Technology in the legal field is effervescent – new companies are popping up everywhere; but what technology can law students actually use while they are in school? What canstudents take back and apply in their day to day studies? Certain companies stood out with their technology because of the way they allowed students to integrate the technology in their studies. Further, these companies’ technology transitioned with the students, as they became full time attorneys.

Throughout the 2019 ABA TECHShow, there were some standout companies for law students and academics. Companies could be placed into two categories based on their functionality: Research or Practice and Skills. These companies were:

 Research

 

Casetext

▪Casetext’s innovative AI machine, ‘Cara,’ allows students to research in a way never done before. A student can upload their paper and get suggestions for research from AI – we are living. The best part, Casetext is free.

LexisNexis

▪Students learn about LexisNexis in law school, but many might not know all the skills training videos LexisNexis provides or the advanced research opportunities on their sight. Plus, gain enough points, and students can cash in for gift cards.

fastcase

▪Fastcase prides itself on being ‘smarter legal research’ and they should. Their latest update of Fastcase7 is not only user friendly, but their powerful sorting algorithms get reliable and tailored research results.

Practice & Skills

 

kinnami

▪Kinnami is a unique company that allows students to authenticate their work by ‘timestamping’ it through their independent sight and keycode. If a student wanted to protect against academic integrity, for example, they could timestamp their work using this software.

PayneGroup

▪PayneGroup offers multiple different software that students could use throughout their time in law school. They offer tools such as Metadata wiping – when sent in an email; this can be handy when being an intern. They also offer formatting for appellate briefs, including table of authorities. They offer student discounts.

Word Rake  

▪Word Rake edits lawyers and students’ writings. This software could help students in law review, legal research and writing, and essentially every other law class they are in. They need something to proof read their papers and this software is the perfect tool to do it.

 

As a law student, these are the companies that can easily fit into the educational system and enhance the students’ lives. These companies have embraced technology with students in mind.

 

Jordan Thomas, 3L

As one of the few law students at the ABA TECHSHOW, I am pretty pumped about the unique perspective I now take with me into my career. Not only does the University of Oklahoma provide amazing opportunities for us to become technologically literate lawyers but experiencing the TECHSHOW provided a new view of the legal profession and the path of my potential career, one in which I may just become a legal entrepreneur.

Not to dog on our profession, but we are, in large part, still beholden to many who do not quite want to step into the 21st century. You know who I mean. Those partners who really don’t believe technology can be effective in the legal world. To these people I say: 1. Can I have a job? And 2. Let’s walk hand in hand and use some of the amazing tools other lawyers have created for us.

While partaking in tech skills training and learning about the available legal technologies, was in-and-of itself an invaluable experience, meeting lawyers turned entrepreneurs was definitely my favorite part of the ABA TECHSHOW.

Entering Law school I had no idea who I wanted to be, much less what I wanted to do. The law seemed interesting and I wasn’t quite ready to “adult” yet. I will never forget sitting in law school orientation and learning about the “legal mind.” At the time I sat quietly, eating my lunch, and internally rolling my eyes. Okay we get it, you’re going to make us smart. But as I reached the half way mark of my law school career I really started feeling my legal mind take shape and even my spouse would get annoyed when we would argue because I would manage to reason my way out of whatever it is I was probably wrong about.

Now as a 3L, I am excited about venturing out and finding a career. They say the career path used to be that of a ladder, you take the first step and if you make a good faith effort at your job you will see the next steps appearing and you will make your way to the top. Now, many people say it’s like a jungle gym. You start at the bottom and you take many twists and turns and when you reach a resting point you look back at your winding path, not entirely sure how you ended up where you are.

I find this will be increasingly true for lawyers as we step forward into our careers equipped not only with a formal legal education but with our legal minds, discerning and understanding the world around us in a unique way. I saw this more than ever at the TECHSHOW when I spoke with “former” attorneys about their start-ups and small businesses.

So many lawyers have stepped out from their traditional roles and used their personal experiences to make the profession better through their innovative ideas. Companies like Headnote and Casetext are founded by lawyers who know the business and saw a need for change and growth. Using their legal minds combined with their entrepreneurial spirit, they created successful companies offering digital solutions for a profession that tends to struggle with stepping into the digital world.

Meeting people who have taken their legal minds and become movers and shakers, using business innovation to make our profession better, faster, and more successful, improving access to justice and many other aspects of the legal realm. For a profession that builds its life on helping others it’s pretty awesome to meet those who have set out their careers to help those in their profession better help others.

Maybe one day I will find myself lawyer-turned entrepreneur and I will stand on the TECHSHOW floor, talking to law students, teaching them how to use my amazing new product. If not, I hope I can build my career in a way that empowers those with the passion and the insight to create amazing legal tech, using their legal minds to advance and stimulate our profession, to move it in a direction of innovation.

 

Meg Reeder-Cramer, 3L

 

I say that I was the TECHSHOW attendee with the least experience or knowledge of technology in the legal world. As a non-traditional student, I have felt a little (maybe significantly) behind my peers because using technology is not as natural to me as it seems to be to my younger peers. Before I left, my emotions ranged from excited to terrified. I really did not know what I expected to learn and had some doubts that it would be as beneficial as others claimed. I was wrong.

 

EXPO HALL

My sleep-deprived and travel-worn self initially found the Expo Hall to be a tad (incredibly) overwhelming. I literally trailed along with a much more talkative and engaging peer who buzzed from booth to booth asking the best questions. I learned so much just about what is available as my work experiences have been in government where cutting edge technology is hard to find. In one booth, there was an app developed to encrypt text messages between attorneys and clients. Next, there was a virtual receptionist who would take your calls—even provide translation services. In another booth, I found an insurance service that employers can provide to employees to provide basic legal services (wills, DUI’s, but not murder—they made that clear making me think there could be a story there) that also happened to be looking for lawyers in many states to contract for those legal services (Anyone want to practice in Alaska?). The list could go on and on.

 

SESSIONS

TECHSHOW offered tracks for specific interests, but I bounced around to different sessions on different tracks. While they varied, I was generally impressed with the presenters and took away valuable information that will help me in my future practice. For example, you can run a law practice and spend less than $150.00 a year on paper! Overall, the greatest takeaway was that the traditional practice of law is going to change and lawyers who want to succeed must get on board. I found sessions about virtual firms, social media, and paperless offices to provide the most valuable information. It was exciting to think about the possibilities available to new lawyers.

 

NETWORKING

As an extreme introvert, I find small talk and meeting new people to be slightly terrifying so I always dread networking. Prior to TECHSHOW I was really struggling with trying to decide what type of lawyer I wanted to be. As a non-traditional student, I have professional experiences that make it very clear what I do not want to do with my time, but I also have commitments that create nuanced circumstances affecting my career decisions.  While those experiences, in my opinion, make me a better law student, I was conflicted as to what direction to take. While making the dreaded small talk at one of the receptions, I met a law professor who told me about some of his students who have pursued less traditional routes and established solo practices or virtual practices straight from law school. That conversation really gave me the courage to consider options that may not be traditional but would work well for my family. While I am not completely certain as to what direction I will take, I am in a better position to make informed decisions about my future. I also took that conversation and used it to select to sessions to attend. By the way, the food and drinks were great, too!

 

I definitely value my TECHSHOW experience and plan to us it to shape my career regardless of which path I ultimately choose. I wish all of my peers could have the opportunity to attend.

 

Marci Gracey, 2L

 

Many pre-law advisors assume their roles because of passing interest, arm-twisting, or forcible assignment. A mix of academic advisors, career counselors, faculty, staff, and community organizers who take on pre-law advising in addition to their other responsibilities, at best, they are enthusiastic participants who lack the time or resources necessary to devote to mastering and keeping current on issues related to legal career counseling, law school selection, and the complexity of the law school application process.

To support and improve pre-law advising, the University of Arkansas, Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law, in partnership with Hendrix College, hosted the inaugural Arkansas Pre-Law Advisor Meeting on November 16, 2018. The purpose of the meeting was to bring together pre-law advisors, career counselors, and faculty who advise students about attending law school and pursuing legal careers to discuss the legal needs of Arkansas, exchange best practices, and network.

The conference featured introductions of Dean Theresa Beiner of UA Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law and Dean Margaret Sova McCabe of University of Arkansas School of Law; a presentation of Arkansas’s legal needs from Jordan Rodgers, Program Director at Arkansas Access to Justice; an overview of LSAC pre-law services from Vivian Bowden, Senior Vice President for Schools and Institutions at the Law School Admission Council; and a collaborative discussion led by Amanda Moore, Assistant Director, Graduate & Professional School Connections at Hendrix College’s Office of Career Services and Matthew Kerns, Assistant Dean of Admissions, Scholarships, and Enrollment Data at the UA Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law.

Because Bowen is my old stomping ground, I can tell you that Bowen recruited many of its best students from Hendrix, a wonderful little liberal arts college (full disclosure: my daughter’s alma mater!). But Bowen didn’t stop its partnership at Hendrix. In recognition of the diversity of experience and support from their respective colleges and universities, the inaugural Arkansas Pre-Law Advisor Meeting brought representatives from a third of Arkansas’s 40 institutions of higher education together to learn and collaborate to find solutions to common pre-law advising problems.

The long-term goal of the meeting is to address Arkansas’s profound access to justice needs by supporting pre-law education in the state.[1] This is the first time a meeting has been held to focus specifically on supporting Arkansas’s pre-law programs.

The Arkansas Pre-Law Advisors Meeting is another step in Bowen’s support of pre-law programming in Arkansas. It is an extension of Bowen’s Admissions 360 Initiative which seeks to provide access to the resources that can help make pre-law candidates successful applicants regardless of whether they or their undergraduate school have the means to support their goals.

[1] So far this year, applications are up 20% in Arkansas, but, of course, it is hard to know the cause. The only other states that have seen such a large increase are Alabama, Montana and North Dakota.

Introduction

With the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), personalized medicine will finally be a reality with AI helping to tackle the vast amount of patient data collected and analyzed from sequencing a patient genome. AI will be used to identify patterns within the high volume of genetic data sets, allowing for the prediction of a patient’s probability of developing certain diseases or assisting physicians with designing potential therapies. AI will be used to help physicians predict how tumors will evolve following treatment, allowing physicians to change the course of treatment if the tumor develops a resistance. AI could be used as a predictive prognostic tool to develop links between DNA mutations and known outcomes. Early detection of certain troubling genes could allow physicians to use CRISPR for gene editing of the target sequence.

 

AI for the detection of Cancer

Studies done on the error rates of cancer diagnosis has found that as much as 1 in 4 suffers from inadequate physical examinations and incomplete diagnostic tests. AI will fix this! AI will soon be able to be linked to tools that are able to analyze compounds in the human breath, detecting illnesses like cancer. AI tools have been and will continue to be trained with data from patients with various types of cancers. Cancers produce a distinctive smell of volatile organic compounds. AI will one day be able to decipher through normal chemical compounds in breath samples to identify those being emitted by the tumor. AI detection tools will not be used to replace physicians, but rather it will function as a supportive tool to help confirm their conclusions. The AI tool will be able to take minutes to autonomously analyze a breath sample that traditionally takes physicians hours to analyze.

 

AI for predicting stable dose treatments

In many diseases like cancer, there is a very narrow window in which a therapeutic agent will prove to be effective. Insufficient dosing or targeting is often associated with higher rates of toxicities or metastasis.  Therefore, there is an increasing need to develop strategies for determining appropriate doses and dosing windows. There are many factors that affect the pharmacokinetics of detecting an appropriate dose or dosing window including ethnicity, age, gender, concomitant medication, and weight. AI could be used to investigate the clinical and genetic factors significantly associated with the appropriate dosing and timing.

 

Empowering, the patient

 AI in combination with blockchain and the Internet of Things will help patients to play a more active role in their health. Patients will soon have their records stored on a single platform for all of their doctors to access when diagnosing and prescribing medication. Patients will soon be able to leverage IoT tools to help monitor their glucose levels and heart rates, allowing for patients to respond to potential issues earlier. By having the power in their fingertips, patients can obtain reliable second and third opinions by granting access to all of their medical records in Realtime.

 

 

Conclusion

              There is a fear that AI will soon take over the world, displacing humans in the market place. This fear is becoming warranted with the emergence of self-driving cars, shopping cart recommendations, and manufacturing robots. It is further supported by the fact that machines are projected to replace 800 million jobs by 2030. Though these may come true, I think that AI will not replace humans but will rather become a mere tool for our use. As I’ve discussed, I think that AI will help transform the way we approach human. AI will allow us to identify potential diseases by analyzing the human genome. Early detection is critical and helps prevent patients from dying from diseases that are curable in its early stages, using gene editing tools.  It will also allow doctors to develop personalized solutions for conditions like cancer. We know that each human body is different and requires different approaches for each human being. AI will change the way we assist human beings.

 

I genuinely believe all law schools make a significant effort to serve their local communities, and I am convinced we succeed.  Our legal clinics provide hundreds of thousands of hours of free legal services each year to people who could not otherwise afford such services, and our externship students support our local, state, and federal governments and scores of non-profits. Our scholarly work advances the law in myriad ways, and our faculties volunteer their time to serve our society.

As those of you at public universities well know, however, public higher education faces particular pressures to justify its public funding by demonstrating relevance and positive contributions to state and local economies.  The West Virginia University College of Law has added two new legal clinics (bringing its total to nine clinics), both of which are designed to contribute directly to economic development in the state of West Virginia. In a region that has long relied on the fluctuating fortunes of a single economic resource—coal—this work adds direct value to the state.

The law school’s new Entrepreneurship and Innovation Law Clinic (EILC), directed by Professor Priya Baskaran, provides transactional assistance to West Virginia’s small businesses, nonprofits, community organizations, and burgeoning entrepreneurs. All the work is pro-bono, of course, and the clinic exclusively serves West Virginia clients. By working with individual clients and also supporting community business efforts, the clinic helps shape the business climate of West Virginia. The clinic, for example, provides legal services and training to new entrepreneurs and community organizations that work to address poverty.

The law school’s new Land Use and Sustainable Development Law Clinic (LUSD) also aims to help West Virginia communities meet their economic goals. Under the direction of Professor Kat Garvey, the LUSD delivers conservation, municipal planning, and land use strategies to local governments, landowners, and nonprofit organizations. The clinic’s conservation focus helps preserve West Virginia’s natural beauty and enhance the tourism industry. Because many communities in West Virginia are small and don’t have professional staff to tackle land use issues, the clinic works with officials to develop comprehensive plans and zoning ordinances. And these comprehensive plans are essential—not just to helping communities grow and prosper—but to helping communities persevere after a disaster. In 2016, much of West Virginia was devastated by floods, but, according to Garvey, communities with comprehensive plans not only knew how to rebuild, but also were in a better position to receive grants to fund that effort. Now, building on common concerns throughout the region, LUSD is helping communities work together by creating the state’s first regional comprehensive plan.

These and WVU’s seven other legal clinics show students “that lawyers are important to people and communities and train them to practice law,” says Gregory W. Bowman, Dean and Professor of Law, but they also “make the West Virginia University College of Law critically important to its state and the region.”

Law schools continue to tinker with the first-year curriculum, with some law schools adding Legislation and Regulation courses, others adding professionalism or professional identity-focused courses, still others adding international law courses, and a few affording students first-year electives.  Texas A&M University School of Law has added another possibility to the mix—a required, first-year, one-credit Dispute Resolution Survey course.   In January, all first-year A & M students must take the new course during the week prior to Spring semester.  Over five days, the course introduces the students to the continuum of legal dispute resolution processes, particularly negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and new developments such as collaborative law and online dispute resolution.

“We introduced the Dispute Resolution survey course as part of a set of changes to the 1L curriculum, designed to ensure that we were preparing our students for effective lawyering and leadership in the 21st century,” says Robert B. Ahdieh, Dean & Anthony G. Buzbee Endowed Dean’s Chair at Texas A&M.  “With an eye to the changing landscape of dispute resolution at home and abroad, its complex interactions with almost every area of practice, and the law school’s distinctive strengths in the area, the course was an ideal addition to our first-year curriculum.”

Members of the faculty who teach in the law school’s dispute resolution program team-teach the course.  Each faculty member focuses on his or her area of specialization.  Professors Cynthia Alkon and Peter Reilly introduce the 1Ls to negotiation concepts and skills.  Professors Nancy Welsh and Carol Pauli focus on mediation and new developments, and Professors Michael Green and Guillermo Garcia provide an overview of the practice and law of arbitration.  Although the course includes substantial reading and some lecture, the students also engage in hands-on learning through exercises and simulations.  By the end of the course, students should be able to counsel clients regarding the basic differences among these processes, identify the issues that are important in choosing among and participating in them, and understand the role of lawyers.

The course has an ambitious set of seven learning objectives.  According to the law school, by the end of the course, students should be able to

  1. Explain to a client the primary differences among the dispute resolution processes of negotiation, mediation and arbitration.
  2. Identify the issues involved in counseling a client regarding which process would be appropriate for resolving a given dispute.
  3. Explain the basic structure and theoretical foundation of each of these dispute resolution processes and how the goals and structures of each one can vary in response to different contexts.
  4. Describe their role as a lawyer within each of these dispute resolution procedures.
  5. Be aware of ethical rules that apply to lawyers when serving as an advocate or neutral in a negotiation, mediation or arbitration.
  6. Identify and apply statutes and case law relevant to the enforcement of dispute resolution clauses providing for the use of negotiation, mediation and/or arbitration to resolve disputes.
  7. Assess their own performance as a lawyer in a dispute resolution process, provide constructive feedback to others, and identify ways to improve skills in representing clients effectively.

Do the words #blockchain, #cryptocurrency, and #smartcontracts make your brain shut down? If so, take a look at the blockchain primer for lawyers that Karen Suber and I just penned – it’s all about the basics of blockchain, current and potential applications and their impact on the legal profession. Read on “A Blockchain Primer for Lawyers” https://lnkd.in/ejVSUwE American Council for Technology – Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) American Council for Technology – Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) Caitlin (Cat) Moon, MA JD CoinDesk DLx Law LLP NCSL International Department of Commerce Pavel Kravchenko, PhD TRON Foundation #WorldEconomicForum #TsuiNg

 

Link Below:

https://lnkd.in/ejVSUwE

 

 

 

 

A few weeks ago, I got talking to a taxi driver about innovation in legal services. During our discussion, she shared her current experience with the legal system.

My driver friend was embroiled in a legal dispute over custody of her daughter. She’d already spent thousands of dollars paying her lawyer. She even sold her motorcycle for additional funding. Her ex-partner wasn’t cooperative, so she expected to spend thousands more before their dispute resolved. She hungered for less expensive legal help, but was grudgingly willing to pay for the highest quality legal representation she could (or couldn’t) afford.

As we were talking, I shifted uneasily in my seat. I’ve been studying legal innovation for a while now. I’ve quoted reports about the increasing gap between those who can and those who can’t afford access to justice. I’ve dreamed of participating in legal tech hackathons and conferences around the world. But in the presence of a real-life end user of the legal system, I realized that I wasn’t exactly sure how recent legal innovation could help her. I suggested a few self-help legal resources, but had to admit that I didn’t know much about how they worked or what you could achieve with them.

In my excitement about legal innovation, the end user affected by the access to justice gap had only been an abstract concept. I should have known better—as an undergraduate engineering student, I’d spent a year as a Crocker Innovation Fellow learning how to innovate by first using ethnographic research to personally observe end users and identify problems-to-be-solved. I led my BYU Engineering Capstone team through interviewing end users and using design thinking to redesign a speech therapy device. In my quest to explore legal innovation, I should have known that only abstractly studying end users and legal technology wouldn’t enable me to help a real-life end user solve her legal problems.

Since my taxi ride, I’ve thought a lot about how legal innovation relates to the experiences of people like my driver. I’ve wondered:

  • How are innovations in legal services helping end users of the legal system?
  • What do end users need to know about those innovations to effectively use them?
  • What do lawyers need to know about new process and technologies to better serve their end users?
  • Why do we seek to improve how legal services are delivered?
  • How do we measure our success as legal innovators?

My answers to those questions may be different from yours, but I hope we all keep end users like my taxi driver friend in mind. The legal system was built by people, for people. Even law firms and companies that directly serve corporate clients have at least an indirect impact on people.

It’s an exciting time to be part of the legal industry as we seek to use data, processes, and technology to improve the delivery of legal services. May our efforts to innovate be ever grounded in engaging with our real-life end users, not the abstract ones. As for me? Well, time to go talk to more taxi drivers!

Curious about innovation in legal services? Follow me on my blog, on Medium, on Twitter, and on LinkedIn.

 

 

 

Traditional Contracts and their Pain Points

“Business does not stand still, however traditional contracts do.” Professor Shadab explained that businesses need dynamic contracts that can be updated in real time. Businesses are in need of contracts that integrate with the business world and are constantly evolving. He explained that the goal of clause is to help develop open-source standards to help move dynamic smart contracts forward. Dynamic contracts (legal smart contracts) would allow for contract terms and conditions to be adjustable over time based on the current business condition. Parties would be able to monitor price changes, discounts, shipping status in a dashboard as they occur.  The price of aluminum fluctuates with demand and supply in the market, this would be of use to have automatically updated in the contract without having both parties guess its potential value for the contracting period. These dynamic contracts would monitor performance and compare the performance against the terms of the contract.

 

Integrating APIs and IOT in Dynamic Contracts

It is projected that there will be more than 20 billion connected devices in the next several years, from traffic lights to autonomous coffee makers. Corporations, like Amazon, are taking the stance that data collection is an invaluable asset and have taken steps to collect more, learn from it, and make modifications that increases profit/knowledge.

An API is a program that allows various products or services the ability to talk to other products or services. APIs allow for individuals or corporations to leverage their data by opening it up to other corporations. This allows for partners/consumers of the corporation’s firewall the ability to access its data. APIs that are incorporated into a contract has the ability to facilitate communication between smart contracts and the cloud.

An example would be a dynamic contract that is developed between a farmer of hay and a farmer of horses, which states that the horse farmer will purchase hay from the hay farmer if the rainfall does not exceed 4 inches that summer. The dynamic contract would pull data via the weather station’s API to monitor the amount of rainfall. If the rainfall remains below the 4-inch requirement then the smart contract will be automatically executed, whereas if it exceeds the requirement the smart contract will not proceed. The hay farmer could also incorporate IoT sensors in the ground to give a more accurate rate of rainfall, and have the information feedback into the dynamic contract. The horse farmer will be notified to allow for him/her to decide if 4 and a half inches is acceptable for executing the contract.