Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

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.

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.