understanding the legalese is painfully frustrating. We were asked by a fan of the show (in full disclosure, it was Greg's sister-in-law Wendy) why lawyers can't write in plain English. We pulled together a panel of four experts on legal communications and asked them just that. It turns out that writing in plain English is not only possible, but it is the preferred method of legal writing. Our guests on this episode are: Neil Guthrie - Director, Professional Development, Research, and Knowledge Management, at Aired & Berlis LLP in Toronto. Author of Guthrie’s Guide to Better Legal Writing. Chris Trudeau – Law and Medical Professor at the University of Arkansas/ Little Rock and author of The Public Speaks: An Empirical Study of Legal Communication. As well as journal articles on plain English writing for lawyers in Healthcare. Jesse Katz – Litigation Editor at O’Melveny and Myers, as well as a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist before taking on his editing role. Sara Harris – Jackson Walker associate who is known for her writing skills, and is an editor for the American Lawyer’s Young Lawyer Editorial Board. Suggested Reading List Typography for Lawyers Plain English for Lawyers Letting Go of the Words Information Inspirations Greg got to drop in on a Houston Young Lawyer Association meeting for First-Generation Lawyers on the topic of lawyer recruiting. The meeting was great, but the biggest impact was made by a question a minority law student was asked on why his experience as a person of color would bring value to the firm. Is that something a firm should even be asking? Marlene geeks out over Evan Parker's article on How to Talk Data and Influence People, Including Lawyers. This dovetailed nicely with our guests' discussion on presenting the information in a way that tells a story and presents information in a way that is understandable by the reader. Data analytics is just another method of communicating. The trick is communicating in a way that actually makes sense and informs.

We reach across the Atlantic Ocean and talk with Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner's Nick Pryor on his work the firm's BCLP³ innovation objectives. Nick heads up the firm's European, Middle East, and Asia innovation projects, and gives us some insights on the joys and hardships that come with innovation in the global legal market. Whether it is regulations, cultural challenges, competition, or setting a long-term vision, innovation is challenging. However, Nick also stresses that it is also very rewarding. Innovation Inspirations If you had any doubts that privacy was dying, the work that Clearview AI is doing may put those doubts to bed. The facial recognition company has scraped billions of images and personal details from the open web over the past few years and has created a database for law enforcement which claims to have a 99% accuracy rate for matching faces to these images. In a recent The Daily Podcast from the New York Times, reporter Kashmir Hill investigates Clearview AI's entry into the facial recognition marketplace and finds a story that is equally amazing and scary. Federal and state law enforcement are raving about the power of this product to help them solve crimes that may have gone unsolved forever. There is a dark side to this power, which Hill found out first hand when the company manipulated results on her photos and possibly intimidated police who were talking with her.  Check out the podcast The End of Privacy as We Know It? On a lighter note, Marlene's innovation comes from another podcast that explains how new words are added to the Miriam Webster dictionary. The podcast doesn't just stop with the explanation, they are actually attempting to place one of three words into that dictionary, and are asking for help on picking which one. Which will it be? Niblings? Preregret? Or, Pistracted? You can help pick America's Next Top Word. Listen, Subscribe, Comment Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.