The Geek In Review

Matthew Coatney , CIO at Thompson Hine, and author of The Human Cloud sits down and talks about what he sees as the transformation of how we work. According to Coatney, freelancing and project-based work (The Human Cloud) combined with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (The Machine Cloud) will soon disrupt the way we deliver work. Law firms will not be exempt from this disruption. Matte...

Back in May ( ep. 117 ), we had Bloomberg Law's Molly Huie on the show to talk about the Bloomberg Law DEI Framework survey she and her team created and were pushing law firms to contribute. So we close the loop on this conversation by asking Molly to come back and talk about the results of the survey. There were over 30 firms who participated in the survey with 28 of those firms making "the cut"...

Richmond Law School professors Jessica Erickson and Josh Kubicki join us to discuss how they are teaching law students not only the critical skills to "think like a lawyer" but also the understanding that they are entering the world of business. Whether that is in BigLaw, non-profit, in-house, public interest, or solo practice, they need to have a baseline of business acumen to practice and thrive...

As we move toward the end of the year, or as in Texas, the end of a lawyer's birthday month, there becomes a mad scramble for completing Continuing Legal Education (CLE) courses. Has CLE become more about checking the box than about enhancing/maintaining a lawyer's skill? Why is it that CLE credits are based on time, rather than knowledge? Is there a better way? Our guests this week certainly thin...

You have to appreciate a book that discusses Legal Design and puts design concepts into action by working with a fellow designer on the layout and functionality of the book itself. The results of The Legal Design Book: Doing Law in the 21st Century is both a great read for the content and the physical interaction with the book. Astrid Kohlmeier and Meera Klemola , Lawyers and Legal Designers, join...

We bring in Brad Blickstein and Beatrice Seravello , Co-Heads, NewLaw Practice Group at Baretz+Brunelle to discuss the recently released B+B survey, “If You Build It, Will They Come?” A Research Report on the Internal Adoption of Innovation by AmLaw 100/200 and Global 100 Law Firms. This free report breaks down the adoption of innovation and the sliding scale (1-5) in where the adoption process re...

Ironclad 's Chief Community Officer, Mary O'Carroll , has spent the past two decades bringing business acumen to the legal industry. In an industry run by lawyers, most of whom had little to no business training, Mary points out that it is logical that legal ops teams are needed to be the right-hand people in helping lawyers in the business process. Her experience with Orrick, Google, CLOC, and no...

While technology is part of innovation, technology alone is not innovation. We brought in three guests this week to talk about what they are doing to innovate in the area of process improvement and give us some examples of some of the projects they are working on. Tiffany O'Neil is the Director of Knowledge Management & Technology Innovation at Procopio in San Diego. Alana Carson is the Client...

Listeners know that we love asking our guests to pull out their crystal ball and tell us about the future. Joseph Raczynski is a futurist who works with Thomson Reuters, so he came prepared with a crystal ball ready to answer our questions on what the future has in store for the legal industry. We even get into the “red pill”, “blue pill” Matrix when it comes to how AI and emerging tech can go for...

Our good friend April Brousseau joins us to discuss her role as Director of Research and Development at Clifford Chance's R&D Hub . The fact that a law firm has a dedicated R&D group shows how innovation cannot simply be a part-time task that someone at the firm takes on. April's diverse background as a law librarian, lawyer, and knowledge management leader paved the path to her current ro...

In an industry focused on revenue and profit. Where does something like customer experience stand in the priorities of legal providers? Leigh Vickery, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Level Legal, as well as CEO and founder of Queso Mama, says that we need to look at the corporate and legal industry world differently. Instead of putting shareholders and partners first, they need to fall mu...

Suffolk Law Professor Shailini George joins us to talk about her new book, The Law Student's Guide to Doing Well and Being Well . Professor George talks about the need for law students to take better care of their mental and physical health in order for them to not only do well in law school but to be better lawyers once they enter the profession. Whether it is stopping task switching, setting bou...

Dentons Nextlaw Labs ' Maya Markovich understands that rational lawyers would observe market dynamics and client pressures to weigh the costs and benefits of adapting their behaviors to survive change, stay employed, and make their work more fulfilling. But, people don't always make rational decisions. And, law firm's economic structure incentivizes lower efficiency as a method of obtaining higher...

When we all started working from home last March, we each did something to help us keep sane and stay engaged with our families, our friends, and our peers. Eugene Giudice found a unique way of doing just that with a daily note to all of the above. After more than a year of these daily inspirational emails, he put them into a book called Reflections During a Pandemic: Thoughts While Sheltering In...

Leading a professional association over the past year has been tough. It's like getting all of the work, and not getting any of the fun experiences of traveling to meet people around the world. For the American Association of Law Libraries' President Emily Florio and President-Elect Diane Rodriguez , they've made the most of the situation they found themselves in. (Hat tip to the past-President Mi...

As we make our way to the next version of the workforce in a post-pandemic world, we look back at a discussion of the Delta Model Competencies with Northwestern Law School's Alyson Carrel and Vanderbilt Law School's Cat Moon . This interview from November of 2019 is possibly more relevant today than it was when we initially recorded it. While we typically focus on the T-Shaped lawyer model of bein...

Summer Associates and the upcoming Fall Associates had a unique experience with their On-Campus Interviews (or OCI) over the past two years. Some of the recruits still have not actually met face to face, the members of their firm who hired them. We talk with Kerry Benn , Director of Series, Surveys & Data at Law360 about Law360 Pulse’s recent survey on this topic and see how the firms, the stu...

When Ropes & Gray launched their R&G Insights Lab consulting arm, one of their goals was to create a dynamic legal team with specialized expertise in analytics, behavioral science, and strategic consulting. Dr. Caitlin Handron completes the behavior science part of that mission, and she talks with us about how that expertise helps guide clients on issues of risk and compliance, DEI goals,...

As much as we complain about the PACER federal dockets, it pales in comparison to most of the state court docket systems when it comes to tracking and searching cases at the state and local levels. Josh Blandi , the co-founder, and CEO of Unicourt is leveraging APIs and normalizing court data across multiple state and local courts to help clean up the data and make searching and tracking better. J...

To modify the quote from Field of Dreams, “ask for it, and they will come” applies to this week’s show as we mentioned the Bloomberg Law Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Framework survey a few weeks ago and suggested that they come on the show and talk more about it. Molly Huie from Bloomberg Law is running the survey and joins us this week to talk about what the mission of the survey is, an...

This week's guest is Jennifer Leonard , Chief Innovation Officer at The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the Executive Director of the Future of the Profession Initiative (FPI ) at Penn Law. Jennifer joins us to talk about her work with FPI, the record $125M donation to Penn Law from the W.P. Carey Foundation, and the amazing Board of Advisors and people behind FPI. The multidiscipl...

Nicole Bradick , Founder and CEO of Theory and Principle , along with Ryan McClead , Principle at Sente Advisors , join us to talk about their collaborative product Map Engine. Map Engine is an easy-to-use, but powerful data visualization tool that allows law firms to quickly and easily turn their multi-jurisdictional data into beautiful, shareable maps. Instead of the common approach of placing d...

We hope that you like your Geek in Review with a little extra geekiness this week because we dive in with CaseText's Chief Product Officer Pablo Arredondo on their innovative search tool, WeSearch .  This completely unique method of indexing texts into what Arredondo calls a "sublimely complex, 768-dimensional vector space"  creates a truly beautiful, and useful method of searching not j...

After 25 years at Liberty Mutual, Bob Taylor began his new adventure in legal services when he joined Deloitte's Legal Business Services (LBS) as the Managing Director a few weeks ago. His in-house experience and desire to help create innovative and creative ways of providing legal business services make him a perfect fit to join his new colleagues, Valerie Dickerson , Legal Business Services Part...

Over the past year, many of us have said "I guess all law firms are virtual law firms now." While that may technically be true, there are many firms whose business model is based on being a virtual firm. Dan Packel from The American Lawyer gives us a primer on Distributed Law Firms like Fisher Broyles , Ramon , Taylor English and Duma , and Culhane Meadows and how they operate without a physical e...