ABA Journal: Legal Rebels

The license plates on Jerome Goldman’s Subaru Legacy reads “OYEZ,” in honor of his U.S. Supreme Court-focused multimedia archive. Now at age 71, Goldman, named a Legal Rebels Trailblazer by the ABA Journal, says he has some more “ephemera” that he hopes will get on the site, which is moving from Chicago-Kent College of Law to Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute. “This means passing al...

Stanford Law School Professor Deborah Rhode is the enemy of complacency. This Legal Rebels Trailblazer is one of the most cited scholars in legal ethics, though she wears many more hats. She has carved out specialties in discrimination (ranging from race and gender to the unfair advantages that flow to physical beauty, often probing their intersection with legal ethics) and in criticism of legal e...

"Working with tech startups, I realized that there is this vast unmet need for affordable legal services," lawyer Charley Moore says. "There's a real need for technology to make it more efficient for lawyers to be able to answer simple questions online and to be able to represent small businesses, individuals, startups and families at fraction of traditional cost."  Moore decided to try to fill th...

Lawyers often think technology should always work. That's aspirational, says Sharon Nelson, president of the cybersecurity, information technology and digital forensics firm Sensei Enterprises Inc. "People can screw up, but technology fails too," says Nelson. "You really need to recover from what the problem is, as opposed to pointing fingers and being angry." Nelson and John W. Simek, her busines...

"We didn't start out to be disruptive," says John Suh, LegalZoom's chief executive officer. "We were set up to fix a problem. The legal system was broken and too many people were frozen out of it." For Suh, the main goal of LegalZoom continues to be providing access to the legal system for millions of Americans who can't afford an attorney and do not qualify for free legal services. "So much of ou...

Ernie Svenson-a.k.a. well-known blogger Ernie the Attorney-was an early evangelist for what he calls The Paperless Chase. The basic premise: "Anything you can do with paper, you can do more with PDF. Way more."  Now he spends a lot of time teaching, training and speaking, all aimed at enabling small-firm and solo lawyers with the ability "to save money, make money and outmatch bigger firm adversar...

Lawyer and longtime journalist Monica Bay didn't let sexism or a technology-averse legal establishment keep her from breaking new ground.    "The baby boomer lawyers were so entrenched with the idea that 'only the girls touch anything with a keyboard' that they absolutely refused to do anything involving tech," Bay recalls. "They thought it was beneath them."   Now, Bay says, the profession has st...