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
Fortune Magazine Covers A2J: it's always exciting when a mainstream magazine does an article on legal tech and/or access to justice. The piece, by Patrick Forrest and Binh Dang of Quest for Justice, nicely lays out the A2J gap problem for its readers who might otherwise be unfamiliar and explains the opportunity technology provides to help improve it (hat tip to Charlie Uniman of Legal Tech Startup Focus).
Snowbirds, Rejoice: after some not-to-innovation friendly rumblings in Florida, their state Supreme Court adopted language that made it clear that an attorney who is in Florida and working remotely on behalf of clients in another state does not engage in the unauthorized practice of law by doing so. Put differently, you can sit leave your wintry office up north, then sit poolside in Florida and represent your clients in New York, Massachusetts, or Michigan without getting in trouble. Law Sites Blog details the long run up to how Florida got there.
Why is Selling Legal Tech So Hard? Richard Tromans, of Artificial Lawyer, explains why selling tools that will make legal organizations better, faster, and more economical remains a tough job. The article brings to mind a quote I once heard from an executive at LegalZoom: "we're not selling a better cheeseburger to people who like cheeseburgers; we're selling a cheeseburger to a vegetarian."
Digital Transformation Roadmap for Corporate Counsel: it's not all that often that I read an academic article that I feel compelled to share with folks, but this one definitely qualifies! Michele DeStefano, Bjarne Tellman, and Daniel Wu summarize interviews of 25 legal execs of S&P 500, and, along with the authors’ professional experience and secondary research, explore how legal departments are responding to and approaching digital transformation. My favorite aspect is that it's actionable because they create a framework for how organizations can apply what they've learned.
How Law Firm Librarians are Reinventing Themselves: maybe the most fascinating group of legal professionals are law librarians/information professionals. In my view, they're the ones with the perfect intersection of knowledge, experience, and skills to improve the functioning of legal organizations of all types. This Reuters piece lays out some of the ways law librarians are doing that now.
Occupied: one of my favorite political thrillers has (sadly) become more realistic than one would hope. Occupied is a 3-season Netflix series conceptualized by Jo Nesbo about a Russian "silk glove" invasion of Norway. The series covers how Norwegian society devolves into uncertainty, chaos, and danger as a result.
Now Booking
I'm booking a limited number of speaking engagements for 2022 (I speak to groups, as you might imagine, about law/innovation and creating organizational changes to embrace it). If you'd like me to come talk to your firm, department, or organization, please reach out and we can see if there's a fit.