Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

Daniel Linna, Senior Lecturer & Director of Law and Technology Initiatives at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law & McCormick School of Engineering visits the podcast to talk legal education, artificial intelligence and intersection of computer science and law. Professor Linna teaches classes at both Northwestern’s law school and engineering school that relate to tech and law including a couple on artificial intelligence. Dan is also heads up the University’s Legal Innovation Lab. Dan also does a fair bit of research including his most recent project that is testing conversational AI that tenants can use in disputes with landlords. Prior to Northwestern Dan held positions at both the University of Michigan and Michigan State. Before he was a professor Dan practiced law at a large law firm.

In this episode Chris Handman, COO and Co-Founder of data privacy management app TerraTrue, talks about Shifting Left with data privacy. “Shift left” is a concept used to identify defects and bugs early in the software development process before deployment. This is also how Chris and his team think legal departments, privacy officers and compliance professionals should think about data privacy. TerraTrue is a data privacy management platform that companies can use and integrate with the other software (like Jira and Slack) to get people thinking about the data privacy implications of products they are building while they are building them. Chris explains that with the continued growth of privacy regulations, companies cannot just ship software and hope to deal with privacy issues after the fact. Chris ended up in the data privacy world after a successful career as a lawyer in private practice. Chris worked as an appellate lawyer right out of law school and handled high profile cases in front of federal appellate courts including the United States Supreme Court. After a few years, an executive search firm contacted Chris about becoming Snapchat’s first general counsel. He had been doing more and more privacy work in his appellate practice and people began to notice. Chris made the jump to Snapchat and hit the ground running. Among other intense and high profile legal cases he had to deal with, the FTC was all over Snapchat about data privacy issues that ultimately ended in a consent decree. In 2017 Chris left Snapchat, took a little time off with his family, and began talking to some of his old Snap colleagues about building a new company. That is when TerraTrue was born.

Blockchain lawyer and fellow podcaster Jacob Robinson visits Technically Legal to talk about how blockchain technology is impacting the law now and how it will in the future. Jacob hosts the Law of Code Podcast covering blockchain related legal issues and hosting a Who’s Who of #Cryptolaw as guests. On this episode, Jacob discusses the interplay between blockchain technology and legal rights (such as property rights). He also explains how, for some endeavors, blockchain might change the look of business organizations. Specifically, Jacob covers legal issues implicated by NFT (non fungible token) ownership and participation in a DAO (distributed autonomous organizations). Jacob also fills us in about interesting legal questions arising in the metaverse.

Krystal Kovac, Head of Legal & Compliance at Oncore, visits Technically Legal to share her story about building a legal department from the ground up. Like many, Krystal decided to become a lawyer without a good understanding of all that entails. Also, like many, she didn’t like her first legal job that much, and when it ended, she went to Canada and became ski instructor. She also got another legal job in Canada that she actually liked, but her Visa ran out and she headed back home to Queensland. When Krystal got back to Australia, she did a stint as a temporary attorney working for a tech company but ended up at Oncore for what was supposed to be a temporary gig helping the company clean up their contracting process. Well…it turned out Krystal did such a good job, they asked her to be be general counsel and build out their legal and compliance functions. Krystal explains that to build a legal department from the ground up, you need to first map out operational processes that touch legal. She says lawyers should also get out and talk to people to not only learn more about the company, but to actually build relationships. Krystal also is a big proponent of meeting clients where they are, communicating with them via methods they already use and using tech that is accessible.

Aaron Powers, CEO and co-founder of Hunit, talks SLCs or, Smart Legal Contracts, that are natural language contracts but utilize blockchain technology to record certain aspects of contractual relationships. Hunit enables users to create text based contracts in Microsoft Word, but tie the document to a blockchain creating an immutable record of certain contract components, like successful performance and the fact that a contract even exists between two parties. Aaron is an entrepreneur first and foremost and started his career in wireless communication technology in the early 2000s, but ultimately joined the founding team of a biostimulant company. After almost a decade in the biostimulant industry, in 2018, Aaron jumped over to legal tech and founded Hunit.

Do you want to spend less time dealing with email? Are you interested in automating repetitive work tasks? Cyndi Wheeler and Mark Pike offer some tips on how to do just that in this episode from 2020. Cyndi and Mark are both in-house lawyers at collaboration software company Slack. Cyndi and Mark discuss how they moved almost all of their communications with outside counsel away from email and into Slack channels and how that has increased the productivity and the effectiveness of their legal team. They also explain that Slack is more than just a communication hub, but has many other features including workflows and bots that the Slack legal department uses to automate common legal tasks. They use Slack workflows to field questions, review documents and contracts for legal issues and help sales close deals.  Finally, the two lawyers offer tips about how to organize and prioritize Slack channels and messages to stay sane and not become overwhelmed by the barrage of electronic communications we all get everyday. This episode originally aired on June 23, 2020.

Victor Bornstein tells us how Justpoint, the company he co-founded and now heads, is taking advantage of changes to Rules of Professional Conduct to build artificial intelligence that matches personal injury clients to the best attorney for their case. Specifically, the company is taking advantage of changes to Rule 5.4 in Arizona that now permits people other than lawyers to have an ownership stake in law firms and legal services companies. Justpoint lets potential clients leverage AI to find the right attorney for their claim. The company uses a combination of human intake by medical professionals and predictive analytics to identify the right attorney for the job. Before launching Justpoint, Victor and his co-founder had nothing to do with the legal industry. Victor has a PhD in biomedical sciences with an emphasis in immunology and worked in medical, his co-founder worked at Google before launching Justpoint. The pair started the company in 2019 and recently closed a $6.9 million fundraising round.

Right out of college with a computer science degree in hand, a buddy helped Andy Wilson (now CEO of SaaS based e-discovery software company Logikcull) get a job at a printing company because Andy’s friend said there was a technology component to the job.  It was the early 2000s and what the printing company was actually doing was printing out email messages so they could be used in a legal matter. The absurdity of printing out something that is inherently digital was not lost on Andy. So, after a couple of years at the printing company, he and a college classmate that also happened to work there launched Logik Systems. At Logik Systems, Andy and his co-founder created software that processed email to make it easier to transfer and review electronically rather than printing them out. Logik Systems was doing great until the economy crashed around 2008. But, it was during this downturn that Andy and his co-founder saw the future of e-discovery software and that future was the cloud. That is when the duo launched Logikcull. It took 4 plus years to develop the software, but they persevered and in 2013 Logikcull went live. Logikcull is an eDiscovery solution that provides user friendly legal software for processing, reviewing, and producing data. The company just celebrated it’s 10th birthday and it continues its upward trajectory toward its goal of democratizing electronic discovery.

“You’re marrying a firefighter. That’s all I’ll ever be.  I’m never going to finish college.”  That’s what Bill Henderson told his soon to be wife many years ago, but thankfully that was not true. Fast forward to today and Bill is now Professor William Henderson, the Stephen F. Burns Chair on the Legal Profession at Indiana University and he has been a law professor for nearly 20 years. Professor Henderson is also the moving force behind Legal Evolution, an online publication focusing on changes in the legal industry with the stated mission of providing lawyers, legal educators, and allied professionals with high-quality information to solve very difficult industry-specific problems. It was almost true that Professor Henderson did not finish college. He dropped out and got a job as a firefighter. But… it was only because he was a firefighter that he ended up going to law school. In the early 90s, during firefighter union negotiations, Bill’s union rep asked him to tag along and take notes. Foreshadowing his career as a professor, not only did Bill take notes, he also did in depth research into prior collective bargaining agreements and into state law so the union team could strike a better bargain. In the end, Bill moved on from note taker to union vice president and eventually took over as lead negotiator. Because of all of this, Bill decided to go to law school at the University of Chicago and became a legal professor. Since entering academia, Bill has done a ton of research and writing on the state of legal services in general, but more specifically, how legal innovation can improve it. In a nutshell, Bill’s research has determined that more and more legal work is focused on commercial law at the expense of “PeopleLaw” –a term he uses to describe legal work done on behalf of individuals (like criminal law, domestic relations law and the like). 50 years ago, legal work was pretty much split 50/50 between PeopleLaw and commercial law. Now that division is 75/25 in favor of commercial law which is causing an access to justice issue.  There is a great need for legal services related to PeopleLaw, but it is too expensive or just doesn’t exist. However, Professor Henderson thinks there are a few things the legal community can do to address this problem: Better use of project management techniques, use of allied professionals, and leveraging legal technology.

SCENE: Afternoon. Early 2000s. Because the first internet bubble is popping, two tech lawyers find themselves with not much to do so they go to a matinee showing of Black Hawk Down. Those two attorneys are James Fisher and Kevin Broyles. That particular afternoon was not the only slow one for them.  Work for them had dried up and colleagues at their law firm were getting laid off left and right. Although they had opportunities to go to different firms, they started looking around at how their current firm was set up and knew there was a better way of doing things. That is when the seeds were sown for Fisher Broyles. A firm that started with five lawyers and would ultimately join the ranks of the AmLaw 200. From the get-go, James and Kevin concluded law firms had a lot of overhead they probably didn’t need which in turn, required them to charge high rates. Not the least of which they figured, was paying rent. They also understood that while support is important, lawyers are hired for what they know, and not based upon how many support staff a firm has. As a result, they decided Fisher Broyles would be a fully remote, distributed law firm that would run lean and mean. Their business model would permit lawyers to pocket most of their hourly rate rather than it going to pay rent and other office expenses. Fast forward to 2021, Fisher Broyles has almost 300 attorneys and had one of their best years ever bringing in $136 million in revenue.  And they did it by leveraging technology and doing remote work before it was even a thing for most other firms.