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.
If you like reading it, please subscribe. You're also invited to forward this to others who you think would benefit. Likewise, please email me with feedback, ideas, and tips so I can deliver what's most valuable to you.
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
Visual Contracts: I got a kick out of this Financial Times piece posted by Bruce Love, which is about using visuals instead of, or in supplementation to, words in contracts. If a picture can say a thousand words, I wonder if, when dropped into a contract, it saves a comparable amount of text (or does it create 1000 new ambiguities that could lead to litigation?). The article actually makes a pretty convincing argument that images have their place in contracts, and I am hoping to see some examples of them in the wild. Hat tip to Rachel Zahorsky who posted about it on LinkedIn.
Exponential.legal: a team of legal tech veterans has launched a new, online, maker-style course intended to teach legal professionals to "apply leverage to your existing legal expertise by creating legal value once, and delivering it widely." Music to my ears. Plus, very meta: teaching people to use leverage by creating a scalable course! And in "it's a small world" news, in describing the origins of the project, co-creator Mike Cappucci posted that it was inspired by a piece written by another co-founder of the Exponential.legal project (Dennis Kennedy) that Mike read about in...Issue #1 of this Newsletter! Congrats to the Exponential team: Mike, Dennis, Christie Guimond, and Marc Lauritsen!
Routes to Legal Tech Careers: the legal tech website, Lawtomated (I like the name - no relation!), is running a 6-part series on careers in legal tech, legal ops, and innovation. The second installment has a list of helpful, tactical opportunities to get a foot in the door, from becoming a Microsoft Power User, to participating in Clifford Chance's incubator.
LaunchFactory: can't come up with an idea for the next great legal tech startup? No problem. LaunchFactory has pre-vetted ideas and hires entrepreneurs to launch them, providing them with $300,000 in seed capital, domain advisors, incubation tools and office space. Not bad! Bob Ambrogi has a terrific interview with the CEO, Brad Chisum, and Alessandro Rinaldi, who, as director of innovation, leads the ideation of new startups.
Jae Um is Unbundling Her Career: Jae is among my favorite writers on legal innovation. Her analysis of industry trends regular gives me plenty of "a-ha" moments, and her ideas are always supported by quality research and data. In a new piece on Legal Evolution, she explains why she has made a counterintuitive career move of leaving a dream job mid-pandemic to create her own path. Her journey is fascinating and er willingness to share her thought process is invaluable.
Visualize Value: one of my favorite Twitter follows is Jack Butcher, a designer who publishes simple, black and white graphics at @VisualizeValue do an amazing job of boiling complex concepts into simple line drawings. They're often inspiring - not just for the ideas shared, but for the creativity by which he does it.
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