Your Weekly Lawtomatic Digest
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The Main Course: 5 Things That Made Me Think This Week
$1B for Legal Tech in 2018: until last year, when someone asked how much VC had gone into legal tech, my answer was "about $720m in the past 6 years," which was then the most reliable/recent figure I could find. Seems like the pace/scope is quickening...
Data Commons for Law: this proposal, from Margaret Hagan and Jorge Gabriel Jimenez (Stanford Legal Design Lab) and Jameson Dempsey (Stanford CodeX) has potentially big, important implications for research into A2J (and beyond). Really exciting - keep your eyes on this initiative.
The Stormtrooper Problem: I found this post from the Farnham Street Blog particularly applicable to legal orgs and underscores the need to have thought diversity within them to create healthy, creative, effective teams.
Estonia Hires Robot Judges: they're planning to use AI to reduce small claims backlogs. With its investment in blockchain and very cool online citizen resources, Estonia is a great candidate to pioneer something revolutionary (and having once visited for a few days, I will go on record saying I'm willing to personally go investigate how it's working.).
Big Things Afoot at Clifford Chance Applied Solutions: Jeroen Plink is taking CCAS (which builds software solutions for clients) in new, and very cool, directions. Read up here.
Tube Benders: on a trip to NYC this week, I wandered into a storefront neon shop, complete with artisans bending glass in an open studio in the back. It was fascinating to see, and reminded me of this podcast episode of 99% Invisible on the neon industry. It'll give you a new appreciation for real-deal neon (as opposed to the LED-simulated stuff made nowadays.
About Gabe Teninbaum
Gabe Teninbaum (@GTeninbaum) is a professor at Suffolk Law (with additional affiliations at Yale, Harvard, and MIT) focusing on legal innovation, technology, and the changing business of law. Every day, he digest tons of content on these topics. The goal of Lawtomatic, his newsletter, is to curate the most interesting, valuable, and thought-provoking of these ideas.
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