The Traklight Blog

This post was originally featured in Above the Law

Clio's annual conference brings together lawyers and legal tech enthusiasts to learn and share their insight and experiences to hopefully move their respective professions forward collaboratively.  At the 2018 Clio Con, Mary Juetten sat down with Kevin O'Keefe of LexBlog and Legal Tech Founders to discuss her own experiences with Traklight and her insights and advice for prospective entrepreneurs. Here are the main takeaways from the interview:

This is a guest post from Christy Burke of Burke & Company, originally featured on Legal IT Insider.

We were excited to be a part of the New Lawyers and Technology event in Irvine, sponsored by Case.one and hosted by Whittier Law School. Our panel was moderated by Allen Rodriguez of ONE400 and featured Bahar Ansari of Case.one, Jason Velez of 1LAW, and Josh Blandi of Unicourt, all of whom had interesting insights to offer on how new lawyers can bring a fresh perspective on technology to the law, and how technology can help to improve how lawyers serve their clients.

This article was originally featured on ABA Journal.

We held our second Denver event on the evening of October 26th, hosted by Lawgical. The evening's focus was a discussion on increasing access to justice through the use of technology in law. The evening kicked off with a Darwin Talk entitled "Time is the New Green" given by Adam Camras of Lawgical and Legal Talk Network.  Every small inefficiency in your life can add up to time wasted, both professionally and personally. That goes for law, where you can still find people running their firms using what are by modern standards crude tools. The firms that are succeeding are the ones who are using the latest in technological innovations and software to be efficient and save those precious minutes and hours that add up over the course of time.

If there is one fact that is most frequently repeated at Evolve Law events when discussing the current state of law, it is that most lawyers are resistant to change. This resistance helps to explain much of the current predicament that the legal industry is in. Businesses are adapting to new economic realities and reshaped marketplaces, but too many law firms continue to operate under the model they’ve had for decades — a model that fails to meet the needs of the modern client or customer. Where law firms have fallen short, legal tech has stepped in to try and fill the void in access to justice and legal help, as well as push the legal industry into the twenty-first century.

This article was originally featured on the ABA Journal.

For the second time, we were fortunate enough to organize a Darwin Talks event at the Minnesota State Bar Tech Conference, with a group of speakers who were able to offer a variety of perspectives on different areas of the law and how to improve them.

Our most recent New York event covered the new topic of "Data & Analytics in the Law" as we look to focus more on adoption and implementation of legal tech in panels and discussions. The evening kicked off with a Darwin Talk on Artificial Intelligence: An Historical Perspective from Dean Sonderegger of Wolters Kluwer.

Evolve Law was back in Silicon Valley for another great legal tech event, this one focused on the "Tech Savvy In-House Counsel." The evening kicked off with a Darwin Talk from Tina Fan of SimpleLegal. Tina's presentation was on "Best Practices for Implementing Legal Operations Software". When it comes to implementation, there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer for every company; there are many tools available for firms and companies to use. When looking at implementing legal ops software, in-house legal departments need to examine what their goals are as a department and ask whether they align with what the company goals are, as well as asking why they're looking to implement software and what they are hoping to accomplish with it. They also need to plan for how they want to implement the software and the resources necessary to get it implemented correctly and to get everyone in the department or company on board. Perhaps most importantly, when you're looking to automate a process, you want to make sure that it's a good process that you're committing to.

In our final installment of a five-part series, we close by interviewing Mark Oblad, around contract on automaton plus a look to the future. Blockchain and cryptocurrency law are opportunities for attorneys, not threats. Lawyers must embrace technology, although not all need to become as expert as Mark or other programmers in order to leverage technology.

Much has been written on blockchain recently, even in legal. We continue our series with Mark Oblad, VP, Legal and Finance at JW Player, who has coded a number of tools for automating transactions. Last time we talked about open source and industry source of information for contracts here.  This time, we look first at smart contracts. The concept of the “smart contract” has taken hold and is becoming increasingly the focus of legal technology groups, such as the Computable Contracts Initiative at Stanford Law School’s CodeX, Cardozo Law School’s Tech Startup Clinic, New York Law School’s Center for Business and Financial Law, law.MIT.edu, and Computational Legal Studies.

In our third installment with Mark Oblad, we take a step away from contracts to discuss open source and industry source. If you missed either Part 1 or Part 2 of this five-part series, we suggest reviewing both before diving into this background on the substantive creation of the forms.

We continue our discussion with Mark Oblad on his work within the contracts, smart contracts, and blockchain space in the second of a five-part weekly series. Not all types of contractual relationships have been reduced to fill-in-the-blank documents as discussed in Part I of this series.

Artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and chat bots are all hot topics these days. At a spring Seattle legal technology event, computable contracts were recommended as a focus for a future event. Mark Oblad, who I have interviewed previously here has done a deep dive into this space over the past eighteen months and below is part one in a series of five pieces on contracts, smart contracts, and blockchain.

We had our recent "Alternative Legal Business Models" event in Palo Alto hosted by our friends at Dentons. As always, the event sparked lively conversation on the topic of the current legal models, and the way that is is, could be, and should be changed for its own good and the good of those it is supposed to serve.

Last May I successfully ran for the GLSA Board because my personal mission is to support legal plans to  address our access to justice challenge. Further, I believe that technology within the plans is the leverage needed to serve more Americans. Join us in Scottsdale next month on May 18^th to hear from some legal luminaries as we gather for the GLSA Annual Education conference in conjunction with GP Solo, more information here.

We were back in Los Angeles on February 22nd for another great legal tech event, hosted by Dentons. We had a great panel who had a lot of interesting ideas about the future of technology in law, and how tech is changing the role of the in-house counsel.  Technology is an inexorable part of everyday life, and as such attorneys need to be familiar with it in order to not only address the emerging legal issues that can arise from technology, but also to protect their clients' information. But there is that familiar tension between lawyers and technology as attorneys worry about machines one day replacing them. The role of attorneys continues to change and adapt as in-house counsel and in-house legal departments become more and more prevalent at big corporations. The interaction between business and legal serves as a positive to the case for the continued existence of the human lawyer, as human relationships and judgment can't be replicated or replaced by machines.

Our most recent event was also the first in what is partially the hometown of Evolve Law. Our February 18 event "Legal Innovation: trends & Ethics from Different Perspectives" was hosted by Evolve Law members Ipro Tech in Phoenix. The evening's panel was moderated by Kim Taylor, CEO and President of Ipro Tech, and featured Josh King, General Counsel at Avvo; Maria Speth, Shareholder at Jaburg Wilk; Marc Chelsey, CEO of BMD Advisers; and Tighe Wilhelmy, VP Business Development at Local Lawyer Guide.