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Author Contribution

Lawtomatic Newsletter Issue, #142

By Gabe Teninbaum


My name is Gabe Teninbaum (on Twitter at @GTeninbaum).  I'm a professor, as well as the Assistant Dean for Innovation, Strategic Initiatives, & Distance Education, at Suffolk Law in Boston. I'm also a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project My work focuses on legal innovation, technology, and the changing business of law. Every day, I digest tons of content on these topics. The goal of this newsletter is to curate the most interesting, valuable, and thought-provoking of these ideas and share them with you. 


If you like reading it, please subscribe. You're also invited to forward this to others who you think would benefit. Likewise, please email me with feedback, ideas, and tips so I can deliver what's most valuable to you.

 

The Appetizer: Sponsors

  • SpacedRepetition.com is a tool to help law students & bar preppers learn more using cutting-edge science. Called the single most effective technique to learn by the American Psychological Association. More than 17,000 users spread across every law school in the U.S.​

The Main Course: 5 Things That Made Me Think This Week​

  • Ironclad Nets $150m in Additional Funding: I can't go 30 seconds without reading something about all the cool things happening at Ironclad nowadays. The fact that this week they brought in an additional $150m in funding (on a $3.2 BILLION) valuation almost feels ho-hum. It also says something about the growth of legal tech. Only 5 years ago, $150m in investment would've been nearly double the total VC investment in all of legal tech for the entire year (in 2017, all of legal tech netted about $82m in funding). Remarkable.

  • Legal Tech Talent/Salary War: Richard Tromans had a fascinating piece on the Artificial Lawyer blog explored rising salaries for legal tech workers, and discovering that wages are going through the roof. This creates all sorts of interesting dynamics: while the wages might not yet compete with BigLaw partner roles, they're nothing to sniff at. And with added mobility, flexibility, and benefits (like more permissive takes on work from home), it may mean more legal talent lands in legal tech. It also can mean there are challenges ahead: higher wages means a faster burn rate for funding, and more pressure to increase prices on consumers. Definitely a worthwhile analysis to read through.

  • Startup Alley Finalists Named for ABA Techshow: Fifteen companies will be selected to face off in a live pitch competition that will be the opening event of this year’s ABA Techshow, as well as to exhibit in a special area of the exhibit hall. You can learn about them (and vote) through the Law Sites Blog page which reported this information. I like to watch the short demo videos and get a sense for what interesting ideas are bubbling up.

  • SKILLS 2022 Recap: Last week, 400 legal knowledge management professionals came together for the Strategic Knowledge & Innovation Legal Leaders Summit (SKILLS) conference. Greg Lambert, of 3 Geeks and a Blog, wrote a summary of the talks and included links so that you can watch the talks, too. My favorite was a summary of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Corporate Legal Tech. All are worth a review, though!

  • Elevate OK'ed by Arizona: Elevate is now the first U.S. company not owned by a lawyer to have an "integrated" law firm, with thanks to the State of Arizona, which granted them a license as part of their experiment with liberalized policies toward "alternative business structures" for law firms. This overrides the historical ban on such activities because of antiquated (IMO, at least!) ethical rules that bar "nonlawyers" from holding economic interest in law firms or sharing fees with lawyers. Perhaps it's not the threat traditionalists would imagine. Elevate's leadership has pointed out that because the nature of their work - like handling large volumes of subpoenas, litigation alongside its own e-discovery group, compliance and privacy work - they are not in competition with traditional firms which have legal advice at their core.

  • The Revenge of Analog: this book by David Sax is one of my favorite non-fiction books in the past few years. The premise is that, at the same moment society is adopting ever-increasing amounts of cutting-edge digital technology, there's a resurgence in the popularity of all things analog. Examples including exploding popularity of vinyl records, Moleskine notebooks, board games, and more. It's not just products, either...it's ideas. Ideas about work, vacation, shopping, and more. The book is entertaining and enlightening at the same time.

It's free, but it's not cheap

  • The second semester has started, so I'll be back, providing weekly updates at the intersection of law, innovation, tech, and entrepreneurship. Please feel free to share this newsletter with your students, colleagues, friends (or enemies). It's free to subscribe for anyone who would like it delivered directly into their inbox on a weekly basis. If you have ideas, feedback, thoughts, want to advertise, or otherwise want to connect, feel free to drop me a note!

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