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
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The Main Course: 5 Things That Made Me Think This Week
Data Privacy TikTok: turns out that TikTok is for more than just viral dances. Irene Mo, a privacy attorney and cybersecurity expert, has a TikTok channel devoted to offering short insights on data privacy and related topics...set to fun music. Irene is very effective at explaining complex topics, and gives actionable advice.
Interview with Dorna Moini of Documate on Artificial Lawyer: one of the most impressive legal tech execs is Documate co-founder Dorna Moini, whose no code document automation tool powers well known companies like Hello Divorce. It's been fun to see Documate's well-deserved success, and interesting to read about the company's plans for what's next. I especially appreciate their efforts - referenced in the interview - to educate legal professionals a process for productizing their own services.
Should Law Firms/Law Depts Have a Chief Data Officer?: this article from, MIT's Sloan School of Management, makes the argument that successful companies need CDOs to help guide strategic decisions, improve their team's performance, and transform processes/services/products. Seems to me that law firms should consider doing likewise, though relatively few have. (hat tip to LegalTech Startup Focus for tweeting this out).
Judge John Tran Feature: I enjoyed this ABA Journal piece on Fairfax County, Virginia's Judge John Tran. The article describes his flexibility and creativity when it comes to holding remote hearings, often starting sessions with a chance for people to test out their equipment and coming up with work-arounds so justice can get done, even when the tools necessary to do so remotely aren't cooperating. This is a stressful time for everyone, and I think for many lawyers and other court users, layering on malfunctioning video conferences or broken Ethernet cords on top of it makes it worse. Judge Tran's approach seems to focus on facilitating the ability for everyone - technophile or technophobe - to succeed.
Double Issue of Legal Business World: they've just dropped a double issue focused on the business of law, with so many interesting articles by so many terrific authors that it'd be silly for me to try to list them individually. It's free, so you can just check for yourself. Here's Issue #1 (pdf) and Issue #2 (pdf).
The Wolfawitzes' Vacation: one of my favorite documentaries is "I Like Killing Flies," about the now-deceased, very funny, very strange, very profane NYC restauranteur/amateur philosopher Kenny Shopsin. His daughter, Tamara Shopsin, is quite funny in her own respect, and I really enjoyed her book, Stupid Arbitrary Goal (on Amazon for $6). I was thinking about my favorite part of the book this week. It's an anecdote of Kenny's that Tamara relays about the Wolfawitzes and the best vacation they ever had. The anecdote is excerpted on Kottke.org.
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