Fringe Legal Presents Bots @ Work

Adolfo E. Jiménez is a Miami litigation attorney whose practice focuses on international disputes. Mr. Jiménez leads Holland & Knight's South Florida Litigation Practice Group, which consists of more than 80 attorneys, and also leads the firm's International Arbitration and Litigation Team. He is Board Certified in International Litigation and Arbitration by The Florida Bar. He handles general commercial litigation matters in federal and state courts. His international experience, language abilities and management skills provide innovative and comprehensive representation to clients involved in complex cases.

We've spoken with technologists and innovators during previous podcast episodes, and this week we talk to a practitioner. In the show, we cover:

• what does a day in the life of Adolfo look like
• the impact of virtualization on the arbitration world
• benefits of multiple perspectives and how it can help stay updated
• thinking long term, and staying client centric

Find out more at the Holland & Knight website and on LinkedIn. 

Anna Lozynski is an award winning executive general counsel & author, turned Change Agent, Advisor and Influencer.  

Starting out at a major Australian law firm, she has spent the majority of her legal career in-house working in the banking, automotive, and cosmetics industries. In 2021, Anna has donned her entrepreneurial shoes and launched her own Advisory service, on a mission to help law and business adapt to the digital age. She is consulting in the areas of social media content creation, strategy & partnerships, legal ops/optimisation, change management, as well as coaching and general counsel freelancing.  

She believes that innovation is invigorating, change is energising and efficiency will never go out of fashion.  

In addition, she is an Advisory Board Member to Mys Tyler (a fashion tech startup), She Breaks The Law (a global female innovator network), and sits on the CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) Australia Chapter.  

Described as a change agent, Anna is a sought-after commentator, mindset coach and consultant both domestically and internationally – seeking to shift the dialogue in order to propel the corporate world forward. 

You are invited to join Anna’s online communities @legallyinnovative and LinkedInas well as @annaloz on Clubhouse. You can also download a variety of products, and read Anna’s blog here: https://annalozynski.com/  

I spoke with Matthew Waldman (Founder, San-Q, and Professor Keio Graduate School of Design) and Ruben Fernandez Vela (Senior Researcher, Samcara research lab) on transformation and innovation lessons from designing next-gen cities.

This was a fascinating chat, and much of the ideas we discussed could very easily be extrapolated for firms, in-house teams, indeed any business.

Here are three things I took away:

1. Planning for obsolescence and avoiding in-action
2. Balancing decision making and privacy
3. Fostering innovation is simple

Other resources mentioned during the episode

• Samcara circular design lab
• San-Q consultancy
• Professor Matthew Waldman on LinkedIn 
• Ruben Vela on LinkedIn
• Laying the foundation for Smart Cities
• What's fueling the smart city backlash?
• Carlos Moreno talks about the 15-minute city
• Beyond Tech - The True Meaning of a Smart City

Peter Dombkins is a national leader in legal transformation, legal operations, and the project management of legal professional services. He has received awards from the Financial Times and AIPM for change and legal practice management. Peter is Australia's first Adjunct Associate Professor in Legal Transformation, at the University of NSW Faculty of Law. Peter is also the Director for New Law at PwC Australia.

During the episode, we discuss:

• Is there a revolution coming to the legal profession?
• A brief history of changes in how professional legal services are offered from 1950 to - present day. Including the trend of appending “legal” in front of many things. 
• What is Legal Project Management, and how most lawyers are are already putting it into practice?
• What is transformation, and the difference between simple and complex transformation?

This episode is a treasure trove of resources. Here are various things that were mentioned or discussed:

• Peter on LinkedIn
• Legal Project Management: Projectifying the Legal Profession
• What's wrong with your transformation initiative? (ILTA Whitepaper)
• Cognitive Bias Codex
• Expectancy Theory
• Yerkes-Dodson Law
• A reflection on Thomas Kuhn's - The Structure of Scientific Revolution

Mouthpiece Law is a student-run not-for-profit. As the world’s first legal education & technology platform, they connect and empower law students and legal professionals to form a legal aid task force and address legal needs through low-cost legal services.

Avinash Pillay is the COO and Chief Legal Engineer at Mouthpiece Law.

Len Hickey is an IP lawyer and founder of Litigaze a case evaluation tool for modern legal teams that enables the evaluation of complex cases using intuitive visual planning.

You can find out more about Litigaze at and connect with Len Hickey on LinkedIn. 

Elani is a leader in building high-growth startups through streamlined operations. After earning her master's from King's College, London, and serving more than two years at the Peace Corp. Elani spent almost a decade helping emerging tech companies develop, optimize and scale their operations marketing, and people processes. Elani is now the venture program manager at MDR Lab.

Topics

• What is MDR Lab (1:55)
• Three different arms of MDR lab (2:33)
• Build vs buy - which gives you the biggest return on your investment (3:54)
• How does MDR decide which companies to have in the accelerator? (5:12)
• How the Launch program works (8:13)
• What is MDR Lab's strategy when it comes to investment (13:50)
• The MDR Lab Venture Studio (16:05)
• The long term strategy for MDR Lab (16:38)
• Emerging tech (19:56)
• How Elani keeps up with what's going on (23:38)
• Building a community around MDR Lab (25:30)

Full transcript of the episode can be found at FringeLegal.com

Resources mentioned

• The Lawyer - Horizon Newsletter
• Y Combinator
• MDR Lab
• Strictly VC
• Nate's news
• Elani on Twitter

Jim Chiang is the founder of My Legal Einstein, an AI-powered legal contract review tool. 

They actually go onto a site, they register, they log in and then they get you to try our algorithms against any of their contracts that they actually see. And our proof of value is very instantaneous and assess that as soon as they actually find ways to navigate their own contracts, to try it on their own contracts and be able to gain value from it when things that they actually might've missed come up very much in an instant.

And when you talk to you about time to value for AI solutions, you really want to make sure that they get to the aha moment where they say, ‘Oh, I miss something’. And that light bulb goes on. And that basically means that the AI has helped them to find something that they have missed before and that's a huge moment for us.”

You can subscribe to the newsletter for free at FringeLegal.com/newsletter.

Show notes

• Jim’s background and introduction to My Legal Einstein (01:33)
• How is My Legal Einstein different from other AI contract review tools (04:18)
• The challenges with delivery value, and how Jim approaches it (09:30)
• Algorithmic differentiation (12:08)
• Why focus on third party document (15:03)
• Future plans (18:28)

The full transcript for the episode is included below. If it is cut by your podcast player, you can find it at www.FringeLegal.com

Parul Patel is the founder of Fuel and Move, a consultancy that helps Partners of law firms and General Counsels develop their teams and lawyers for performance optimization. 

“So performance optimization means that you're delivering at a high level of performance, but you're not, it's not coming at the expense of exhaustion burnout, a lot of these things that we see quite prevalent within the legal sector.”

“So we're just focusing on the technical skills and the technical knowledge and forgetting really about: when greatness shines, greatness comes from the inside, from each individual. So yes, you've got the common skills, the common knowledge of the law, and really clients expect that as standard.

It's not that you get any bonus points for knowing the law, right? Your clients expect that, and technical knowledge and technical skills are expected as standard. That level of excellence is expected as standard. 

Once you've got your job and you're in the legal sector, you have to ask yourself: I’ve got myself in the room; how am I now going to shine in the room.”

You can subscribe to the newsletter for free at FringeLegal.com/newsletter.

Show notes

• Introduction to the podcast (01:02)
• Defining performance and performance optimization (02:43)
• The importance of training - similarities between lawyers and elite athletes (08:31)
• Technician vs a leader (13:06)
• Issues with progression paths (17:02)
• Designing immersive and impactful training programs (25:09)

You can connect with Parul on LinkedIn or via Fuel and Move.

Why successfully introducing artificial intelligence in legal tech is a challenge

Matthew Golab is the Director of Legal Informatics and R+D at Gilbert + Tobin. He leads a specialized in-house multidisciplinary legal informatics team that utilizes a variety of data analytics and eDiscovery, and other AI technology tools. Matthew has more than 20 years of experience in the legal technology industry, including two of Australia’s preeminent law firms.

If you've been in the legal profession for any amount of time, then I'm sure at some point, someone will have told you that there are nuance problems, it's very different, and things are difficult to change. What are you buy into that across the entire legal tech ecosystem, looking at problem-solving in legal when it comes to AI, there are some unique challenges. And I'm excited about this episode because we explore some of those challenges today. Before we get started, do note that during the conversation with Matthew, we jumped straight into the deep end, right at the beginning of the conversation. 

However, both Matthew and I make a concentrated effort to de-mystify as much of the jargon as we go through. And during the episode, we really do tackle why are artificial intelligence problems so difficult to solve when it comes to Legal use cases? Why don't we have better-performing models? Why don't we have models that actually work on any number of different data types or different types of documents or languages? Especially if you look at things like what's happening in the consumer world, or if you look at even other business verticals where things just seem to be much much further ahead. Why does it feel that the legal profession is still a long way behind?

We tackled that and a lot more. I don't promise that we have all of the answers, but certainly, we have a healthy discussion into why things are the way they are and what needs to happen to bring about change in the future. 

Before we dive in, if you haven't subscribed to my newsletter, please do so. As part of the newsletter, I actually provided some additional commentary to supplement this episode, specifically discussing how things like synthetic AI are being used in other industries where there are similar challenges in the form of small data sets with little variations.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for free at FringeLegal.com/newsletter.

Show notes:

• Introduction to the podcast (0:28)
• The deliberate use of language in legal vs. general language training sets (4:51)
• NLP, NLG, and NLU (7:08)
• Overview of the AI development process (9:49)
• The deliberate balance to be achieved when introducing technology to lawyers (13:22)
• High-risk tolerance as a barrier to continuous learning (15:09)
• The general sentiment about AI and the future (17:08)
• The challenge of working with different jurisdictions and languages (22:34)
• Training a specialist system vs a general-purpose system (26:37)
• The biggest improvement in tech within law firms (29:17)

You can connect with Matthew on LinkedIn, or find him on the G+T website.