New Survey Paints Picture of Innovation and Technology at Law Firms
May 27, 2018

When firms were asked whether they had specifically tasked anyone with responsibility for innovation, 29.7 percent answered yes. Large law firms of 500 or more lawyers were more than twice as likely to have such a person, with 55.9 percent  answering yes. Whether firms have tasked anyone with innovation, by size. Firms were also asked about which technologies had the greatest impact on efficiency. The top five technologies that firms said had either a moderate or high impact on efficiency...

Rethinking the Law of Legal Negotiation: Confidentiality Under Federal Rule of Evidence 408 and Related State Laws
May 18, 2018

Federal Rule of Evidence 408 and related state laws are among the most important rules to implement the national policy favoring the settlement of legal disputes. These rules bar the introduction of statements made during negotiations leading to the resolution of legal disputes. However, comprehensive analysis of the rule’s text, doctrinal history, and modern context demonstrates that the rule no longer meets its noble goals. Rather, the rule has evolved textually from a remarkably narrow and complex...

AI-Powered Contract Review Platform LawGeex Raises $12 Million in New Funding
May 12, 2018

LawGeex, a company whose product uses artificial intelligence to help in-house legal teams automate the review and approval of everyday contracts, is today announcing the closing of a $12 million Series B funding round led by venture capital fund Aleph. This investment brings the total funding for LawGeex to $21.5 million. In March 2017, LawGeex raised $7 million. Previous investors, including Lool Ventures, also participated in this round.     This news follows several recent...

Managing a Law Practice in the Age of Intelligent Machines
May 6, 2018

Managing a Law Practice in the Age of Intelligent Machines represents my attempt to speak to those lawyers who are perplexed by the number of things they are reading and hearing about law office automation and artificial intelligence replacing lawyers. That can happen and I cite one example where it has happened already. But many, hopefully most, lawyers will be using automation and AI to better serve their clients. I hoped to provide a general framework of when automation makes sense and how the law evolves...

Moneyball for Lawyers: Changing the Game with Analytics
May 6, 2018

The use of analytics has permeated into various industries, from baseball to banking, but could it be invaluable to lawyers...

Justia Adds Lawyer Ratings and Reviews To Its Lawyer Lawyer Directory
May 5, 2018

The legal research and information site Justia this week added peer-based lawyer ratings and reviews as part of the Justia Lawyer Directory. The new Justia Lawyer Rating and Reviews is based solely on attorney-to-attorney reviews and is intended to provide clients with valuable insights from peers and colleagues personally familiar with the lawyers’ work, Justia says. Ratings are displayed as a badge on attorney profiles in the directory. Attorneys may also display the badge on their websites...

The Person Who Most Disrupted Law This Decade
May 5, 2018

If Avvo had done nothing more than introduce lawyer ratings to consumers, it would have been disruptive. But it did a lot more. I am going to go out on a limb and put forth this proposition: No one individual has been more directly responsible for disrupting the legal industry over the past decade than Mark Britton. As he exits as CEO of Avvo, he leaves the legal world a different place than it was when he founded the company in 2007. His idea — that lawyers should be rated on a scale of one to 10 to help...

Study Finds Texas Lawyers Satisfied With Careers
May 4, 2018

A new survey study by Milan Markovic and Gabriel Plicket finds that Texas lawyers generally remain fairly satisfied after...

Lawyer Is America’s Loneliest Profesion
April 29, 2018

In a breakdown of loneliness and social support rates by profession, legal practice was the loneliest kind of work, followed by engineering and science. This is perhaps not surprising, given the known high prevalence of depression among lawyers. At the other end of the spectrum were occupations involving high degrees of social interaction: social work, marketing, and sales. ... The solitude of the ivory tower seems to be a real phenomenon, as well. Graduate degree holders in our sample reported...

Keet, Heavin, & Sparrow on the Psychological Cost of Civil Litigation
April 25, 2018

Michaela Keet, Heather D. Heavin and Shawna Sparrow (University of Saskatchewan College of Law, University of Saskatchewan...