One of the best things about the legal industry is that there are multiple pathways to success. We are all trained issue spotters, and our guest on this episode identified an issue and founded a new company to fix that issue. Brian Powers is the CEO and co-founder of PactSafe, a high-velocity contract acceptance platform used by such major companies like Angie's List, UpWork, BMC, TIVO, and others to handle large volumes of clickthrough agreements. We talk with Brian about what motivated him to take on this challenge, and how he sought out to change the way businesses approach these types of contacts, and bring efficiency to the market place, and the legal industry through technology and process improvements. Brian is just one more example of those in the legal field who has found an alternative path through identifying inefficiencies, and finding ways to correct them.
Hat tip to Kristin Hodgins for her tweet this week when she saw that someone said that if law firms are going to us AI, we need ways to collect structured data. Hodgins tweet reply was spot on when she said “Guess who are experts at structured data? Librarians. Google didn’t destroy us; it help us by reducing low-value work like rote retrieval from our duties & allowed us to focus on high-order skills. AI will do the same.” Well said!
Information Inspirations:
We're doing AI Wrong
Zach Warren interviewed Brad Blickstein in a law.com article this week about how law firms are looking at AI the wrong way. When it comes to AI and law firms, Blickstein says that “[AI has] become a top-down thing: What are we doing about AI? It’s like asking, what are we doing about databases? It’s a crazy question. The question should be, what problems do we have, how do we solve them, and is AI or some semblance of AI a potential solution for that?” Brad's company, Blickstein Group, is producing a Legal AI Efficacy report that is due out this summer.
We're Communicating Wrong
This will come as a surprise to no one, but there can often be communications issues between executives and technologists. In a Harvard Business Review article, a scenario is set up between executives and data scientists, and we are walked through some examples on how to improve the communications between the two personalities. The article suggests you have a variety of projects and you build a team based on a variety of skill sets (and goes on to list them-data wrangling, data analysis, project management, subject expertise, storytelling, design)- so that the team can focus on what they do well but you have all the skills needed for a strong data science team. (We have a little fun with the data wrangling job.)
We're Podcasting Wrong
Check out Jared Corriea's latest episode of the Legal Toolkit podcast. Former law librarian, and podcast enthusiast, Tim Baran, has a number of suggestions for those of you who might be considering starting your own podcast. It turns out that Marlene and Greg are violating a few of the suggestions.
more...
Adam Pascarella's "Reversed in Part" - 15 Stories of Non-Traditional Careers After Law School
Phil Flora on What Law Firms are doing in the Battle for Talent
Anne Klinefelter on The Right to Be Forgotten in the Age of Internet Surveillance Capitalism
M.C. Sungaila and The Portia Project Podcast
Live From New York... It's LegalWeek!
Sarah Sutherland on How Data and the Law Interact
InnoLaw's Lucy Bassli on the Sexiness of Contracts
Sang Lee: Talent Management That Enables People to Be True to Themselves
All Information… All Inspirations
Ama Romaine and Wayne Harris on The Initiative: Advancing the Blue and Black Partnership
Maker5's Sanjay Kamlani on the Who, What, and How of Legal Innovation
Factor's Ed Sohn and Michael Callier on Leading through New Law
Axiom's David Pierce on Talent Recruitment and Flexible Working-Models Amid Shifting Industry Expectations
Gabe Teninbaum on Productizing Legal Work / Lindsie Rank on Can I Publish This?
Litera's Ashley Miller on Data and the Single Source of Truth
Haley Moss on How Embracing Neurodiversity in the Legal Profession Makes Us All Better
Cultivating and Retaining the Next Generation of Legal Talent
Alex Babin - Getting the Machines to Work the Way You Work
Matthew Coatney - The Human Cloud: The World of Projects and Freelancers
Results of the Bloomberg Law DEI Framework with Molly Huie
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