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
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. More than 17,000 users spread across every law school in the U.S.
The Main Course: 5 Things That Made Me Think This Week
Nasdaq.com covering legaltech: The folks at Nasdaq have posted a guest contribution from Jae Um and Casey Flaherty, both of LexFusion, about why the legal tech boom is just getting started. The piece itself is an excellent background on legal tech and its path toward adoption. Just as significant, it's cool that people from all different sectors surfing on the Nasdaq website will get exposure to this topic. Hat tip to Ron Friedmann.
DAOs (for law?): I read a Twitter thread by Peter Yang this week about how Distributed Autonomous Organizations operate. If you don't know about DAOs or haven't read the thread - and you really should read the thread - suffice it to say, it's a totally new way of thinking about organizing a business. I've been wondering (a) how one might use this sort of approach to solving legal problems. Because of client confidentiality issues, it likely wouldn't be feasible for most matters, but in terms of creating policy, advocacy orgs, and legal tech products...seems like a possibility. Give it a read and see if you agree.
Susskind's 10 Trends for Legal Tech for the '20s: if you weren't able to make it to the British Legal Tech '21 Forum this year, join the club. But...thanks to people with iPhones, we're all able to benefit from the inimitable Richard Susskind's prediction about 10 trends for legal tech for the coming decade. The one I see the most challenge with will be "changing the client experience," though the one I'm most personally interested in is his final item: that we'll be "overhauling how and what we teach." I suppose this is a good time to put in a plug for Suffolk Law's new Hybrid JD program, by which students attend in-person for the first year, and can take their upper-level remotely courses from anywhere in the world, as well as my new book that teaches people who to productize legal work!
"Redesigning Legal Talk" Event on UPL, 10/20 at 9a ET/11a MT: Public protection has long been the justification for licensing/regulation of lawyers. However, in multi-jurisdictional and increasingly remote practice environment, lawyers who innovate are put in the crosshairs of unauthorized practice of law (UPL). The panel will include my great colleague, Andy Perlman, who is the Dean of Suffolk Law; Mike Kennedy, bar counsel for the Vermont Judiciary; and Wendy Muchman, professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Their conversation will be moderated by Lynda Shely, ethics lawyer at the Shely Firm PC. Free and open for all to register. (Hat tip to Kelli Proia).
Five Ways Legal Teams Can Begin to Leverage AI: if you're leading a legal organization and are trying to envision ways that you can harness AI to do better work, this Forbes article Phil Sokowicz who is the co-founder and Managing Director of the legal tech company helpcheck, lays out several ideas in straightforward terms.
Squid Game: Subtitles vs Dubbing: if you're like most people I know, you've been watching the dystopian, South Korean horror-suspense show, Squid Game on Netflix. It's currently the #1 ranked show in the world. I don't speak Korean, and this has me, and viewers like me without the ability to understand the original language, with a quandary: subtitles, or dubbed? Turns out, it really matters. This Buzzfeed article spells out just how much is lost with dubbing for this particular show (a lot!). Of equal interest to the substantive reporting is just how many people are writing about this specific issue. If you Google "Squid Game dubbing vs subtitles," you'll get 14 MILLION results. From the biggies, like NBC News, the BBC, and Slate, to countless bloggers and assorted self-appointed TV critics, this very niche issue has captivated a lot of people.