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
LTC4 Document Creation Guide: For over 18 months, a group assembled by the Legal Technology Core Competencies Certification Coalition (LTC4) worked to create a guide describing the best practices for creating documents. It cuts through the thousands of features available in current word processing software (some versions of Word have over 4,000 features!), and tells you how to use it most efficiently from a technological perspective. The guide covers everything from formatting to creating templates. This is exactly the sort of thing that seems dry until you actually dig in, and then it turns out to be fascinating and super valuable, too.
How AI Will Change Legal Jobs: This analysis from InformationWeek.com of how AI will change IT jobs provides several analogous examples. It also provides a ray of hope for those who feel the footsteps of our computerized overlords coming for their jobs to stay relevant (hat tip to Dan Linna of Northwestern Law - if you don't follow him on Twitter, you should!).
Report on Utah's Regulatory Sandbox: this week, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System released a report analyzing the data generated by Utah's 30 nontraditional legal entities licensed over the past year. The report is quite optimistic, finding that the "sandbox is providing thousands of consumers with a variety of legal services, creating new jobs for lawyers and other types of professionals, and equipping courts, policymakers, and other justice system stakeholders with incredibly valuable data." Dig in to their analysis of the sandbox (pun intended) and see for yourself.
Interview with Rudy DeFelice on Investment in legal tech: In a recent talk, Rudy DeFelice, a legal tech pioneer and co-founder of Keesal Propulsion Labs, examines investment trends and the impact of tech on the legal space. The interview will be valuable for current and future legal entrepreneurs. It's available on demand, along with 60+ other talks, by joining the Community of Legal Innovators (CLI). CLI membership is free and open to anyone who is interested. Sign up here. (hat tip to Connie Brenton who both served as the interviewer and posted about it on LinkedIn)
Richard Granat's Law Product Makers Blog: one of the people I admire most in legal tech is Richard Granat. He's done remarkable things, in many instances years before others, to promote virtual law practice and productization of legal services (in fact, the opening anecdote in my new book on productizing legal work - out later this year - is about Richard). For those reasons, I was excited to learn he is launching a new blog called Law Product Makers. I think this is actually Lawtomatic Newsletter's first breaking news story, as his blog doesn't officially "go live" until later today, but gave me permission to let readers of this newsletter in on it early.
Gastro Obscura: one of my favorite sites on the web is Atlas Obscura, where anyone can learn about interesting, strange, and wondrous places in their community and around the world (my favorite part of it: there's a "what's near me?" feature on their app/website, and I like to check it whenever traveling as a way to explore new areas.). Well, turns out that the same team has a site devoted to interesting, strange, and obscure foods from around the world. They have a site, newsletter, and their Instagram is great too. It's certain to both make you hungry and steal a few hours of your time.