Your Weekly Lawtomatic Digest
The Appetizer: Sponsors
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The Main Course: 5 Things That Made Me Think This Week
Kings of the North: This week, Clio announced a $250m USD investment, marking the “largest [fundraise] in Canadian history and one of the largest in legal technology." More coverage all over the place, most notably in this special report on LawSitesBlog.
Artificial Lawyer Joins Campaign for Facial Recognition Regulation: one of my favorite legal tech blogs, Artificial Lawyer, has joined others in urging lawmakers to regulate facial surveillance tech. This is an important issue to me, too, and I've written in support of pausing the use of these tools until reasonable regs can be created. This is by no means a political blog, and as a former federal law enforcement officer, I'm certainly sensitive to the needs of police agencies to have great tools...but I'd encourage everyone to read up on the issue and get involved if so-moved.
LexisNexis Announces 2019 Legal Tech Accelerator Class: twelve companies will be joining the cohort, with products covering everything from estate settlement to professional development for lawyers. Looking at the past classes, there are several of the companies as having gone to market and gotten some traction, so kudos to the participants, as well as to LN for investing in the future of law.
WordRake + Suffolk Law to Collaborate: the narrow story is that all 1Ls at Suffolk Law are going to get free access to some really cool legal editing software provided by WordRake. I'm not (just) bragging here: I'm excited about this more broadly because law schools and legal tech companies *should* partner to expose students to cool tools. It's good biz for the startups, it's good training for the students. There are other companies that have been generous with students (coming to mind are Clio, CaseText, FastCase, HotDocs, Community Lawyer, and plenty of others), but they often fly under the radar. These sort of collabs should be the norm IMO, and we should promote them when they do happen.
MIT's own law journal: a group at MIT is launching the MIT Computational Law Report focused on "the way that law and legal processes function also as computational systems." One of the most exciting parts about it is that, in addition to traditional long-form and short-form law journal pieces, they're also going to include "reproducible software and data projects (such as computational law apps, automated processes, data science projects, visualizations, games, etc)." Neat.
The Comet: this is an amazing short film made from linking thousands of still images of the Rosetta spacecraft orbiting, then landing on, the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2016. Really strange to see, and made even better by the other-worldly music.
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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