The Geek In Review

Brian Powers on the Entrepreneur Lawyer


Listen Later

One of the best things about the legal industry is that there are multiple pathways to success. We are all trained issue spotters, and our guest on this episode identified an issue and founded a new company to fix that issue. Brian Powers is the CEO and co-founder of PactSafe, a high-velocity contract acceptance platform used by such major companies like Angie's List, UpWork, BMC, TIVO, and others to handle large volumes of clickthrough agreements. We talk with Brian about what motivated him to take on this challenge, and how he sought out to change the way businesses approach these types of contacts, and bring efficiency to the market place, and the legal industry through technology and process improvements. Brian is just one more example of those in the legal field who has found an alternative path through identifying inefficiencies, and finding ways to correct them. 

Hat tip to Kristin Hodgins for her tweet this week when she saw that someone said that if law firms are going to us AI, we need ways to collect structured data. Hodgins tweet reply was spot on when she said “Guess who are experts at structured data? Librarians. Google didn’t destroy us; it help us by reducing low-value work like rote retrieval from our duties & allowed us to focus on high-order skills. AI will do the same.” Well said!

Information Inspirations:

We're doing AI Wrong

Zach Warren interviewed Brad Blickstein in a law.com article this week about how law firms are looking at AI the wrong way. When it comes to AI and law firms, Blickstein says that “[AI has] become a top-down thing: What are we doing about AI? It’s like asking, what are we doing about databases? It’s a crazy question. The question should be, what problems do we have, how do we solve them, and is AI or some semblance of AI a potential solution for that?”  Brad's company, Blickstein Group, is producing a Legal AI Efficacy report that is due out this summer. 

We're Communicating Wrong

This will come as a surprise to no one, but there can often be communications issues between executives and technologists. In a Harvard Business Review article, a scenario is set up between executives and data scientists, and we are walked through some examples on how to improve the communications between the two personalities. The article suggests you have a variety of projects and you build a team based on a variety of skill sets (and goes on to list them-data wrangling, data analysis, project management, subject expertise, storytelling, design)- so that the team can focus on what they do well but you have all the skills needed for a strong data science team. (We have a little fun with the data wrangling job.)

We're Podcasting Wrong

Check out Jared Corriea's latest episode of the Legal Toolkit podcast. Former law librarian, and podcast enthusiast, Tim Baran, has a number of suggestions for those of you who might be considering starting your own podcast. It turns out that Marlene and Greg are violating a few of the suggestions. 

more...

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

The Geek In ReviewBy Greg Lambert & Marlene Gebauer

  • 4.7
  • 4.7
  • 4.7
  • 4.7
  • 4.7

4.7

24 ratings


More shows like The Geek In Review

View all
This Week in Startups by Jason Calacanis

This Week in Startups

1,271 Listeners

a16z Podcast by Andreessen Horowitz

a16z Podcast

1,014 Listeners

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch by Harry Stebbings

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

503 Listeners

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish by Shane Parrish

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

2,635 Listeners

Hidden Brain by Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam

Hidden Brain

43,482 Listeners

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett by DOAC

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

6,878 Listeners

Practical AI by Practical AI LLC

Practical AI

189 Listeners

LawNext by Populus Radio, Robert Ambrogi

LawNext

35 Listeners

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg by All-In Podcast, LLC

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

8,909 Listeners

Hard Fork by The New York Times

Hard Fork

5,426 Listeners

The Artificial Intelligence Show by Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput

The Artificial Intelligence Show

154 Listeners

Pioneers and Pathfinders by Seyfarth Shaw LLP

Pioneers and Pathfinders

11 Listeners

The AI Daily Brief (Formerly The AI Breakdown): Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis by Nathaniel Whittemore

The AI Daily Brief (Formerly The AI Breakdown): Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

441 Listeners

Legal Innovation Spotlight by Infodash

Legal Innovation Spotlight

8 Listeners

AI + a16z by a16z

AI + a16z

30 Listeners