Pioneers and Pathfinders

Today’s guest is Kunoor Chopra, a true pioneer in the legal industry and vice president of Legal Services at Elevate, a law company providing software and services for the intersection of business and law. A litigator by training at Am Law 50 firms, she made the transition into legal services outsourcing when she founded LawScribe, one of the pioneer alternative legal service providers in the industry. She made the leap to founder in 2004—before the term ALSP was even born. Kunoor’s move from Am Law 50 to founder is not unusual now, but it was unheard of 19 years ago. After selling the company to UnitedLex, she co-founded Elevate with entrepreneur Liam Brown. As a lesbian South Asian woman, Kunoor wanted to create a place where people can bring their authentic selves to work, and she fulfilled this vision by co-founding Elevate. For more than a decade, Elevate’s legal, business, and technology professionals have offered practical ways for global law departments and law firms to improve efficiency, quality, and business outcomes. Additionally, she is a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, focusing on innovation and transformation in legal services delivery. In our conversation, Kunoor tells us about her transition from law to sales, finding acceptance as a diverse attorney, and her thoughts on the future of the legal services industry.

Toby Brown is the CEO and founder of DV8 Legal Strategies and a true pioneer in pricing and project management in the legal industry. Toby got his start in law firm administration, and then became director of the Utah State Bar. His move to head of knowledge management at Fulbright & Jaworski marked the start of his business of law innovation journey, which has since led to a number of roles at Am Law 100 firms building pricing and project management programs. Today, Toby helps legal organizations break from the status quo and develop differentiated and sustainable strategies in lateral partner hiring, pricing, and legal project management. Toby is a respected speaker on topics such as legal management, marketing, and technology. He also founded the Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry, and was co-founder of the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. In our conversation, we discuss Toby's professional journey and how it led to legal project management, the need for standards in the profession, what drives him to bring people together in the industry, and his new venture at DV8 Legal Strategies.

Today's guest is Dr. Sonja Ebron, a PhD of electrical engineering and an entrepreneur with a background in AI. She co-founded Courtroom5 with her wife, Dr. Debra Slone, PhD, a former librarian, school professor, and qualitative data and analysis expert. Motivated by their own difficult experiences navigating the judicial system, they decided to help others in similar situations. Courtroom5 provides people with the tools, resources, and workshops needed to help them settle civil cases, with or without a lawyer to accompany them. Through the resources they provide, people of all classes can learn and understand the legal process without being shut out. Courtroom5 won first place at the Duke Law Tech Lab Demo Day in 2019 and since then, has continued to grow. In 2022, Courtroom5 partnered with Fastcase to provide limited scope access to lawyers who use Fastcase, and to select individual elements of cases where they can provide the most help. It was a fascinating conversation with Dr. Ebron, covering everything from her personal journey to her experience as a serial entrepreneur, and how her training as an engineer influences her approach to the development of Courtroom5. Dr. Ebron is also the host of a podcast called Who Wrote That Up For You?, so we talked shop about the ins and outs of podcast life. Dr. Ebron is a fabulous example of the incredibly important role allied professionals can play in driving change in the profession.

To close out this year, we are delighted to welcome back an old friend, Jae Um. Jae is one of the most sought-after strategy executives in the legal industry. She is the founder and executive director of Six Parsecs, an insights firm for the legal vertical. In addition to strategic consulting for law firm leadership, Jae serves on advisory boards for emerging legal tech companies, including LegalMation, Datana, and LexFusion. Jae got her start in Big Law at Seyfarth, where she served in a progression of high-impact roles in client service innovation and strategic growth. She then went on to serve as director of pricing strategy for Baker McKenzie worldwide. She is a contributing author to Legal Evolution, The American Lawyer, and other publications covering the legal industry. In her spare time, Jae has created a series called Lawyering at Scale on Luminate+. Her work is consistently brilliant. Jae was one of our first guests on the podcast when we launched in 2021, and we are thrilled to have her back for a fascinating conversation about her life on the road, the role of empathy in her consulting practice, the cultural commonalities of the most successful law firms, and how she sees the landscape for the profession unfolding in 2023.

We have had numerous guests on the podcast focused on legal tech, but in today’s conversation, we talk about practical governance strategies for AI and other frontier technologies with Karen Silverman, the CEO and founder of The Cantellus Group. Karen advises Fortune 50 companies, startups, consortia, and governments on how to govern cutting-edge technologies in a rapidly changing policy environment. Her expertise is informed by more than 20 years of practice and management leadership at Latham & Watkins LLP, where she advised global businesses in complex antitrust matters, M&A, governance, ESG, and crisis management. Karen is a leading voice in the governance of AI and other frontier technologies. She is a regular speaker at conferences and forums, and her thoughts on the governance oversight and real-world applications of AR, AI, VR, and other nascent technologies have been featured in numerous journals and publications. Most recently, Karen launched a series on Luminate+, a streaming platform for cutting-edge legal content featuring the most respected thought leaders of the profession. Karen’s series, “Where Lawyers Meet Tech and Tech Meets the Law,” is about how new technologies affect the substance and practice of law, and what all lawyers need to know in order to be effective counselors. In our conversation, we talk about how Karen developed her level of expertise in business and legal issues around frontier technologies. We also discuss what The Cantellus Group does and the type of companies they work with, together with her views on the knock-on effects of machine learning on the culture of the practice. And of course, we talk about the changes necessary in the regulatory framework to keep up with the speed of change in technology.

Today's guest is Haley Altman. She is a corporate attorney, founder, and a friend to many of us in the legal technology innovation space. Haley has had a fascinating career, where she moved from attorney for buyers and sellers, to founding and selling her own company, and eventually landing on the buy side with Litera. She began her career in Big Law, first as an associate and then partner, moving into entrepreneurship as the founder of Doxly, Inc., which was acquired by Litera. There she took on the role of global head of corporate development, and eventually led 10 acquisitions in a time span of less than two years. Most recently, Haley has shifted to a strategic advisor consulting role at Litera, where she continues to support the leadership team and their M&A and product strategy. In our conversation, we talk about why Haley jumped from equity partner to founder, and the support she got from her firm and the venture studio High Alpha. We also discuss why she turned her focus to the talent side of the legal industry, and how she is addressing burnout and career progression—both for herself and for others in the profession.

Today’s guest is Carmin Ballou, vice president of Data Analytics and Innovation at Attorneys' Liability Assurance Society, also known as ALAS. ALAS is the country’s largest lawyer-owned mutual, insuring 223 law firms—including 89 of the Am Law 200—with more than 74,000 lawyers located around the world. A lawyer with a Master of Science in Analytics degree from the University of Chicago Graham School, Carmin is focused on a key element of the legal profession: risk management. She uses her legal background and technical skills to lead the data analytics team at ALAS, with a goal of instilling more robust risk management-based analytics across all functional areas of ALAS, and providing analysis and tools for use of their member firms. The analytics initiatives are designed to assist in ALAS' ongoing operations, and to provide a service to ALAS' member firms by helping them understand and manage their professional liability risk. To this work, she brings many years of experience as a practicing attorney at Skadden, as well as expertise in machine learning, natural language processing, SQL, Python, and Power BI. Listen in to today’s conversation to learn how Carmin's team uses data to test and support the experiences of her loss prevention colleagues. We also talk about the use of data visualization techniques to help communicate the messages learned from the data as to a firm’s area with the most issues. And of course, we talk about her professional journey and how her interest in project management and data analytics instructed her personal path.

Today we welcome back our premiere guest, Dr. Heidi K. Gardner. An economist by training, she is a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession and chair of the school’s Smarter Collaboration Master Class and Sector Leadership Master Class. In addition to these roles, she founded and runs her own consultancy, Gardner & Co. In our first conversation, we talked about her journey, how she got involved in studying the legal profession, and her bestselling book, Smart Collaboration, a data-driven look at the business case for effective collaboration. Now, Dr. Gardner has a new book, Smarter Collaboration, co-authored with Ivan Matviak. In this book, she builds on the concepts of smart collaboration with data, case studies, and ways to help leaders identify places where smarter collaboration is already happening—and take it to the next level. Join us as we catch up with Dr. Gardner on what she has been doing since we last spoke, and explore why she was inspired to write her new book. We cover a wide range of topics: why we should continue to cultivate “serendipitous encounters” at work, how organizations can avoid the dangers of over-collaboration, and how they can better collaborate with outside parties such as consultants and vendors. We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did.

Today’s guest is Alex Smith, Global Product Management Lead for iManage RAVN. He got his start at legal publishing giant LexisNexis, where he began in online editorial work and eventually evolved his role to product management and platform innovation. An interest in new roles in law firms led to his time as innovation manager at Reed Smith, a global firm where he oversaw the firm’s Innovation Hub program that encouraged, communicated, connected, and managed a pipeline of ideas across the firm's global network. Today, he oversees the product roadmap for the search, knowledge, and AI offerings within the wider iManage experience, bringing the voice, needs, and ideas of the customer in service design. The common thread in his career journey is his fascination with search and data, and the evolution of new and emerging technologies, from CD-ROM to contract management, artificial intelligence, semantic search, and linked data. In many ways, Alex’s career maps the evolution of technology in the legal sector. Our conversation flashes back to the early days of online legal publishing up to today's emerging technologies. We talk about Alex's various work experiences, and how he uses lawyers’ penchant for talking about themselves in his work in product design. We also discuss how he has been at the core of some of the critical technology products in the legal industry.

Contracts are a hot topic in education, technology innovation, and practice in the legal industry. In fact, we've had several guests on the show focused on those aspects of contract management, but today's guest focuses on contract formation. She asks a simple, but important question: Can we learn to do a better job of negotiating and drafting better contracts? Laura Frederick is the founder and CEO of How to Contract. Drawn from her 26 years practicing contract law, How To Contract teaches real-world skills in negotiating and drafting contracts. The formation of How To Contract is a fascinating story. Two years ago, Laura began sharing daily contracting tips as part of a 30-day challenge of posting on LinkedIn. The reaction to these posts was overwhelmingly positive, and Laura went from 1,000 followers on LinkedIn to more than 33,000 followers today. This, in turn, led to her book, Practical Tips on How to Contract. Laura also launched How To Contract, the global leader in practical contract training for lawyers and professionals. Through its training membership and events, it has helped thousands of people learn how to manage contract risk and get deals done. Laura is also the managing attorney of Laura Frederick Law, PLLC, a boutique law firm based in Austin, Texas that helps companies that need practical and affordable advice on commercial contracts. In today's conversation, we talk about Laura’s use of social media and her move to being an entrepreneur. We also discuss what ignited Laura's love of contracts, how and why she addresses the human side of contracting at a time when technology dominates, and the influence of SeyfarthLean on her evolution.