Working with outside counsel is like getting thrown in a pit of rattlesnakes and hoping one won’t bite you. Anonymous Axiom, the 14,000-person alternative legal service provider, launched in 2000, together with Wakefield Research, recently conducted and published a Study of U.S. in-house counsel. They conducted a 15-minute Survey online in January and February of this year. Some 300 general counsels of small, mid-size, and large businesses responded. The Significance of the Findings The findings and recommendations are significant and should sound alarm bells for law firms representing busine ..read more

A loophole in Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service terms of use could expose privileged information to third-party review. Lawyers need to undertake reasonable diligent vetting of vendors and their terms. Reliance on vendor assurances alone is not enough. But what is? Last week, I ran across a good piece of reporting by Cassandre Coyer and Isha Marathe in law.com. The report highlighted an important issue. Legal tech vendors have aggressively marketed Gen AI products over the last 18 months. To a vendor, they all assure potential customers that the inquiries and responses are protected, that ..read more

The lack of lawyers in rural areas has attracted much attention lately. Rural pockets with few or no lawyers living there, the so-called legal deserts, are on the upswing. According to some surveys, 14% of the population lives in rural areas, but only 2% of lawyers do. A 2020 ABA study found that 40% of all counties in the US have fewer than one lawyer for every 1000 residents. Fifty-two counties have no lawyers, and another 182 have only one or two. There are multiple reasons for the dearth of rural lawyers. Many young lawyers simply want to live in more urban areas. They value the quality o ..read more

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil. Walter Lippmann As most of you know, I frequently attend conferences–both legal tech related and those related to technology in general, like CES. I do this because I am interested in the field and because I like to think what I write as a former practicing lawyer is valuable. The latter idea, of course, carries the responsibility to be candid and to “call em as I see em”. I have tried to do that since I started blogging some seven years ago. Most of the time, the conference organizers provide media c ..read more

We best be careful, or we will find ourselves in a closet talking to ourselves too much. Once upon a time, I had a good client who was fond of saying, “We best be careful, or we will find ourselves in a closet talking to ourselves too much.” Meaning, of course, that you get into trouble if you don’t get diverse viewpoints from people who perhaps see the problem and the world differently than you. My client’s wisdom was recently brought home to me in connection with the Gen AI hoopla. The last two months have been a whirlwind of conferences for me. During that time, I attended three technology ..read more

“If you want to show up and be seen in your life, you’re going to get your ass kicked.” Brene Brown I recently finished a book by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn entitled Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric that Matters. The book talks a lot about ideas and their power. The authors go to great lengths to explore ways to nurture ideas, how to work in teams to enhance ideas, and how to turn ideas into reality. They also talk about how organizations and leaders can act to nurture ideas instead of quashing them and the creativity that creates them. It’s that creativity that is essential to a v ..read more

On our recent LegalTech Week Journalists Roundtable, we went into a discussion about the increased emphasis of late on so-called midsize law firms. In particular, we talked about their needs when it comes to things like technology. Certainly, more attention has recently been paid to this group of law firms. Clio provided a Survey entitled Legal Trends for Midsize Law Firms that focused on midsized law firms. Clio recently announced it planned to aggressively market to midsize firms in the future. An outfit called Actionstep recently released its 2024 US Midsize Law Firm Priorities Report. Tho ..read more

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Two recent studies, one by LexisNexis and one by LawPay-MyCase, looked at the use of AI and Gen AI at two ends of the legal market. The LexisNexis study, entitled 2024 Investing in Legal Innovation Survey, looked at very large law firms and businesses. LexisNexis tal ..read more

I just got back from LegalWeek 2024 in New York City. LegalWeek is the annual legal tech conference put on by ALM and directed at big law firms and clients. There were lots of exhibitors, lots of parties, and fancy dinners. It’s glitzy and sales and marketing oriented. This year, as expected, the educational sessions, discussions, and marketing were dominated by generative AI. There were ample predictions about how it will transform the legal profession. The standard refrain was that Gen AI will enable lawyers to spend more time on high level thinking. Gen AI, like ordinary AI, needs to be f ..read more

Back in the 1970s, there was a television commercial featuring jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald with a wine glass, a recording studio, and a recordable audio cassette made by a company called Memorex. The pitch was that the audio recording of Ella’s voice could break the wine glass, just like her live voice. The tagline was, “Is it live or Memorex?” Courts and the Deep Fake Problem Courts may soon be facing a similar question when it comes to audio evidence, photos, videos, and various other forms of digital evidence: is it real, or is it fake? Indeed, in the midst of the excitement about General ..read more