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Law 2050 Students Take a Deep Dive into Neota Logic

November 3, 2014 2:44 pm / Leave a comment

Many, many years ago, when I was practicing environmental law with Fulbright & Jaworski in Austin, I was unfortunate enough to have a number of clients whose needs required that I master the EPA’s utterly convoluted definition of solid and hazardous waste. One summer I assigned a summer associate the task of flowcharting the definition. Over the course of the summer we debugged draft after draft until, finally, we had a handwritten flowchart that flawlessly worked any scenario through the definition step-by-step. It was ten legal-sized, taped-together pages long. It worked, but it wasn’t very practical.

If only we had had Neota Logic back then!  Last week, in my Law 2050 class, Kevin Mulcahy, Director of Education for Neota, demoed their product over the course of two classes and a 3-hour evening workshop.  Prior to the session I had assigned the class the exercise of flowcharting the copyright law of academic fair use. Each student prepared a flowchart and explained its logic, then six groups collaborated on final work products. I sent the group flowcharts to Kevin so he could use them to explain the Neota platform in a context familiar to the students.

Neota is a software program that allows the user to translate legal (or other) content into a user-friendly interactive application environment, much like Turbo Tax does for tax preparation. Neota allows the content expert to build the app with no coding expertise, with end products that are quite sophisticated in terms of what can be embedded in the app and how smoothly the app walks the user through the compliance logic. Example apps Kevin offered covered topics as varied as songwriter rights to Dodd-Frank compliance.

The first class period Kevin introduced Neota and then walked through each of the group flowcharts to analyze how each one broke down the fair use compliance problem. The core theme was how important it is to develop the output scenarios first. In the fair use exercise, there are several yes/no questions specific to educational uses, and then a multi-factored balancing test applies in the event none of those binary questions leads to a fair use outcome. Like any balancing test, this one yields a range of scenarios from very likely fair use to very likely not fair use. We spent a good deal of time thinking about how to design an app component to capture the balancing test.

In the evening workshop a group of 20 students acted as content experts to guide Kevin through the process of building the fair use app, much in the way a legal expert might work worth a Neota software expert. The most striking learning experience from this session, besides the deep look under Neota’s hood, was how the process of building the app actually sharpened our fair use compliance logic. We tested various approaches for capturing the balancing test and conveying output scenarios with substantive explanations for the user.

The next day the entire class regrouped to go over the workshop product, allowing those who could not make the workshop due to conflicting classes the chance to get a good feel for both the flexibility and precision the Neota software offers. Thinking back to my perfectly accurate but impractical ten-page flowchart of the EPA’s waste definition, I could envision how that and many other tasks that required developing a compliance logic could have been leveraged into apps I could have shared with other attorneys in my firm as well as clients.

My Law 2050 students clearly got a lot out of the immersion in using Neota to attack a compliance logic problem. I can’t thank Kevin and Neota enough for the time he invested in preparing for and delivering what was an excellent hands-on and instructive workshop. By the way, the EPA now has an online decision tool for navigating through the waste definition. I think they might want to get in touch with Neota!

Lex Machina a Smash Hit in Law 2050

October 15, 2014 7:21 pm / 1 Comment on Lex Machina a Smash Hit in Law 2050

This week my Law 2050 class has been all about Lex Machina, and to quote one student at the end of the two sessions: “I can’t imagine being a patent law firm and not wanting to purchase that!” [Note: I have no connection whatsoever with Lex Machina other than having them appear in my class, nor, I believe, did this student.] That sentiment was widely shared.

I contacted Lex Machina early in the semester to explore how I could give the class a deep dive in their technology. Jeremy Mulder, Lex Machina’s Director of Customer Success, worked closely with me to make the site available to the students, design an exercise for us to complete in one class, and guide us through the site and the company’s vision over a JoinMe link the next day.

My reactions:

First, the Lex Machina product is a truly awesome example of turning Big Data into a useful, user-friendly legal analytics product. The depth and breadth of data contained in the site, particularly for patent law, was astounding. For example, pick any federal district judge and within a few seconds the site provides an array of data, including outcomes at granular levels, patents handled, time to case termination, lawyers appearing in  the court, and many more. The site display and navigation is a breeze. The class started to tackle the questions together at the beginning of the first class, and within about 10 minutes, with no instructions from Lex Machina, we had begun to navigate the site with ease and, over time, learned how to tap into one after the other of analytic tools. The site is a model for other law+tech developers.

Second, as the exercise progressed I began to wonder how I would describe Lex Machina within the “disruptive technology” space. Disruption comes in many forms, and whether good or bad depends on the beholder. Lex Machina strikes me as disruptive primarily by providing an additive function—it makes possible what a lawyer could not have imagined he or she could do, at least without a tremendous amount of effort, time, and cost. It adds a tool, but it does not necessarily replace lawyers, or suck away billable hours, or “commoditize” a lawyering function; indeed, by giving lawyers more power over how to analyze patent law’s expanse, it may do just the opposite. More on the “disaggregation” of the disruptive legal technology concept into more descriptive and refined categories in an upcoming post.

Don’t Cry for the Global 100

October 14, 2014 4:26 pm / Leave a comment

The October 2014 issue of The American Lawyer includes its annual rundown of the Global 100 – the top 100 law firms around the world based on revenue – and I must say there’s quite a bit of legal spend going on out there! My ballpark estimate of the total revenue of the top 100 firms is close to $100 billion. Profits per partner at the Global 100 averaged $1.61 million in 2013, which is up (yes, up) 5.3 percent over 2012 (which was up 0.7 percent over 2011), with 70 firms averaging over $1 million. As expected, US firms took the biggest share of profits. Interestingly, some of the largest firms in the world in terms of revenue and/or lawyers fall below the $1 million PPP mark, including Jones Day, K&L Gates, Norton Rose Fulbright, Squire Sanders, CMS Legal, and Dentons. In some cases that may be a tradeoff between stability and profit, and in some cases the verein structure could result in uneven PPP across the firm’s offices.

As one might expect, the lion’s share of all that legal spend goes to firms with their largest number of attorneys based in the US. Of the top 50 firms in the world, 42 find their largest number of attorneys in the US. For the top 100 firms the number is 78, with the UK a distant second. In some cases, however, the US share, while the largest for the firm, is still relatively low. Overall, though, over 97,000 of the lawyers working for the Global 100 work in the US. The UK comes in a distant second with 6900 and China is third with just over 2500. But the number of lawyers working for AmLaw 200 firms in offices outside of the US, and the number of offices outside the US, has expanded steadily since 1998, primarily into the UK, but also significantly into China, Germany, France, Australia, and Canada.

The bottom line: Global Big Law seems to be doing just fine and spreading its wings. Is news of its death premature?

Is the 21st Century Going to Be One Ginormous Long-Tail Event?

October 13, 2014 6:43 pm / Leave a comment

In Book of Extremes: Why the 21st Century Isn’t Like the 20th Century, Ted Lewis builds the case for defining the 21st century as likely to become a morass of extreme events unlike any prior century in terms of magnitude and frequency. The core theme of the book is that the world has entered an era of unprecedented network scope and connectedness, which, while offering us all sorts of advantages like social media and global trade (if you think those are benefits), exposes society to massive cascading failures.

Lewis is clearly wired into complexity science, network analysis, and data science. He’s held a variety of positions in academia, industry, and publishing, and spins out a fascinating account of how all those and other disciplines are necessary to even begin to understand what is happening in the world today. He pulls from the internet, marine shipping, climate change, the financial system, and wealth concentrations to argue that we have gone well past the “tipping point” of exposure to black swan events and worse (see my prior posts on systemic risk and dragon kings). Although I disagree with Lewis’s assessment of prior centuries as essentially flat, linear, and relatively free of global networks and extreme events – anyone who thinks so should read Distant Mirror and 1493 – the evidence he amasses regarding the breadth, tightness, and impact of today’s interlinked social, economic, political, and technological networks is impressive. These networks of networks, while robust in one sense, are fragile in others—fragile in ways that can lead to extreme outlier failures. One example Lewis offers is the global shipping trade, which is a complex network linking lanes and ports and which depends disproportionately on just three ports (Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Los Angeles), so much so that failure of any one of those ports can bring down the whole network (which then cascades to other networks such as finance).

These massive networks also can produce behaviors that appear unusual and counter-intuitive. For example, although social media networks theoretically connect everyone around the world and should produce convergence and harmony, there is evidence they are more an agent of fragmentation. Consisten with LEwis’s theme, for example, Curtis Hougland explains in a post today on the Wharton School’s website how social media allow people that have been assembled according to conventional ordering (nations, religions, employment, education) to reassemble according to other personal affinities, thus cutting across traditional boundaries such as nation states. “Social media provides both an organizing tool through its ability to structure and facilitate communication and an organizing principle in the way people gravitate toward the extreme. In this way, social media accelerates political unrest like a giant centrifuge, sinning faster and faster and spitting out those who disagree.”

Book of Extremes provides an excellent, albeit fast and furious, tour through networks analysis, complex adaptive systems, data science, and an array of other disciplines. Lewis uses metaphors such as waves, flashes, sparks, booms, bubbles, shocks, and bombs to tie the science to real-world contexts with scads of historical and modern examples. His bottom line is that governments and individuals need to start taking big “leaps” to avoid continuing down the spiral leading to cascade failures, including more instances of private initiatives not waiting for government to lead, the way SpaceX has launched itself (pun intended).

So, what does this mean for law? For starters, if Lewis is right, get ready for a century of unprecedented demand on the legal system. Law students and young lawyers, watch trends, anticipate disruption, and think hard about what pressures these will place on the legal system to produce solutions, protect rights, and adapt new legal doctrines. You can help shape how law responds, and you can be the first to “jump on it” with thoughtful analysis and reasoned proposals for legal action. In short, think Law 2025!

Nicola Lettieri on the Big Data Deluge

October 7, 2014 6:36 pm / Leave a comment

Head to this Computational Legal Studies site post for an excellent Prezi by Nicola Lettieri of the University of Sannio on legal and other issues flowing from the “Big Data Deluge.” One part of the presentation dives deep into the field of law and computational social science, which IMHO is the future of legal research and scholarship.

Network Analysis In Law 2014 Conference

October 7, 2014 6:18 pm / Leave a comment

The second Network Analysis in Law conference will take place in Krakow, Poland, December 10-12. The call for papers outlines intriguing lines of research about legal networks:

We invite papers and demonstrations of original works on the following aspects of network analysis in the legal field:

  1. Analysis and visualization of networks of people and institutions: law is made by people, about and for people and institutions. These people or institutions form networks, be it academic scholars, criminals or public bodies and these networks can be detected, mapped, analysed and visualised. Can we better study institutions and their activities by analysing their internal structure or the network of their relations? Does it help in finding the ‘capo di tutti i capi’ in organized crime?
  2. Analysis and visualization of the network of law: law itself forms networks. Sources of law refer to other sources of law and together constitute (part of) the core of the legal system. In the same way as above, we can represent, analyse and visualise this network. Can it help in determining the authority of case law or the likelihood a decision will be overruled? Does it shed light on complex or problematic parts of legislation? Is it possible to exploit networks visualization to support legal analysis and information retrieval?
  3. Combination of the first and second aspects: people or institutions create sources of law or appear in them: Research on the network of one may shed light on the other. Two examples: (1) Legal scholars write commentaries on proposed legislation or court decisions. Sometimes they write these together. These commentaries may provide information on the network of scholars; the position of an author in the network of scholars may provide information on the authority of the comment. (2) The application of network analysis techniques to court decisions and proceedings is proving to be helpful in detecting criminal organizations and in analysing their structure and evolution over time.

I wish I could go!

Law 2050 Student Projects on Trends in Law and Law Practice

October 2, 2014 2:59 pm / Leave a comment

Given how much time we spend in law school covering what the law was and is, one of the goals of my Law 2050 class is to get students to think about what the law will be and how they can help shape it’s future. I have students identify examples of two kinds of trends. The first is an “inside law” trend, such as new technology and new kinds of service providers, that will influence how law is practiced. The other is an “outside law” trend, such as developments in health care, technology, and the economy, that will influence how law evolves in response.

Last year I had students work in groups to present “pitches” in a shark-tank setting, with the pitch being an assessment of whether to invest in the trend (e.g., put money into a new legal practice technology or devote firm resources to developing a new practice area). This year I have used this phase of the class to develop some practical, practice-oriented writing skills: a blog post, a client alert letter, and a bar journal article. As was the case last year, once again I am thoroughly impressed with the topics the students selected, and their blog post assignments were top-notch. Watch for several of them in coming days as students serve as contributing bloggers!

Here’s a sample of the topics:

Inside Law Trends: lawyer coaching for pro se clients; IP prior art search outsourcing; third party litigation funding; Shake, the contract app; legal hackathons; legal fee analytics; Ravel Law; Mitratech’s software for in-house counsel; “low bono” law firms; legal project management firms; online dispute resolution; pricing consultants; Islamic finance practice; speech recognition programs for lawyers; Bryan Cave’s Rosetta project; legal knowledge engineering; telecommuting and the decline of the law office; Counsel on Call; Integron; business for lawyers training programs; legal solution engineers; Clerky; Axiom–is it becoming another BigLaw?; virtual courts; Legal Force; and compliance lawyering.

Outside Law Trends: digital signatures; commercial delivery drones; invisibility cloaking; Google Glass; neural implants; predictive policing; driverless cars; commercial space travel; e-money; The Internet of Things (embedded sensor networks); newsgathering drones; unmanned cargo ships; virtual patient consultations; 3D printing of guns and organs; apps to convert 3D iPhone photos to 3D printing; Apple’s fitness watch; automobile connectivity and privacy issues; texting detection technology for police; cloud storage issues; sea level rise; crowdfunding; negligent infliction of disease; ridesharing (Uber etc.); robotic surgery; renewable energy trends; extreme reality TV; fracking; human gene patenting; and police body cameras.

Needless to say, we are going to have some interesting class discussions!


Has All the Important Law Already Been Invented?

September 2, 2014 4:48 pm / Leave a comment

A few months ago the Wall Street Journal carried an article titled Has All the Important Stuff Already Been Invented? It was about a dispute between two Northwestern University economists over that very question. The basic gist:

Robert Gordon, a curmudgeonly 73-year-old economist, believes our best days are over. After a century of life-changing innovations that spurred growth, he says, human progress is slowing to a crawl.

Joel Mokyr, a cheerful 67-year-old economist, imagines a coming age of new inventions, including gene therapies to prolong our life span and miracle seeds that can feed the world without fertilizers.

Law 2050 being what it is, I had to ask the parallel question for law: Are the best days of legal innovation over, or are we entering a coming age of new legal “inventions”?

The first aspect of this to sort through is the difference between new law and new legal innovations. We’ll always be making new law—the question is whether any of it will be innovative. More to the point, what exactly is a “legal invention”?

My main field of research and practice, environmental law, has gone through several of what legal scholars suggest are “generations” of evolution. Each generation represents a significant innovation in the approach and content of the law. As my good friend Tony Arnold of The University of Louisville Law School framed it in a recent article, Fourth-Generation Environmental Law: Integrationist and Multimodal:

U.S. environmental law appears to have evolved from reliance primarily on common-law tort and property doctrines to government reservation and management of lands and natural resources to pollution control and prevention through command-and-control regulation, technology-based standards, and rule-of-law litigation. Some have characterized the latter collection of command-and-control statutes and regulations, administered with technology-based standards and enforced by rule-of-law litigation, as the first generation of environmental law. This generational classification is in contrast to what are often referred to as second generation environmental law methods that emphasize regulatory flexibility and the harnessing of economic incentives. These include compliance incentives, negotiated rulemaking (or “reg. neg.”), and market-based mechanisms. Some believe that the structure and practice of environmental law have now entered a third generational phase with the growing use of collaborative and voluntary processes, outcomes-based instrument choice, and reflexive law principles to achieve sustainable development and engage in ecosystem management. In each case, the new features of environmental law have simply been added to the existing features, making some modifications to the older structure but mostly just adding new generations to the family of environmental law.

He then predicts the emergence of a new, fourth generation:

Ecological and social forces of change—and the policy imperatives that they create—will move the next generation of environmental law towards integrationist and multimodal methods of addressing complex, interdependent, dynamic, and multiscalar environmental problems.

So the point is, legal inventions are new kinds of law, not just new law. And as Arnold suggests, it’s usually forces of change outside of and acting on law that spur legal innovation.

Certainly as much, and perhaps more than, any force of change, technology has rocked law over time into new configurations. So, going back to the Gordon-Mokyr debate, if Gordon is right then we can expect to see technology become less of a player in spurring legal innovations. But if cheerful Mokyr is right, we could be in store for new kinds of law we don’t even imagine today. Consider, for example, the increasing breadth and depth of information and knowledge being put at our fingertips through Big Data and machine learning. Could this lead to more than just new law, but also to legal innovation?

That’s the kind of question I put to my students in Law 2050. One assignment is to identify some economic, environmental, technological, or social trend and play with its potential legal consequences. What novel issues might it present? What legal responses will be appropriate? Do we need legal innovation to respond, or just new law? I’m looking forward to their projects and answers, and for now my strong hunch is that we have not seen the end of legal innovation, not by a long shot.

This Is a Relationship Business!

August 27, 2014 8:48 pm / Leave a comment

The second week of Law 2050 concluded with a panel of corporate general counsel, the day after the panel of law firm leaders. As a reminder, the participants, whom I thank profusely, were

Also participating on the law firms panel was Mike Duffy, King & Spalding’s first Director of Growth & Client Service, who added a fascinating dimension to the discussion. I think it is fair to say the students were riveted by the discussion and will have lots to work with in their reaction papers.

I have enough notes from the panels to fill pages, so I plan to break my own reactions down into several posts over the next few weeks. Today’s has to do with a theme the cut across both panels: As one of the GCs put it, “This is a relationship business!” Now, I am sure everyone gets that in general–lawyers have to forge a relationship with their clients and vice versa–but what does that mean today, six years after 2008 hit the reset button.  I’d have to say that the GCs panel was most emphatic about this, so I’ll start there:

  • It’s about the lawyer, not the firm. I have always maintained that the spike in lateral partner and practice group movement in the late 1980s, which I saw happen around me in my firm and which has not abated, was the beginning of the erosion of the “trusted firm” relationship. It has been replaced by what the GCs described as the “follow the lawyer” relationship, which places less weight on the firm and more on the individual.
  • Share the risk. The GCs want that individual to forge a partnership that involves new ways of sharing risk, as opposed to the old model of firms shifting all the risk to clients through the billable hour.
  • Help yourself by helping me. The outside lawyer also has to recognize that GCs and their in-house legal team “live with the client.” They are on call 24/7 and are under intense pressure to get answers fast and to perform like any other branch of the business. There is low tolerance in that environment for outside lawyers looking to make themselves look good–the real value comes in making the in-house lawyers look good to their C-suite colleagues and to have their back. Do that and it will work both ways.
  • Look around the room. One student asked how to begin to forge those kinds of relationships, and the best advice was to start by looking around the room–in other words, it starts in law school and continues into the years of associateship. All those GCs out there were once law students and associates too, so the person next to you in class or down the hall at the firm could very well later be in-house at one of your current or prospective clients.
  • Don’t fake it. The GCs also had low tolerance for outside counsel who go too far outside their or their firm’s wheelhouse to keep work. That costs clients time and money, and won’t help get return business.

My sense is that none of this would have surprised the law firm leaders panel, but that the harder question for them is how to forge and sustain this kind of relationship in a static market facing intense competition from within (other firms) and outside (new kinds of service providers). All the law firm leaders agreed it starts with firm differentiation, although if the “follow the lawyer” trend is real and growing, one has to wonder whether differentiation matters. The firm lawyers suggested it does if it achieves niche or strength differentiation, as that is likely to attract the best lawyers. But the most interesting angle on it came from Mike Duffy, a non-lawyer who came to King & Spalding from Ernst & Young. Among his many functions there, one practice he has instituted is to interview clients who retain the firm, but also those who decline to hire the firm, as in what did the firm not bring to the table. That practice has to lead to some insight about how to get the relationships up and running next time.

To drive this message home, Mike Duffy also revealed to the class what he believes, based on years of observation, to be the traits of the most successful lawyers (more on which later). High on the list was “relationship skills.” Those do not come naturally to all people and are hard to teach in law school, but if I got anything out of the two panels (and I got a lot), it’s that this world of lawyering is, now more than ever, a relationship business.

 

 

An Evening With Some Really Smart People Working In Law+Tech

August 20, 2014 2:45 pm / Leave a comment

As many interested in Law 2050 topics will know, Nashville has the pleasure of hosting this year’s International Legal Technology Conference. I have not been able to attend much of it given the ironic detail that I have been teaching Law 2050 classes the same days as the conference. So it was a real treat to be invited to a dinner gathering to discuss the law+tech landscape along with several current and former Law 2050 students, other Vanderbilt Law students, and local legal community members. .

Our hosts were Michael Dunn and Aria Safar of e-Stet, the California based litigation technology company. Also present, and presenting tomorrow at the conference, was Noah Waisberg, founder of Diligence Engine, which has developed transaction due diligence review software. E-Stet treated us to an excellent Nashville hot chicken spread and opened an informal forum on the state of play and future of law+tech and its impact on the legal services industry.  Although I can’t speak for anyone but myself, here’s my take home from the discussion:

  • Legal technology developments like those represented by e-Stet and Diligence Engine (and a fast-expanding universe of other developers) will make lawyers better and more efficient. Law is one of those professions in which making a mistake can be very, very costly, so why not reduce the risk of missing an important document or detail? The downside may be that efficiency cuts into hours billed, but the offsetting upside is that better lawyering results attract more work.
  • These advances in law+tech are going to flatten the legal services industry in two ways. First, it will make it more possible for lawyers to service the mid-tier market of consumers and small businesses. Firms that might in the past (and present) have seen their market as large corporations and wealthy individuals might very well be in a position to provide reasonable-cost services to those markets. Whether they will deign to do so is a different question. But one thing is for sure–if they don’t, someone will.
  • The other flattening effect of law+tech is that it levels the playing field between the AmLaw 50, concentrated as they are in New York, L.A., and other mega markets, and the major regional/city law firms. If you have a significant deal or piece of litigation in Nashville or Denver, why fly in lawyers from New York or L.A. when law+tech has made everyone better? The experiential advantage of spending 10 years working deals in New York etc. will erode as everyone, everywhere, has access to aggregated databases of deal documents and the computational analytics to crunch through them. Bespoke lawyering may still be more concentrated in a few major cities, but over time this trend could revolutionize the legal services industry, giving law grads and young lawyers even greater flexibility to combine a sophisticated legal practice with quality of life preferences.
  • I think I can speak for all present in concluding that law+tech is not headed in the direction of robot lawyers any time soon (speaking of which, here’s the program for a conference session on that tomorrow). Perhaps a substantial chunk of lawyering can be mechanized, commoditized, and computerized, but the bottom line is that life is complicated and as soon as a client’s preferences or needs depart a smidgen from the default context built into the “robot,” you need a human. But the human will use law+tech to provide a faster, better, more efficient outcome. Maybe the better way to think of it is lawyer+robot.

The most gratifying aspect of this fascinating evening (besides the ridiculously spicy hot chicken!) was seeing my students engage in the discussion at what I considered to be a high level of knowledge and insight. Most if not all of them are members of our Journal of Entertainment Law & Technology, and it was clear that their experience on the journal has paid off in terms of enhanced awareness of the trends in law+tech. Go Vandy!

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