During my Civil Procedure class yesterday, we discussed the U.S. Supreme Court case Hickman v. Taylor, an important case pertaining to the attorney work-product doctrine. However, I didn’t expect that the opinions delivered for the case would be relevant to my most recent blog post titled “What are legal services?”.

From my earlier blog post, you may remember that “legal services” in the U.S. is usually defined as work performed by a lawyer (see Cambridge dictionary definition). One question that arises out of that definition is “Whom does a lawyer serve?”.

In the majority opinion for Hickman v. Taylor, Justice Murphy writes “Historically, a lawyer is an officer of the court, and is bound to work for the advancement of justice while faithfully protecting the rightful interests of his clients.” Hickman v. Taylor, 329 U.S. 495, 510 (1947). In other words, lawyers serve two masters: the justice system and their clients.

Sometimes, serving those two masters may feel difficult to balance. What if a lawyer finds information that will be damaging to her client’s case but that should be disclosed to ensure that the whole truth is presented? How does disclosing such information in the interest of advancing justice affect a lawyer’s ability to gain the trust and continued business of her clients? Does a lawyer owe a higher duty to the justice system or her client?

At just over a month into my law school career, I’ve only begun my formal exploration of these types of questions. As a lawyer in training, I suspect that honesty is the best policy, but I anticipate that some situations will present ethical dilemmas. Nonetheless, as lawyers work hard to advocate for their clients, our principles must include at least equally fighting for a fair justice system.

But what if someone doesn’t seek a lawyer to resolve their legal issue?

In his concurring opinion in Hickman v. Taylor, Justice Jackson states “But it too often is overlooked that the lawyer and the law office are indispensable parts of our administration of justice. Law-abiding people can go nowhere else to learn the ever changing and constantly multiplying rules by which they must behave and to obtain redress for their wrongs.” Id. at 514-515 (Jackson, J., concurring). Even if lawyers are “indispensable” to the justice system, would Justice Jackson feel that there is there room for nonlawyers to provide legal services in today’s world?

The opinion for Hickman v. Taylor was written in 1947, well before people started using “google” as a verb meaning “a search for information”. I’m curious what Justice Jackson might say to self-helpers who seek to answer their legal questions using the collective “wisdom” of the Internet. How would he feel about alternative legal services providers, such as LegalZoom and DoNotPay (see this recent announcement about DoNotPay’s new services), that help people represent themselves in legal issues? Websites like Wikipedia have provided greater access to knowledge. Is it acceptable for others on the Internet to provide useful legal knowledge and aid?

We’ll never know how Justice Jackson would answer these questions. But perhaps they’re questions we should answer as we try to address the growing access to justice gap between clients and the justice system. Perhaps lawyers, in their unique role as servants of both clients and the justice system, should take the lead in bridging the gap.

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

The importance of social media for a  business entity is becoming a critical part of how a corporation markets and connects with its consumers. With much of America’s citizens joining and using social media sites regularly, the social media industry is becoming a larger part of our lives. In fact, over 2 million corporations are using Facebook for promoting their products and services. Corporations have found that the use of social media allows for it to lower ad costs, reach its target audience, and analyze the effectiveness of its ad campaign. Though 61% of Fortune 500 CEOs have no presence on social media at all, there is a smaller subset of CEOs that are using their private accounts to build a brand for themselves and their companies. This has to lead to free PR for their company, with one such example being T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere.

 

But what happens when the CEO goes too far and crimples the business?

 

This is exactly what happened to Telsa. Its CEO, Elon Musk, has become a celebrity on Twitter with over 22 million followers. Musk has become one of the most influential CEOs on the platform. Musk has used the platform to display his self-expression and is often guilty of oversharing. An example of his oversharing was displayed in the following tweet:  

His tweet about taking the company private and having funding secured triggered the SEC to investigate his claims. The SEC was worried that his tweets might lead to market manipulation. In fact, the stocks soared by 11 percent. A week after the tweets, the SEC subpoena-ing Telsa about Musk’s statements. The SEC found that Musk nor Telsa had lined up the necessary financing aside from preliminary talks with investors. The Board of Telsa has requested for Musk to leave twitter during the investigation.

 

The SEC Deal

 

The SEC sued Musk for his statements of taking the company private. The SEC found that his statements about securing the funding to offer shareholders $420 per share, misleading. The SEC and Telsa settled the lawsuit for $40 million and required for Musk to step down from his chairman position. This marks the first time the SEC has reacted to social media post and online communications and is likely to not be its last.

 

A construction team physically builds a skyscraper by starting with the foundation. Similarly, as we begin our “Building Blocks” journey, let’s establish the foundational ‘building block’ of innovation in legal services.

When I began planning this blog post, I thought that our foundation would be a simple definition of legal services. After conducting substantial research, it’s clear that I was wrong.  

Legal-Explanations.com states, “Legal services are the services involving legal or law related matters like issue of legal opinion, filing, pleading and defending of law suits etc [sic] by a lawyer or attorney practicing law related services.”

The Cambridge Dictionary concisely defines legal services as “work done by a lawyer for a client.”

Note that each definition specifies lawyers as the providers of the “work” of legal services. In the United States, that specificity is supported by prohibitions on the unauthorized practice of law by nonlawyers. For example, see the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 5.4(b), which states “A lawyer shall not form a partnership with a nonlawyer” to deliver legal services. Internationally, however, the definition of legal services does not always specify who provides the work of legal services (see “What We Know and Need to Know About Global Lawyer Regulation”, page 471). Should the legal profession limit who can provide legal services? For what purposes? Do current regulations achieve those purposes?

As a brand-new law student, I don’t have enough experience or qualifications to answer those questions. But as a curious consumer, I wonder why legal services providers should always be limited to lawyers. Others in the legal profession are asking similar questions and even pushing the boundaries of who can provide which kinds of legal services (see Endnote 1). Where there is some debate about what “legal services” means, is a precise definition the foundational ‘building block’ of innovation in legal services?

Perhaps not. Rather, like the foundation of all innovation, the foundation of innovation in legal services is to question the status quo: “What should “legal services” mean?” ∎

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

Endnote 1: For examples of the ongoing debate about who can provide legal services, check out the following articles and reports: 

Swishhhh! The sound of LEGO® bricks pouring onto the floor is the sound of playtime. As a kid, I’d pull open a new box of LEGO® bricks and follow the instructions to build the toy shown on the box. At the end of a building session, I’d have a new toy to use in imaginary space adventures, ocean voyages, or car races.

The more I played with LEGO® bricks, the less committed I became to sticking with the toy shown on the box. I still followed the instructions the first time, but it was more fun to use the knowledge gained from building others’ creations to improve my own designs. Nowadays, I’d be as content with a box of simple rectangular bricks as I would be with one of the fancy sets you see in stores.

The progression from instruction-follower to creative builder is not limited to LEGO® building. Rather, it’s the process of innovation: learn, build, repeat. LEGO® bricks are like individual pieces of knowledge. We first learn how to combine those pieces to form knowledge already developed by others. As we gain experience, we use our foundation of knowledge to build our own creations. For example, we learn to use letters to create words and words to build sentences. Much later, we use our developed knowledge of language to write laws to create a justice system.

The legal industry, like all industries, has innovated over time. However, in recent years the pace of that innovation has increased. “Old” knowledge is being combined with “new” knowledge to create more affordable, accessible, and efficient legal services.

Looking into a box of LEGO® bricks can be daunting if you’re not sure how to put the pieces together to create a useful structure. Looking into the increasing storm of knowledge, tools, and hype of legal innovation can be daunting as you seek to create or even just operate in the legal industry.

The purpose of this blog is to explore the building blocks, both old and new, of innovation in legal services. Some blocks will be in the form of knowledge or ideas, others in the form of tools. We’ll also look at completed sets of blocks that form new products and services. In so doing, we’ll bring some order to the chaos of innovation in the legal industry. We’ll draw inspiration from the “blocks” and “sets” we learn about to create new ways of delivering legal services.

Playtime is about to begin. Will you join me?

Follow me here, on Twitter, and on LinkedIn.

Note: LEGO®is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this site.

It is important to have the ability to improve one’s community. But it is just as important to retain the ability to reside in that community after the improvement have been made.

 

Civic Beautification Efforts

 

Imagine using local resources to empower those who reside in disinvested communities through crowdsourcing. Imagine affording local residents the ability to contribute to the restoration of their communities without gentrification. Crowdfunding can allow residents to turn creative, sustainable projects into a reality. Communities seeking to do restoration projects that do not have an economical return could use platforms like ioby or Citizinvestor.com, crowdfunding platforms that help residents raise money for public projects. Platforms like Citizinvestor.com also allow for residents to partner with the city to conduct joint projects. In communities that have had years of disinvestment, the government and community coalitions will need to create ways to restore public confidence to help win investors trust.

 

Economic Improvement Efforts

Crowdsourcing in such a community could function by allowing the residents to contribute their nominal funds to other residents’ nominal funds to create an investment fund. Each resident, based on their contribution, would have a certain percentage of ownership in the overall venture. These funds could be used to help create local groceries with actual fresh produce, community centers or programs for the youth, employment for local residents, and beautification initiatives. Ownership could be maintained on a private or public blockchain, which is considered to be immutable, depending on the needs of the group. Immutability can help build trust amongst those looking to invest in the projects of the community.

Episode 2 of Chaotic Lawful is out. In it, I interview Becki Lee, an IP attorney at Seyfarth Shaw, about Seyfarth Lean, the firm’s process management system utilizing lean and six sigma principles.

New to process management? Here are some links to give you an idea of what those terms mean and how they apply to legal practice.

I am getting in on the podcast game. It’s called Chaotic Lawful and will focus on change in the legal industry. The first episode is linked here.

Most of the episode is a long introduction, but the last portion addresses a new Nature article about algorithmic bias. Following is a link to the article and a few related ones:

Bias detectives: the researchers striving to make algorithms fair

This is a blind spot in AI research

Machine bias

Google says sorry for racist auto-tag in photo app

The Blur Between The Sense of Technology and People

 

Cease and Desist Letter Automation

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Introduction:

On Friday, April 20th LegalRnD will host the “Measuring Lawyer Quality and Setting an Empirical Research Agenda for Legal Technology and Innovation” Conference from 9 am to 12 pm at the Kellogg Center in East Lansing. Students from Dan Linna Jr.’s Litigation: Data, Theory, Practice, Process Course will present on legal technology tools that have been developed to address real-world problems provided by project partners. Students were taught the Kata method to help identify potential solutions for the legal problems that they were provided.

Students were also trained in both Think Smart and Neota Logic artificial intelligence platforms, so that these solutions could be built for the project partner.  My group consisted of Erica Porter, Kaitlyn Huber and myself. We were given the following problem by Jeffrey Sharer of the Akerman Law Firm .

Industry
Law and Intellectual Property

Primary Business
Protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights. Intellectual Property involves intangible assets and creative works. It secures and enforces legal rights to inventions, designs, and artistic works.

The Challenge

Intellectual property rights are one of the most valuable assets of a corporation. In fact, it may be the most important asset the corporation possesses and therefore should be protected. In a recent survey, C-Level executives were asked whether they considered trademark infringement as something that they monitor in the company. Over 80% of these executives state that trademark infringements have become a growing issue for corporations over the past 5 years.

There are a number of ways in which a trademark infringement can damage a company’s brand, resulting in loss of sales. One of the growing concerns for C-Level executives is the negative publicity that a brand may sustain on social media. This makes the response of a corporation and its legal team time sensitive. Traditionally, it takes an in-house lawyer or outside IP counsel approximately 2 to 4 hours to assess a potentially infringing mark and draft and appropriate cease and desist letter or other correspondence to the alleged infringer. For many large organizations, this can add up to hundreds or even thousands of hours per year. One Deputy General Counsel responsible for IP at a Fortune 100 company suggested that this process could be at least partially automated to allow for responses to be generated more quickly

The Solution

Law firms like Akerman, which build smart systems, are uniquely positioned to respond to this issue. Attorney Jeffrey Sharer and Professor Dan Linna Jr. decided to have a group in Dan’s Litigation Class develop a solution using Think Smart or Neota Logic to streamline the researching and drafting of a cease and desist letter. My group decided to use the Neota Logic artificial intelligence software platform to help clients determine their rights under Trademark law. The Neota Logic platform employs process management, document automation, and reasoning to build an intelligent application for addressing complex legal issues.A client using the system can draft a cease and desist letter in 15 to 20 minutes rather than the traditional 2 to 4 hours. This allows for the client’s IP counsel to address other issues for the corporation, rather than spending valuable time on the cease and desist process.

How it Works: Programming Neota with Actions, Variables, Question Flows, and Decision Trees:

When determining the best app to develop for clients, we discussed developing an app that would allow the client’s IP counsel to generate an automated cease and desist PDF, but decided that our app would be of better use if it empowered anyone on the legal team to determine the companies’ rights under Trademark law and drafts the cease and desist letter for them. The software’s functioning is similar to TurboTax in that regard, where you can file taxes without having to be a CPA. With seamless integration, Neota Logic opens the web interface of the Advisor where the user selects the appropriate template for the document type.

The Advisor starts automatically, prompting the user for a case number or other identifying information. The Advisor provides a link to the USPTO if the IP counsel needs to retrieve related data about the company’s trademark and prompts the user to fill in the remaining information required for the document type.

The Advisor generates the document using the template, merging the data obtained in the questionnaire, and from common content, and applying trademark rules as required.
The solution then routes the generated document automatically to the clients’ email.

The Draft Letter:

Results and achievements of this project:

  1. With automated document templates, the time spent by the legal department on drafting cease and desist letters is reduced by more than 80%!
  2. Automated templates significantly reduce mistakes in documents.

User Input

We strived to make the best app possible, so we wanted to make sure that we were able to incorporate input from those in the field and those in general practice. We wanted to make sure that our app has the content that a trademark attorney would need to feel empowered to continue using it, but we also wanted Akerman to be able to provide it to in-house counsel who does not work on trademarks as often. Jordan Galvin was incredible, as she was willing to go through our app and provide comments to help us make our app amazing. By incorporating user input, we were able to draft the questions so that all audiences could follow through and submit information for the letter. Martin Childs, a 2L working for a Chicago firm, stated that he wished he had taken this class because he felt that developing these tools directly address clients’ pain points. Professor Bean said he was impressed with our app and felt that it was very useful. Professor Carter Johnson, who worked in IP at a firm and now teaches IP at MSU, stated that our app was very interesting and a great start to an awesome idea.

What We Learned:
In creating this automated artificial intelligence software platform, we learned that you cannot simply throw technology at an issue. We opened the course by learning to implement the Kata method, which forced us not to jump to a conclusion but rather to employ the scientific method. We were forced to test our theories to determine if they were accurate. We employed process improvement and process mapping to eliminate waste, by using the data-driven approach to develop our system.

This innovative system was created through teamwork with my classmates and with our project partner, Jeffrey Sharer. We learned that in this era of Artificial Intelligence, the legal field could be significantly improved through the automation of data, leading to more efficient service delivery and improved client satisfaction.