By Gabe Teninbaum
My name is Gabe Teninbaum (on Twitter at @GTeninbaum). I'm a professor, as well as the Assistant Dean for Innovation, Strategic Initiatives, & Distance Education, at Suffolk Law in Boston. I'm also a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project. My work focuses on legal innovation, technology, and the changing business of law. Every day, I digest tons of content on these topics. The goal of this newsletter is to curate the most interesting, valuable, and thought-provoking of these ideas and share them with you.
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The Appetizer: Sponsors
For law students who want to retain more of what they study (2-4x as much vs cramming) and save time (50% less time vs. cramming), the science of spaced repetition is for you. SpacedRepetition.com is a tool to help law students & bar preppers learn more using cutting-edge science. Called the single most effective technique to learn by the American Psychological Association. Named one of the world's Top 20 Legal IT Innovations by ALM. More than 15,000 users spread across every law school in the U.S.
The Main Course: 5 Things That Made Me Think This Week
Jordan Furlong's Pandemic Update: back in May, I really enjoyed Jordan's series on how COVID-19 would impact the legal industry. Here - a half year later - he shares his thoughts about our progress and what seems likely to happen in the legal industry over the course of the next one. He covers everything from the future of work from home, to how the AmLaw 200 is re-envisioning business model. As always, well researched and thoughtfully done.
Amazon and the Law: law firms might not be ready to compete with Amazon, but it turns out Amazon is ready to compete with law firms. Mark Cohen's piece describes the inroads Amazon has taken into the legal industry so far, and describes the areas in which they could move much deeper.
Interview with Mary Shen O'Carroll, Google's Director of Legal Ops: it's always useful to get the perspective of leaders of powerful organizations, so I was especially glad to come across this interview of Mary Shen O'Carroll in the Asia Business Law Journal. She's the director of legal operations, technology and strategy at Google, and, in the interview, she gives an in-depth take on her views on the emerging field of legal operations, trends in legal technology and the future of in-house legal teams.
Software is Scholarship: this is a topic near-and-dear to my heart and Prpf. Houman Shadab of New York Law School does a terrific analysis of it in the latest release of the MIT Computational Law Report (the whole issue is worth reading. Link is here). His argument is that by transforming the way that knowledge is discovered and shared, software has the ability to revolutionize the way scholars communicate their ideas. The article explains how software applications enable the highest forms of scholarship and applies those lessons to law.
John Tredennick on Open Source (and More): this week, Bob Ambrogi had a fascinating interview with John Tredennick who recently sold his eDiscovery business for $75 million...only to start a couple of new ventures, including a non-profit devoted to improving access to justice and make legal operations and regulatory compliance more efficient through the use of open source software.
Wait But Why: this is one of my favorite websites, mostly because it explains really challenging topics in an engaging, entertaining way. This series they did on the nature of time is probably my favorite, but the site is full of little summarizes of big ideas, with illustrations that match. If you're not feeling up to deep thoughts on the nature of time, just sit back and listen to this, or this.
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