Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

Eric Farber, attorney and writer, visits the Technically Legal Podcast to talk about Creators Legal, a LegalZoom like app for creators and those in the entertainment industry. Creators Legal offers self serve industry contracts drafted by experienced lawyers. It makes sense that Eric launched a legal tech company for creative types. He started his career in the entertainment industry working for a talent agency and then headed up business affairs for a movie studio. Ultimately he moved to private practice and represented entertainers and athletes. In fact for many years, he represented Amaru Entertainment which released Tupac Shakur’s posthumous music. In 2008, with the economy in shambles, Eric, like many, had to pivot and launched Pacific Workers which was initially a workers compensation law firm for athletes, but later came to represent workers from all fields. So, how is that Eric decided to launch a legal tech company? One of Eric’s law clerks pointed out that Eric always had great business advice, but he never used it himself. That comment resonated with Eric and that’s when he decided to launch Creators Legal. Based on his experience in the entertainment world, he knew the vast majority of those creating art and intellectual property could not afford proper legal representation to protect their rights. What Eric saw is an access to justice issue and set out to do something about it. The result is a site that creators can go to and find legal documents to help them protect their rights and create businesses around their art. Although historically Eric was on the legal side of the entertainment industry, he is also a creator. He wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Case for Culture: How to Stop Being a Slave to Your Law Firm, Grow Your Practice, and Actually Be Happy.

The ransomware episode. October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so how couldn't we do this episode? Our guests are Kelly Geary, National Practice Leader of Executive Risk & Cyber/Professional Services Claims for EPIC Insurance Brokers, and Rich Gatz, Claims Counsel for Coalition, a Silicon Valley cyber insurance company. While both Kelly and Rich have law degrees, they have worked in insurance for a long time. Both got started with cyber insurance and incident response in the early days. On the show, they talk about the history of cyber insurance coverage and what parts of ransomware and cyber incident response insurance covers. To close out the conversation, they explain what goes on behind the scenes in a cyber attack response.

Blockchain. Crypto mining. Proof of stake. Smart contracts. Non Fungible Tokens (NFT). DAOs. Crypto regulation. We talk about all of the above and more with Lewis Cohen of the blockchain focused law firm of DLx Law. Lewis breaks down what a blockchain network is and how transactions are recorded and verified on the network. He also talks about the legal and intellectual property implications of NFTs and decentralized autonomous organizations. Lewis also touches on recent efforts to regulate cryptocurrencies and blockchain businesses.

Otto Hansen, the founder of Term Scout, visits Technically Legal to talk about the company he founded that uses machine learning to analyze and rate contracts. Specifically, it analyzes contracts to determine whether they are in line with industry standards and how vendor or customer friendly they are. The goal of Term Scout’s rating system is to cut down on contract negotiation and eliminate the back and forth about uncontroversial terms so the parties can focus provisions that will require more give and take before they are finalized. Term Scout is not Otto’s first start up. Otto is a lawyer who practiced for a few years before launching Term Scout, but prior to entering the legal world, he worked at a start up that was making ski gloves. It was his experience with the ski glove company that actually inspired Otto to go to law school.

“Whatever benefits advanced legal technology may bring to lawyers, I am concerned about this sort of technology seeping into the legal writing classroom,” writes Northwestern University Legal Writing Professor Michael Zuckerman in an article he penned for the ABA Journal, Law Professor Makes Case Against Automating Legal Writing in Law School. However, Professor Zuckerman is not anti-legal tech. In fact, as he explains in the latest episode of Technically Legal, he even founded a legal tech company before joining the law school faculty at Northwestern. His concern is that if law students are not first taught to write their own legal documents and do their own legal research, but instead rely on tech, it may very well come at the expense of their ability to employ critical legal thinking and, ultimately, be effective attorneys to their clients. Professor Zuckerman also talks about how the Rules of Professional Conduct are also implicated by the use of legal technology.

Contract automation and building an alternative legal service provider (ALSP) within a law firm is the topic of Episode 52. Eric Baker and Michael Case, transportation attorneys with Frost Brown Todd, talk about their journey founding Transaction Expeditors, an AI enabled contracts automation platform for the transportation industry. Before joining Frost Brown Todd and before launching Transaction Expeditors, both Eric and Mike were in house attorneys. Eric served as GC for transportation and logistics companies SIRVA and CRST. Mike was also in-house doing legal work and running claims for a transportation insurer Protective Insurance. There has been much talk over the last couple of years about the interplay between law firms and alternative legal service providers. Should law firms use them? If so, should the create their own? When Eric and Michael, along with their colleague Stacy Katz, founded Transaction Expeditors, they were not thinking about those questions. They just wanted to create a more efficient contract management solution for their transportation clients. But in the end they created an ALSP within their law firm. Having Eric and Mike on the show also brings the podcast full circle because Transaction Expeditors’ technology partner is the AI engine Legal Sifter, a company we had on the show way back on Episode 15 in 2018.

Cyber incident response. Cyber attacks. Unfortunately, we hear these terms daily nowadays. But what really goes on behind the scenes in a cyber incident? To answer that question, we asked Luke Green, a Breach Response Services Manager for cyber insurer Beazley Group and Josh Sudbury, Managing Principal of Forensic Investigations at Lodestone, a leading cyber defense and incident response company, to come on the show. They break down step by step what happens when an organization is hacked. From containment to remediation, Luke and Josh explain the stages of a cyber incident response plan. They also explain how cyber insurers and incident response teams work with companies to minimize cyber risk and damage. They also discuss cybersecurity and what companies can do ahead of time to prevent cyber attacks including education initiatives and implementing cyber incident policies.

Data analytics maturity models (and legal operations maturity models in general) are the topic of discussion with Peter Eilhauer, Managing Director for Legal Spend Solutions at Epiq. Peter knows his stuff about legal spend management–he’s been working in and around it for 16 years. He started as a consultant helping law firms manage costs and then jumped ship to help corporate legal departments manage their legal spend. Most recently with Epiq and just before that with Elevate Services. Peter describes a maturity model as “a set of structured levels that describe how well the behaviors, practices and processes of an organization can reliably and sustainably produce required outcomes.” Stated another way, a legal operations maturity model is a way of measuring how well a legal department is using their people, processes and technology to handle legal work. Although Peter mainly discusses maturity models as they relate to data analytics (and specifically how to use data analytics to monitor and control legal spending), maturity models can be applied to many legal operations functions.

Using artificial intelligence to help make hiring decisions is the topic du jour of Episode 49. Matt Spencer and Aaron Meyers, the CEO and CTO of Suited, respectively, explain how their AI powered, assessment-driven recruiting platform helps law firms and corporate legal departments find the best candidate for legal jobs and also increase diversity hires. After a career in investment banking, Matt and his co-founders launched Suited to address the major difficulties in finding the right job candidate: limited time, limited budgets and limited information. Suited trains its AI with assessments taken both by hiring parties and candidates to identify potential hires who have the best chance at thriving in a particular firm or company work environment. Suited’s assessments collect three categories of information: psychometrics, skills and academics. Once candidates take the assessment, the app ranks them for a particular firm to predict whether the candidate will work well in that environment. To better identify the right legal job candidates and create a more diverse hiring pool, Suited’s engineers worked hard to develop software that mitigates bias in the hiring process. To do that Suited’s A.I. models models exceed the standards for fairness set forth by the EEOC. Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.

"The fundamental tool of lawyers is language" explains Serena Wellen in this episode. Serena is a Senior Director for LexisNexis and works on the Context legal analytics platform. Context leverages machine learning and natural language processing from Ravel, a company LexisNexis acquired in 2017. Using Ravel's analytics engine, Context sits atop many of the LexisNexis databases and analyzes information about judges, lawyers, expert witnesses and companies compiled in "entity authorities." With Context, lawyers can craft their best arguments using analytic insight about the judges they are in front of and opposing counsel they face. Context can help identify the case law judges and adversaries rely on the most, and how likely a court is to grant their motions. Context is also a helpful tool outside of the courtroom. In-house legal teams can use it to vet outside counsel and attorneys can use it to figure out if the expert witness they want to hire has ever been disqualified and if so, why. Learn more about Serena.