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
Legal Operators Magazine: one of the great gifts to the legal innovation/tech community is the (free) Legal Business World magazine. If you agree, I've got very good news: the same team has just released the first issue of a magazine specifically aimed at the closely-related legal ops field. So many good articles in issue #1, my favorite of which is Mark Cohen's piece on humanizing the legal function!
Vedika Mehera Interview: it's always a thrill to see a former Suffolk Law student saluted for being an expert legal techie, and never more than this Artificial Lawyer interview. Vedika Mehera is the Innovation Advisor at Orrick, and in this interview, she covers some fascinating projects: from Orrick's own "skunkworks," to their investments in other legal tech projects, to building a legal tech directory free for all to use.
Nominations Open for Third Annual American Legal Technology Awards: the American Legal Technology Awards is today kicking off the third-annual round of nominations, according to Law Sites Blog. The awards ceremony will be at a gala on Oct. 9, 2022, on the eve of the Clio Cloud Conference, at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville. Click here to nominate your favorites for the award or to buy event tickets (full disclosure: I'm pleased to report that I've been invited to serve as one of the event's judges. I will not receive any compensation or benefit for doing so, other than the honor of participating in selecting winners).
Diversity Lacking in Legal Tech User Testing: Julie Sobowale writes that one of the biggest blind spots in tech development is user testing. This is because most companies neglect to have users from different ethnic, accessibility and language backgrounds to test their products. This can be fixed!
Lawyerist Podcast Interviews Justine Humenansky on Web3: In this episode, Justine Humenansky, the CFO at Rabbithole.gg, discusses Web3, DAOs, and how interested lawyers might participate in these conversations and communities. I think this is most interesting because Web3 talk is everywhere nowadays, and it's hard (for me, at least) to separate hype from reality. This interview helps to do just that.
Escher Sentences: I learned about a type of comparative sentence that, on first glance, is grammatically sound and makes sense, but after review...doesn't. An example: More people have been to Russia than I have. It's fun to play with these, as well as to identify examples of Elon Musk using them as he attempts to coherently describe his approach to free speech once he acquires Twitter.