I got interested in #legaltech after reading "Tomorrow's Lawyers" by @richardsusskind. In it, Susskind predicts what will happen to the legal industry over the next 20 years, but I wanted to know what people were working on *now*. Everyone I met said “Go to @wearelegalgeek”...
So I went to @wearelegalgeek! I attended all 3 days, and these are some thoughts on Day 1 from an outsider's perspective :). Also, I'm wrong frequently, so please feel free to call me out when you think I said something stupid :) (go easy on the company list I was movin fast)
Day 1 seemed to run like a normal conference (the few I've been to), with speakers, demos and corporate booths happening everywhere. Instead of listening to the awesome lineup of speakers ... I decided to talk to every company I possibly could lol: 
One thing I noticed....where were the B2C companies? Almost all the companies here were B2B SaaS companies. Is it simply that law firms / in house legal counsel have all the money, and the opportunities for scalable businesses don’t exist? What about LegalZoom and RocketLawyer?
For one, American companies (at least according to Euro consensus), raise way more money. Another difference is that the legal infrastructure differed enough that some Euro companies were looking at Australia and Singapore for expansion instead
Another diff is the regulations. In the UK, I think businesses can apply to be an alternative business structure (ABS), which allows non-law firms to offer legal services and also (I think) allows private equity firms to invest in alternative legal service providers (ALSPs)
I'm not entirely sure what the status is for the US here...I've heard around the block that @atrium has to do some funky accounting to get around the analogous restrictions in the US for legal service delivery, and it was only a few years ago that LegalZoom settled w the NC bar
Diving deeper into the types of businesses there on day 1...there’s a plethora of companies that help lawyers automate, analyse, and manage documents and contracts. Where were the e-discovery companies I had heard so much about back in the states?
The explanations I heard were that 1. the problems solved by e-discovery were even more prevalent in the US, and more importantly 2. the e-discovery market in the EU is mostly saturated / figured out by now. Now in the EU, contract analysis and document automation are the FOTM
On AI and legaltech: While many people consider AI to be snake oil for legaltech....most "AI" companies that I talked seemed to solve problems with straightforward ML-based solutions. Maybe I'm just gullible...and/or maybe all the bad cos were already filtered out already lol
Whether it is NLP, a knowledge graph, or clustering, it's pretty clear that these ML techniques (and others) will successfully be used by companies to massively improve the overall attorney workflow.
I find the initial downside for AI being that the best techniques are often statistical, and there are almost certainly parts of the lawyer workflow where either recall or precision (or both) have to be 100%. In those cases, the company has to package the tech s.t. it's useful
On cos like @atrium: From my brief conversations with people about Atrium, it's pretty clear: lawyers tend to be pretty dismissive, but competitors of Atrium and anyone who knows what they're doing respects them fully as a law firm w a unique strategy
Atrium, @sprintlaw, and @claradotco are all examples of the tech-law firm hybrid: law firm accompanied by adjacent "tech company" that builds tech for the lawyers. @Lexoo and Baobab are examples of legal marketplaces, connecting lawyers to big and small clients
IMO, the above are similar in that they're building Ops Tech. Whether the company is a law firm or an intermediary between the lawyer and his/her clients, they can start acting as PMs, slowly but surely taking over the work that the lawyers don't want to do and don't need to do
In fact, since almost all the contract management / document analysis companies are just improving the lawyer workflow (yes even the ML ones), they too are Ops Tech. Predictive algorithms, however, don't seem to have caught on, and I wonder why...maybe there's not enough data?
The realization that a lot of “legal innovation” was basically just OpsTech was a bit deflating. Automating the lawyer workflow doesn’t seem exciting to me, but that’s where the biggest gains are because legal operations are apparently stuck in the 1920s
What about innovation in the sense of rethinking legal service delivery? I simply don't know enough yet. There’s codifying the law, litigation finance, rethinking dispute resolution, #a2j, things I'm forgetting, and the scariest of them all: the unknown unknowns!
So where does all this leave me? Well, over the next two days, I got to interact with lawyers in Legal Design and learn about #A2J in @wearelawforgood (I'm considering writing up notes about these days as well). This plus the lessons from Day 1 gave me a couple of action items:
1. I've got to go to more US events/conferences (I think I just missed clio's). I got a good flavor for legaltech in the UK, but the market in US is different!
2. I need to look more into #a2j...is it possible that the most impact to people's lives will come from a2j nonprofits?
2. I need to look more into #a2j...is it possible that the most impact to people's lives will come from a2j nonprofits?
So, thoughts on conferences (heard of CodeX), companies/nonprofits, and books I should check out? Thoughts about what I've got to say about Day 1? I'd love any and all feedback here! @DanLinna @alexgsmith @HackettInHouse @DigitalLawyer @lawheroez @Clevy_Law @Nicola_Shaver
P.S. This was basically the first time I did something resembling "market research" and it was exhausting lol....so the amount of work and knowledge in just the first 2 chapters of "The Future of Professions" by @danielsusskind and @richardsusskind is mind-boggling 🤯🤯
