Lawtomatic Newsletter Issue, #141
- Author Contribution
- Dec 2, 2021
- 4 min read
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
LSC Announces 2021 Tech Initiative Grants: The Legal Services Corporation just awarded this year's installment of grants, with $4.26m being spread across 36 outstanding programs. TIG grants, given out annually since 2000, illustrate how technology can be used to narrow the justice gap for low-income Americans and enhance the efficiency of the legal services organizations that serve them. Given the gigantic scale of legal tech investment in recent years ($1B+ annually), these grants also underscore just how little invested in access to justice, at least when compared to for-profit ventures. Read Law Sites Blog's full write-up on the awards here.
Overcoming Resistance to Innovation: one of the most frequent concerns I hear from legal professionals who want to try something new/innovative in their organization is that their colleagues are resistant to this sort of change. Here, Mark Ross and Bob Taylor, both of Deloitte's Legal Business Services group, provide a playbook for recognizing the challenges that might arise, and give specific, tactical advice for overcoming them.
DAO Forms to Buy the Constitution; Just Misses: I've given passing mention to DAOs (distributed autonomous organizations) in this newsletter, and spent a lot of time investigating them. It's a pretty fascinating concept because DAOs leverage lots of things I'm interested in: crowdsourcing, crypto, smart contracts, distance-based communication tools, and traditional business goals to do interesting things...like forming a group to raise $40+ million over a few short weeks in an attempt to purchase one of the small handful of original copies of the US Constitution. This Thomson Reuters piece by Joseph Raczynski details the effort and should be food for thought on how this structure might be used in the future.
Time Millionaires: I've been thinking about this Guardian piece by Sirin Kale on the subset of professionals who position their life to become "time millionaires," i.e. people who have a wealth of freedom and flexibility in how they spend their day. I think one of the reasons this concept is attractive to me is that implementing new technology offers people more ability to spend their time as they wish. I think the core assumption is that if a law firm implements a new technology that allows them to do 10x the work, they'll use that to become something like 10x more profitable. This article - and the people it describes - flip that script, and envision a 10x efficiency improvement as a way to work 1/10 as much and enjoy far more freedom to spend their days as they see fit.
Product Jobs are Next: this is a post that's right up my alley. Jason Dirkx explains why the legal job of the future is in product development. In short, productization of legal services is super hot right now - with good cause (indeed, I think someone just wrote a book on the topic!) and that means that legal organizations will need people who are able to identify opportunities to package services into products. This process requires a suite of skills that traditional legal professionals don't have, but that can be learned/trained for the cadre of people working in product development that the post envisions. Exciting concept and I hope it proves correct.
Hertz: one of the trending topics on Twitter on the eve of this newsletter's arrival in your inbox was "Hertz" with a description "A Hertz customer shares a detailed letter they wrote to the car rental company following a bad experience over Thanksgiving." It turns out that the letter was written by a law prof at St. Johns, and former colleague at the Yale Information Society Project, Kate Klonick. It's a demand letter - a letter that describes a legal problem and demands a remedy from the wrongdoer - but it's so terrifically written that I think it's actually destined to end up included in legal writing syllabi. I read it twice, through gritted teeth, because I think we've all had some flavor of this experience (though likely not as bad, and at least in my case, not something I could articulate nearly as well). If you feel badly that *you* can't write like that, don't feel too badly: Kate's work has been published in rags like the New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic (not to mention academic work in the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal). Not bad. Hertz met its match.
It's free, but it's not cheap
If you'd like to support this newsletter, one way is by purchasing my new book, Productizing Legal Work. You can read a review of it by Richard Granat or this one by Carolyn Elefant.
See you in 2022
I put this newsletter out weekly during the semester and, alas, the semester has come to an end. So, until we meet again, I'm going to be spending time at home with family (such a novel idea during the pandemic!), preparing for the spring semester, and relaxing. I'll be back in January. Best wishes for happy holidays and fingers crossed for a brighter 2022.
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