The Technology That Is Revolutionising How Business Gets Done — from artificiallawyer.com

Excerpt:

We are on the cusp of a revolution. Contract negotiation, with all the associated document redlines and email threads, is about to get a whole lot quicker. Today, artificial intelligence has the potential to save lawyers hours of intense editing – but only if they embrace the sector-wide behaviour change this could ignite.

Technology has reached the point that much of the initial legwork of perusing a contract can be done by a piece of software. Precision AI can scan a document and create a list of issues based on how a lawyer typically contracts. It is then up to the lawyer to accept or disregard those issues, but the point is that the initial editing time is greatly reduced.

 

 

From DSC:
This is another area where the slow pace of the American legal system is having a negative effect. The American Bar Association and the majority of the law school graduates (i.e., those who passed the Bar and have been practicing law in one form or another) for the last 30 years have a lot to do with this situation. They have stimied innovation and have protected their turf — at the increasing expense of the American people. 

Online learning has been going on since the late 1990’s, yet the ABA STILL doesn’t let law schools have 100% online-based learning without their special consent. 


Artists say AI image generators are copying their style to make thousands of new images — and it’s completely out of their control — from businessinsider.com by Beatrice Nolan

Excerpt:

  • OpenAI, a company founded by Elon Musk, just made its DALL-E image generator open to the public.
  • Artists say they work for years on their portfolios and people can now make copycat images in seconds.
  • But some AI companies argue that the new artworks are unique and can be copyrighted.

People are creating thousands of artworks that look like his using programs called AI-image generators, which use artificial intelligence to create original artwork in minutes or even seconds after a user types in a few words as directions.

Rutkowski’s name has been used to generate around 93,000 AI images on one image generator, Stable Diffusion — making him a far more popular search term than Picasso, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Vincent van Gogh in the program.

 

From DSC:
Many of the items below are from Laurence Colletti’s posting, Clio Cloud Conference – The Big Return


Clio Cloud 2022: Innovation in the Courts with Judge Schlegel — from legaltalknetwork.com by Laurence Colletti and Judge Scott Schlegel

Episode notes:

The pandemic was a driver for change in justice systems around the globe, but one court’s innovative and inexpensive approach is worth a closer look. Judge Scott Schlegel manages what may be one of the most advanced courts in the United States for delivering justice online. Tune in for his tips on how any jurisdiction in the country can modernize its justice system for under a thousand dollars. Go to https://www.onlinejudge.us/ for all of Judge Schlegel’s recommendations.

Clio Cloud 2022: The Benefits of a Legal Blog — from legaltalknetwork.com by Laurence Colletti and Teresa Matich, Kevin O’Keefe, and Iffy Ibekwe
Legal blog posts are great tools for building relationships with potential clients because they build trust, credibility, and allow you to create a personal connection with your clients.

LawNext Podcast: What Is Justice Tech? A Conversation with Maya Markovich — from lawnext.com by

Excerpt:

An increasing number of startups are defining themselves not as legal tech, but as justice tech. So what, exactly, is justice tech, who are some of the companies that represent it, and what is the business opportunity they present for potential investors? Our guest this week is Maya Markovich, executive director of the Justice Technology Association, an organization formed earlier this year to support companies in the justice tech sector.

Clio Cloud 2022: Insights from Clio’s 2022 Legal Trends Report — from legaltalknetwork.com by Laurence Colletti, Joshua Lenon, and Rio Peterson
Amid Inflation, Rising Interest Rates, and Volatile Employment Markets, Clio takes a look at How Global Trends have Impacted Business and Productivity among law firms.

Clio Cloud 2022: What Lies Ahead for Legal with Jack Newton — from legaltalknetwork.com by Laurence Colletti and Jack Newton

Episode notes:

The world of lawyering has surged in spite of the pandemic, but new adversity looms. Fears over inflation, war, hiring markets, and a recession have left many attorneys wondering how to prepare for the coming months. Jack Newton discusses the concept of anti-fragility and its place as a mental model for law firms as they face an uncertain future. Jack outlines how deliberate preparation can help your law firm thrive in the midst of opposition.

Jack Newton is CEO and co-founder of Clio.

Clio Cloud 2022: How Content Creation Can Grow Your Law Firm — from legaltalknetwork.com by Laurence Colletti

 


Also related, see:

Virtual Courts Are Not Going Away — from news.bloomberglaw.com by Jon David Kelley
As the pandemic winds down, courts are shifting to a hybrid approach that incorporates remote with live proceedings. Jon David Kelley of Kirkland says virtual courts can expand access to justice, but care should be taken to maintain credible representation.


 

 

How Long Should a Branching Scenario Be?— from christytuckerlearning.com by Christy Tucker
How long should a branching scenario be? Is 45 minutes too long? Is there an ideal length for a branching scenario?

Excerpt:

Most of the time, the branching scenarios and simulations I build are around 10 minutes long. Overall, I usually end up at 5-15 minutes for branching scenarios, with interactive video scenarios being at the longer end.

From DSC:
This makes sense to me, as (up to) 6 minutes turned out to be an ideal length for videos.

Excerpt from Optimal Video Length for Student Engagement — from blog.edx.org

The optimal video length is 6 minutes or shorter — students watched most of the way through these short videos. In fact, the average engagement time of any video maxes out at 6 minutes, regardless of its length. And engagement times decrease as videos lengthen: For instance, on average students spent around 3 minutes on videos that are longer than 12 minutes, which means that they engaged with less than a quarter of the content. Finally, certificate-earning students engaged more with videos, presumably because they had greater motivation to learn the material. (These findings appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal article, An Early Report Card on Massive Open Online Courses and its accompanying infographic.)

The take-home message for instructors is that, to maximize student engagement, they should work with instructional designers and video producers to break up their lectures into small, bite-sized pieces.

 

Clio’s 2022 Legal Trends Report
Learn how lawyers are balancing the flexibility of hybrid work, and what clients look for when hiring a lawyer.

Also relevant/see:

Clio’s 2022 Legal Trends Report Finds Lawyers’ Business Growing But Fees Fail to Keep Pace — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi

Top law schools have been slow to add women faculty members, research finds — from highereddive.com

Excerpt:

Law schools have increasingly sorted along gender lines, and the makeup of faculties has become a reflection of schools’ student population, according to preprint research published on the SSRN, an open access platform for early-stage research.

Five digital trends to watch in the legal tech sector — from information-age.com by Leanne Aldrich

Excerpt:

Technology is changing the legal sector. The UK government has recently announced that it is investing £4m to modernise the UK legal industry through its LawTechUK programme. The initiative is a part of a drive to keep the UK at the global forefront of legal services..

ILTA’s Annual Technology Survey: Highlights — from legaltechnology.com

What does it take to be a legal technologist? — legalfutures.co.uk

Excerpt:

When the first seeds of the legal technologist role were planted in the early 2010s, they took some time to germinate. A decade later, after a seemingly slow start, there has been an explosion of investment, awareness and new job opportunities in legal technology.

But as this new strand of the legal profession sets its roots deeper in the industry, what exactly does it take to be a legal technologist?

Shearman & Sterling Launches Legal Ops Service In Sign of the Times — from artificiallawyer.com

Excerpt:

In another sign of the changing times we are in, leading New York law firm Shearman & Sterling is formally launching a Legal Operations capability. The move follows fellow elite rival Cleary Gottlieb launching Cleary X, its innovation-focused legal delivery arm.

A decade ago many would not have expected New York’s top firms to be that bothered with anything other than high-end legal advisory and disputes work, but the legal world is evolving.

‘Legal Operations by Shearman’ will offer a range of services including legal tech help, data analytics, and inhouse department design, but may work with ALSPs and other groups when it comes to CLM onboarding, with these other providers handling actual implementation and with Shearman focused on the bigger legal ops picture.

#legal #trends #legaltech #lawyers #law #lawschools

 

 

What might the ramifications be for text-to-everything? [Christian]

From DSC:

  • We can now type in text to get graphics and artwork.
  • We can now type in text to get videos.
  • There are several tools to give us transcripts of what was said during a presentation.
  • We can search videos for spoken words and/or for words listed within slides within a presentation.

Allie Miller’s posting on LinkedIn (see below) pointed these things out as well — along with several other things.



This raises some ideas/questions for me:

  • What might the ramifications be in our learning ecosystems for these types of functionalities? What affordances are forthcoming? For example, a teacher, professor, or trainer could quickly produce several types of media from the same presentation.
  • What’s said in a videoconference or a webinar can already be captured, translated, and transcribed.
  • Or what’s said in a virtual courtroom, or in a telehealth-based appointment. Or perhaps, what we currently think of as a smart/connected TV will give us these functionalities as well.
  • How might this type of thing impact storytelling?
  • Will this help someone who prefers to soak in information via the spoken word, or via a podcast, or via a video?
  • What does this mean for Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and/or Virtual Reality (VR) types of devices?
  • Will this kind of thing be standard in the next version of the Internet (Web3)?
  • Will this help people with special needs — and way beyond accessibility-related needs?
  • Will data be next (instead of typing in text)?

Hmmm….interesting times ahead.

 

The Future of Virtual Legal Proceedings Just Became More Certain with the Launch of Calloquy — from businesswire.com by Calloquy
Hundreds gathered in Atlanta to celebrate and hear from leading legal innovation voices about The Next Era of Litigation

Excerpts:

The event celebrated the launch of Calloquy’s new virtual legal proceeding platform, which offers distinct usability benefits on a foundation of world-class security and industry-specific videoconferencing technology, including:

  • The platform’s intuitive design delivers a virtual experience that is akin to conventional legal proceedings, with clearly marked titles for all participants and traditional seating arrangements. The participants in a remote deposition, for example, are organized with plaintiffs on one side and defendants on the other.
  • Robust collaboration tools, combined with role-based security, ensure that only the right people have access to only the right information—and only at the right time. Documents or comments cannot accidentally be passed to an adversary.
  • The platform’s integrated case management tools streamline the complex litigation process by enabling meetings and proceedings to be scheduled, exhibits to be managed and transcripts to be created and archived all in one place.

“My goal in starting Calloquy is to help drive ‘the next era of litigation’, which means improving the way all people experience the legal system, from the most high-profile commercial litigator to the most underserved defendant and the lawyer who works pro bono on their behalf.”

 

Utah’s reforms offer model for serving low-income and indigent people, report suggests — from abajournal.com by Matt Reynolds

Excerpt:

The Utah model of reform allowing nonlawyers to offer legal services could be “critical” to serving people who can’t afford them, according to a Stanford Law School study published Tuesday.

The 59-page report by the school’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession offers an early look at how regulatory changes in Arizona and Utah have impacted the delivery of legal services. It also examined who is being served by innovations in those states.

 

Also relevant, see this upcoming webinar:

Upcoming webinar -- licensing legal paraprofessionals

Two neighboring states — Oregon and California — have recently come to different conclusions on whether to license paralegals to provide some legal services.

In July, the Oregon Supreme Court, with the support of the Oregon State Bar’s Board of Governors, approved a proposal to allow licensed paralegals to provide limited legal services in family law and landlord/tenant cases — two areas of law with large numbers of self-represented litigants. In August, the California legislature, after opposition from some lawyers’ groups, prohibited the State Bar of California from implementing, or even proposing, any loosening of existing restrictions on the unauthorized practice of law before 2025, effectively killing a proposal to permit licensing of paraprofessionals to provide limited legal services.

This webinar will explore how and why Oregon and California reached conflicting results and identify lessons learned from both experiences.

Register >>


Also relevant/see:

IAALS Panel Explores Alternative Paths to Legal Licensure — from iaals.du.edu

Redesigning Legal: Redesigning How We License New Lawyers from IAALS on Vimeo.


Also see the following items from Natalie Anne Knowlton (@natalalleycat) on Twitter

 

 

HSF embraces the metaverse with new digital law course for students — from legalcheek.com by Thomas Connelly

Excerpt:

The global law firm has launched a series of free workshops exploring how lawyers help clients navigate novel legal and regulatory issues relating to techy-topics including the metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), robotics and artificial intelligence (AI).

From DSC:
This kind of thing needs to happen in law schools across many countries.

 

Also relevant/see the following post I created roughly a month ago:

In the USA, the perspectives of the ABA re: online-based learning — and their take on the pace of change — are downright worrisome.

In that posting I said:

For an industry in the 21st century whose main accreditation/governance body for law schools still won’t let more online learning occur without waivers…how can our nation expect future lawyers and law firms to be effective in an increasingly tech-enabled world?

The pace of the ABA is like that of a tortoise, while the pace of change is exponential

 

 

Comprehensive Study of Regulatory Reform Finds It Is Driving ‘Substantial Innovation’ In Legal Services Delivery with No Harm to Consumers — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi

Excerpt:

A Stanford Law School study published today of regulatory reforms in Utah and Arizona finds that they are “spurring substantial innovation,” that they are critical to serving lower-income populations, and that they do not pose any substantial risk of consumer harm.

“The evidence gathered in this report shows that rule reforms can spur significant innovation, both in the ownership structure of legal services providers and in the delivery models used to serve clients,” the report concludes.

Also relevant/see the following article form Penn Law’s Future of the Profession Initiative: Law 2030 Initiative/newsletter:

How A Law Prof Is Training Non-Attys As Immigrant Advocates — from law360.com by Marco Poggio

Michelle Pistone, professor at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law, saw a bigger opportunity for online technology after using it to reach law students across the country. She realized online tech could be used to remotely train nonlawyers to become advocates for immigrants and even represent them in court, ultimately helping to combat the severe lack of legal representation in immigration cases. “This is a moment in time when we have an opportunity to think about new models for the delivery of legal services,” Pistone said.

 

Just another new Academic Year? Think again! — from The Educationalist by Alexandra Mihai

Excerpt:

Welcome to a new issue of “The Educationalist”! For many of us the new Academic Year just started or is about to start. These are busy times: catching up with our academic (and administrative) duties, reconnecting with colleagues and with students. It’s all too easy to fall back into an old pattern and go into the classroom with the same set of assumptions and expectations from previous years. That’s why I would like to call for a pause. A moment to collect our thoughts and acknowledge where we are. Think of what’s important. I believe this exercise is not a luxury; it is extremely necessary right now as it allows us to take stock of the current situation and decide on our next steps. Intentionally and not “by default”.

But how about letting go of the idea of “normal”? How about we take a moment to meaningfully reflect on our experience in the past three years in a try to see how it shaped the way we teach, learn, work, the way we interact with each other and with our environment?

 

Stanford Law School tries out income-share financing — from highereddive.com by eremy Bauer-Wolf

Excerpt:

  • Stanford Law School will allow some students to fund their law degrees with an income-share agreement, in which they will pay back tuition costs through a portion of their salaries over 12 years.
  • The law school is working with a nonprofit, Flywheel Fund for Career Choice, on the pilot program, which will initially be open to 20 students. The law school attendees will be able to have up to $170,000 of their tuition covered upfront in exchange for paying back 10% of their salaries.
 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian