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
The Geek in Review Ep. 150 – Live From New York… It’s LegalWeek! Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert, i.e. the team behind the TGIR podcast, travel to their first legal tech conference in 2 years and, for their 150th episode (same, same!) discuss some of the LegalWeek highlights, along with the experience of being back among human colleagues for the first time in 700+ days.
Modernizing Court Technology: another podcast from LegalWeek worth checking out, this one an interview from Above the Law with Louisiana's Judge Scott Schlegel. Judge Schlegel, a techie from way back, leveraged the tools available to him to improve the administration of justice during the pandemic...and hopefully some of those efficiencies he and his team implemented will stay in place as (hopefully) life returns to normal.
Do Richer Lawyers Mean More Legal Tech or Less? Commercial lawyers have never had it so good – if you’re measuring just in dollars and cents – but does this do anything for legal tech? And does it perhaps even undermine the drive to consider new ways of operating? Artificial Lawyer explores three scenarios.
2022 Dynamic Law Firms Report: the folks at the Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute have just published their latest installment. They did something interesting - they looked at how their top performers pre-pandemic were doing, and compared that to their current rate of progress. Turns out that those that were doing well before accelerated their rate of success based on a number of metrics during the pandemic. It's a free download here (must provide contact info to download).
Florida Supreme Declines to Implement Valuable Reform Recommendations: The Florida Supreme Court “does not intend to adopt” most of the recommendations from the final report of its Special Committee to Improve the Delivery of Legal Services. The recommendations the court will not adopt include "proposals to test non-lawyer ownership in law firms, fee splitting with non-lawyers, and broadly expanding the work paralegals are allowed to perform." Read the Florida Bar's release explaining the reasons. I dissent.
The Great Courses: I don't want to try to come off as more erudite than I actually am, but I just discovered that my public library's digital collection includes "The Great Courses," which I've long seen advertised in very erudite places (NYT Book Review, etc.). The courses are free through the library, so I tried one on Ancient Greek Philosophy and it's terrific. It's like the most engaging undergrad professors creating a lecture-only course made for people who don't have the time to read endlessly. So, if your library has a digital collection, see if you have access (and to be honest, if it doesn't and you have. few dollars, it'd be worth paying for if you're looking for some pain-free self improvement).