Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

Joshua Schwadron Founder and CEO of Mighty visits  the podcast to discuss how his company and law firm are disrupting personal injury law. Even though Joshua has a law degree, he knew he did not want to practice law in the traditional sense. Instead, in 2010 the entrepreneur in him founded Betterfly, a marketplace where consumers found service providers to help with projects like home remodels, yardwork or wedding plans. Betterfly was acquired by a company ultimately purchased by Microsoft and Joshua found himself with time to move on to a new venture, and that would be legal related. After Betterfly, he launched a litigation finance company and worked on it for a few years, until 2015 when he launched Mighty. At first, Mighty also had a litigation funding component and tried to pair plaintiffs with funders by having them compete for cases. Gaining traction with that model turned out to be a little harder than Johsua expected, so Mighty started building tech to help plaintiffs and their lawyers track liens against recoveries in their cases held by medical providers and other attorneys. As you will hear from Joshua, Mighty is a purpose driven company and its goal is to make the practice of personal injury law more efficient so plaintiffs can take home better settlements. That’s why he decided to found Mighty the law firm. A firm that requires lawyers to abide by a code of conduct and work to put the most money in plaintiff’s pockets.

Looking for an in-house counsel job? Wondering what companies look for when hiring legal professionals? Well, this episode is for you. Bruce Byrd, General Counsel for cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, talks about what he looks for when he is hiring for his legal team. Like many in-house attorneys, Bruce worked a few years at a law firm and then moved in-house when he took his first corporate legal job with the AT&T legal team. He climbed the ladder and ultimately ended up with the top job as Chief Legal Officer. Earlier this year, he moved to Palo Alto Networks and took his current role as Senior Vice President and General Counsel.  Bruce’s 20+ years as corporate counsel has afforded him great insight about landing an in-house job. Bruce says that he looks for a few attributes when interviewing attorneys for his company: Curiosity An understanding of what drives the company's business (especially financial aspects) Business Development Skills (which is really understanding what the clients/business people need) Being a good listener Adaptability and Flexibility

Ethics attorney Jim Doppke makes his fourth appearance on the show to discuss the pros and cons of liberalizing legal ethics rules like Model Rule of Professional Conduct 5.4 that prohibit people who are not lawyers from owning an interest in legal services companies and preventing them from sharing in legal fees. In recent years, states like Utah and Arizona that are testing the waters and permitting lawyers to team up with others to provide legal services and share legal fees. Jim discusses the ethical implications of these programs and explores preliminary statistics from the programs that trac the number of people served and the number of complaints raised about the services. Jim is an ethics attorney with the Chicago firm of Robinson, Stewart, Montgomery & Doppke. Before that, he spent most of his career as a prosecutor with the Illinois ARDC (the Attorney Registration and Discipline Commission). He also has a legal ethics focused podcast called Legal Ethics Now and Next.

Sonja Ebron found herself in a couple legal tangles over the years. From disputes with landlords to dust-ups with shady creditors, she represented herself in court a couple times and quickly figured out litigation without a lawyer can be very difficult. So, what did she do about it? She founded Courtroom5, an app that helps civil pro se litigants with legal research, provides education about court procedures and also helps them draft and file pleadings. A “do-it-yourself” litigation support tool. In 2019 when Courtroom5 participated in the Duke Law Tech Lab incubator program, Sonja met Maya Markovich who joined the Courtroom5 advisory board. Together with the Courtroom5 team, they are trying to bridge the access to justice gap and make it a little easier on litigants who head to court without a lawyer.

Noah Waisberg literally wrote the book on Lawyers and Artificial Intelligence. Now he is building his second company that offers AI to analyze contracts. As many do, Noah went to a top notch law school and then to BigLaw. He ended up doing deal work at the firm and had to review of ton of contracts. What Noah learned is that even moderately sized companies have a ton of contracts, but because lawyers are expensive, to get a deal done, they would review only the most important contracts. This often left an incomplete picture of the liabilities and risks a company might be taking on by buying another. This got Noah thinking. After taking some off from the legal grind, he and a co-founder launched Kira Systems to build an artificial intelligence tool that would help lawyers analyze contracts. If it worked, Noah figured, the AI would give the lawyers a head start permitting them to review more contracts with the same amount of work they were putting in without AI. Because more contracts could be reviewed, companies involved in M&A deals could have a better picture of the risks and liabilities in a deal. Kira’s AI did work, and in fact, was a smashing success. Last year, another legal tech company, Litera, bought it. Before the Litera acquisition, Kira started working on a tool that would help in-house legal teams use AI to analyze contracts to help out with contract management. After the Litera deal, this project became a new company that Noah now runs, Zuva. Zuva’s technology permits users to embed AI into into their own applications via APIs to extract information from their contracts. In this episode, Noah explains how he and his team grew Kira systems and why he is excited to do the same with Zuva.

Richard Mabey, CEO and co-founder of contract automation platform Juro, visits the podcast to talk about building a legal tech start up that helps in-house legal teams deal with contracts from drafting to execution (and reduce the number of software products they use while doing it.) Richard founded Juro in 2016 with a technical co-founder he met in business school. Prior to getting a business degree, Richard received a few others that run the gamut from music to philosophy and to (of course) law. Richard started his professional career at one of the UK’s premier law firms and while there, he was seconded to a client. During his time at that company is when the seeds were sown for Juro. As Richard explains, the legal team he worked with team included very smart people but they spent a lot of time comparing versions of high volume, low risk contracts in Word. And that was only one out of five pieces of software the company used to run an agreement through its lifecycle. Richard, like many that have come before, said to himself, “there has to be a better way” and went on to found Juro, an end to end contract automation platform that helps legal teams manage contract lifecycles. But Richard didn’t launch Juro right away. Before he and his co-founder started the company, he did a stint at Legal Zoom.

Angela Floessel, Global Director of Pricing and Legal Project Management at Morrison Foerster, discusses the litigation finance program she helped set up permitting MoFo to take good cases it might not otherwise take, secure good results for clients it might not otherwise help and help grow the firm’s bottom line while doing it. Before moving to legal, Angela spent most of her career in finance. But in 2015, she took her business skills to the legal world. First to Baker Mckenzie and ultimately landed at Morrison Foerster. Among other responsibilities, Angela was hired to build out MoFo’s pricing and practice management teams, but while doing that, her business background helped her spot another opportunity at the firm to develop–a litigation funding program. Working with other lawyers at her firm, they developed a structured litigation funding program, with a due diligence protocol and a legal funding committee that vets good cases for which they can enlist the help of litigation funders. As Angela also explains, to ensure the program is a success, its foundation relies on project management processes. The firm’s project management team is involved in the cases every step of the way to make sure they identify the right opportunities, staff the cases correctly and stay on budget.

We talk to New York Times Senior Economics Correspondent Neil Irwin about his book, How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: The Definitive Guide to Adapting and Succeeding in High-Performance Careers. To write the book, Neil interviewed successful employees with companies in various industries–from Microsoft to a company running popular New York City eateries.  He wanted to understand what made these people successful in the modern economy. An economy driven by automation, “gig” jobs and dominated by “winner take all” companies (companies that dominate an industry like Google, Facebook and Walmart). Neil figured out that the most successful professionals are “glue people.” People who can communicate across varying job types and roles. Glue people are effective communicators because they are flexible, held varying types of positions in their career and understand the economics of their company. What does this have to do with legal tech and legal innovation? Quite a bit. The legal industry is not immune to economic changes affecting other industries. Technology and automation are changing the way lawyers work. To be a successful lawyer nowadays, it takes exposure and skills outside traditional lawyering (like understanding project management and being tech savvy–or, being a “unicorn lawyer”). In his book, Neil ultimately concludes that for people with the right mindset, economic changes impacting the modern career path are positive. Those that are flexible, willing to make the effort to stay ahead of industry trends and take time to understand what really drives business to their companies and firms are poised to succeed. Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.

Using legal tech to scale a corporate legal department is the topic du jour in Episode 45. The guest: Mel Scott, Senior Legal Counsel for Megaport, a global technology company offering scalable point to point connectivity for public and private cloud connections. Mel is also the host of a great podcast called Counsel about in-house lawyer life. Mel talks about her journey from law firm lawyer to an in-house role. She also talks about her experience scaling Megaport's legal department not only with specific legal technology (contract management app Ironclad) but by starting with technology the company was already using. In this case, Slack and Jira (issue and project tracking software). Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.

Brightflag COO Alex Kelly discusses the AI powered legal operations platform he co-founded that helps legal teams get a handle on legal spend and gain insight into their legal operations as a whole. By collecting information from legal bills and other sources, Brightflag provides analytics about how legal work is being resourced which can then be used to inform procurement decisions, help determine which legal service providers to add to panels and help create legal pricing models. It is interesting that Alex ended up cofounding Brightflag because he never worked in-house and instead spent seven years in private practice at one of Ireland’s premier law firms representing financial institutions. But, that Alex is a lawyer turned entrepreneur is not surprising. Both his father and stepmom are lawyers and his mother’s family founded one of Ireland’s preeminent bespoke carpet manufacturing companies.