Dr. Heidi Gardner of the Harvard Business and Law Schools joins the podcast to talk about about latest book Smarter Collaboration and the importance of collaboration in legal teams and in all organizations generally. Smarter Collaboration is Dr. Gardner’s second book and a follow up to Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos. Both books are helpful to those in law because much of Dr. Gardner’s research is based on the many years she studied collabora...
May 11, 2023•48 min
A conversation with former Big-Law lawyer turned tech entrepreneur, Dan Rabinowitz. After stints with law firms, the Department of Justice and time as general counsel, Dan tells us how all of that led to the founding of Pre/Dicta. Pre/Dicta is an app that uses data science to tackle judicial analytics, but unlike other similar software, Pre/Dicta does not just look at a judge’s opinions and track record, but also looks at other factors that influence court opinions. The app looks into data like ...
Apr 27, 2023•36 min
In this episode, lawyers Hailey Lennon and Preston Byrne discuss the current state of crypto regulation in the US and explain why being “crypto literate” will benefit lawyers. Hailey and Preston practice with Brown Rudnick’s Digital Commerce group. Hailey counsels fintech and crypto companies on regulatory requirements and Preston advises technology companies on corporate and commercial law issues. Both Hailey and Preston have deep crypto experience from both private practice and also as in-hous...
Apr 13, 2023•42 min
In this episode, Felipe Alexandre, a founding principal of AG Immigration, talks about his experience growing up as an immigrant in South Florida, his journey into law, and his passion for helping newcomers to America. He also discusses his firm’s services, including business-related visas, humanitarian work, and asylum. In addition, Alexandre talks about his firm’s move to the metaverse and the benefits of using VR consultations with clients.
Mar 30, 2023•22 min
Since she was a kid, Dorna Moini, the CEO of legal document automation company Gavel, knew she wanted to be a lawyer–specifically a human rights lawyer. So, right after she received an accounting degree from NYU she headed to law school and even took an internship with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. After talking to a trusted professor, she decided that before pursuing human rights law, it might be best to get other types of legal experience and she ended up wo...
Mar 16, 2023•32 min
We talk to Nicole Clark, Co-Founder of Trellis, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform. Like many entrepreneurs before her, Nicole came up with the idea for Trellis to “scratch her own itch”. She was burning the midnight oil on a pleading she needed to get on file for a client (prior to launching Trellis, she was a litigator). She was unfamiliar with the judge that would hear the motion so, that night, she sent an email to colleagues at her firm to find out if any of them had ...
Mar 02, 2023•39 min•Ep. 58
Nathan Walter, founder of Briefpoint, joins Technically Legal to explain how his company is using technology and artificial intelligence to automate routine legal drafting tasks. A good portion of lawyers’ time and those helping them is copying or re-using prior work. This is especially true in litigation and especially in discovery. Thankfully more and more apps have been developed that help automate the creation of legal documents. Historically, these programs have been form based and users po...
Feb 16, 2023•49 min
Zach Abramowitz makes a repeat appearance on Technically Legal to talk generative AI (like OpenAI) and its impact on legal technology adoption. Zach is a keen observer of legal tech and its trends. If you want to keep tabs on up and coming tech geared for legal, Zach is a good person to follow. He started is career at a large New York law firm where he worked on mergers and acquisitions. From there he launched his own tech company called Reply All and his latest venture, Killer Whale Strategies,...
Feb 02, 2023•46 min
IP lawyer Len Hickey joins the show to discuss Litigaze, the legal tech start up he founded that helps legal teams evaluate litigation risk, make smarter settlement decisions, figure out which claims to pursue and budget for litigation. Len has worked both in-house and at law firms. Over the course of his practice, to answer questions posed by his clients about the value of their cases, he developed sophisticated spreadsheets to analyze his clients’ odds and determine what expected outcomes migh...
Jan 19, 2023•37 min
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 Jo...
Jan 05, 2023•30 min
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 to...
Dec 15, 2022•36 min
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 th...
Dec 01, 2022•45 min
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...
Nov 10, 2022•38 min•Ep. 55
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 oft...
Oct 27, 2022•43 min
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) la...
Oct 13, 2022•33 min
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 ...
Sep 29, 2022•33 min
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 dominate...
Sep 01, 2022•29 min
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 wi...
Aug 18, 2022•32 min•Ep. 45
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 interes...
Aug 04, 2022•28 min
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 al...
Jul 21, 2022•42 min
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 so...
Jul 07, 2022•48 min
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 ...
Jun 23, 2022•46 min
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 Queen...
Jun 09, 2022•27 min
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 ...
May 26, 2022•35 min
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 t...
May 12, 2022•35 min
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 t...
Apr 28, 2022•32 min
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 ...
Apr 14, 2022•40 min
“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 ...
Mar 31, 2022•40 min
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 cur...
Mar 17, 2022•31 min
Thibault Schrepel joins the podcast to talk blockchain, antitrust and competition law. He is a professor at the Free University in Amsterdam and on the faculty of the Codex Center at Stanford University. At Stanford he is involved in the Computational Antitrust Project which works to foster the automation of antitrust procedures and the improvement of antitrust analysis. Thibault knew he wanted to pursue a career in antitrust on the very first day of his very first antitrust class during law sch...
Mar 03, 2022•43 min
