Mark Harris is sounding an alarm – or, as he puts it, staging an intervention – for corporate counsel. 

Harris and Alec Guettel, the original founders 20 years ago of alternative legal services provider Axiom and, since last year, the CEO and CFO of contract management company Knowable, have taken the unusual step of posting an open letter that they describe as an unsolicited intervention for general counsel. 

Businesses are about to confront a tidal wave of urgent questions from suppliers, customers, partners, employees, and others, they warn, the answers to which are buried in thousands or hundreds of thousands of commercial contracts. Unfortunately, they say, most companies don’t know what’s in their contracts or even, in many cases, where those contracts are. 

“We woke up a couple weeks ago and realized, there is no time,” Harris and Guettel wrote. “Our clients, you, are drifting through these pandemic rapids, focused on more important issues like the immediate safety and sanity of your employees, heading right for a cliff.”

What has led to this situation and what can corporate counsel do about it? In this episode of LawNext, Harris, who we previously interviewed in Episode 56, returns to LawNext to share his analysis and advice. 

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Virtually overnight, COVID-19 changed the landscape for law firms and how they serve clients. While some firms were caught unprepared – struggling to adapt to a remote work environment and lacking the technologies and procedures to ensure seamless client service and team performance – other firms made the pivot quickly. What gave these successful firms the edge? 

In this episode, which was recorded as a live video webinar on May 7, 2020, we speak with the heads of innovation at four major U.S. law firms about how they responded to the pandemic and its impact on their firms. The panelists are: 

• David Cambria, Chief Services Officer, Baker McKenzie.
• Linda Novosel, Chief Innovation and Value Officer, Blank Rome, LLP.
• Meredith Williams-Range, Chief Knowledge and Client Value Officer, Shearman & Sterling, LLP.
• Adam Ruttenberg, Senior Partner and Chairman of the Technology Committee, Cooley, LLP.

Joining as co-moderator for the discussion was Josh Becker, head of Legal Analytics at LexisNexis. 

Special thanks to Valerie Chan, founder and principal of Plat4orm PR, for helping to organize the panel. 

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The coronavirus crisis has created turmoil for legal education and bar admissions, as law schools have shut down their campuses and states have put off bar exams. One proposal, advocated by Jennifer L. Mnookin, dean of UCLA Law School, and Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law School, in The National Law Journal, is for states to provisionally license law school graduates for two years, without a bar exam. 

Of course, bar admission is only one of the many difficult challenges facing law school deans as they wrestle with online courses, uncertainty about student internships and placements, disrupted admissions, and enormous questions about planning for the coming academic year and beyond. 

On this episode of LawNext, Dean Mnookin joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her thoughts and experiences on legal education in a lockdown and beyond.  

Dean of UCLA Law since 2015, Mnookin is also the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro professor of law and faculty co-director of PULSE @ UCLA Law (Program on Understanding Law, Science & Evidence). 

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As chair of the Specialty Treatment Courts in Jefferson Parish, La., Judge Scott U. Schlegel manages what may be one of the most advanced courts in the country for delivering justice online, and he does it almost entirely with off-the-shelf software he cobbled together himself. 

Even before the coronavirus crisis caused courts to shut down, Judge Schlegel was conducting hearings via Zoom, scheduling sessions via Calendly, and communicating with staff and counsel via Slack. 

But when courthouses in Jefferson Parish closed last month, it presented an even-greater challenge for the programs Judge Schlegel oversees, which focus on treatment and rehabilitation of drug and alcohol offenders. 

With help from legal technology companies, he rallied to further innovate, working with LawDroid to create a text-based chatbot to check in on probationers and with Documate to develop an online system for defendants to enter guilty pleas from prison. 

In this episode of LawNext, Judge Schlegel joins host Bob Ambrogi to describe the systems he has built and how they are being used to keep the wheels of justice turning even with courthouses shut down.   

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As the COVID-19 pandemic has forced legal professionals to work remotely, many are scrambling to find the best tools and technology to help them manage their legal matters and continue to closely collaborate with their colleagues. While many law firms already use Microsoft Office 365, fewer are as familiar with its core collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams.  

Our guests for this episode of LawNext believe that Teams is a powerful tool for lawyers working from home and one that can effectively serve as a full matter-management platform for law firms and legal departments, entirely within Office 365. They are:

• Mike Ammerlaan, director, M365 Ecosystem Marketing.
• Carol Lynn Grow, vice president of marketing and sales, LawToolBox. 

Ammerlaan and Grow will explain why they see Teams as a powerful tool and discuss how lawyers can use Teams for collaboration, conferencing and case management. 

As a supplement to this episode, Ammerlaan and Grow recorded a video demonstrating the features and capabilities of Teams for legal professionals. 

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Ever since the publication of his seminal 1996 book, The Future of Law, Richard Susskind has remained the world’s most-recognized and most-respected speaker and author on the future of legal services. But even he could not have foreseen the sudden relevance of his latest book, Online Courts and the Future of Justice. 

On this episode of LawNext, Susskind joins host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation about the legal profession and the judicial system in a time of global pandemic. Will the pandemic fast-forward law’s leap into the future? Will there be fundamental change in legal services delivery? Will courts move online more quickly than even he had thought? Susskind shares his thoughts on these questions and more.

Susskind is an author, speaker, and independent adviser to major professional firms and national governments. His main area of expertise is the future of professional service and, in particular, the ways in which technology and the Internet are changing the work of lawyers. He has worked on legal technology for over 30 years. 

Susskind has, since 1998, been IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. He is president of the Society for Computers and Law, chair of the Online Dispute Resolution Advisory Group of the Civil Justice Council, and chair of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute, where he is also a visiting professor. He also holds professorships at UCL, Gresham College, London, and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

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David Lat defied the popular conception of who should be hit with a serious case of COVID-19. Just 44 years old, a two-time marathoner, with a young family and a successful career as a legal recruiter and journalist, and best known as the founder of the blog Above the Law, he did not fit the mold of a person at high risk. 

But what started early in March as fever and chills eventually led to 17 days in a New York City hospital, six of them spent intubated and on a respirator in ICU. As two major news organizations began preparing his obituary, his family, friends and thousands of social media followers prayed for his recovery. 

Over half of COVID-19 patients who go on a respirator do not survive. Lat was one of the fortunate ones. After six days, he recovered enough to be extubated and moved out of ICU. Then, on April 1, he sent out a Tweet announcing that he was about to be discharged. 

Now recovering with his husband and son at his parents’ home in New Jersey, Lat -- still hoarse from the intubation -- joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his ordeal and share his thoughts on what he learned going through it. 

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In Australia, as elsewhere, COVID-19 is creating a surge in the demand for legal help, especially among low-income individuals, as people face job losses, evictions, bankruptcy, domestic violence, and end-of-life issues. Further complicating the situation there is that parts of the country are still recovering from the bush fires that only recently were extinguished.

With face-to-face legal help not possible, technology is a critical tool and effective tool in meeting the demand for help, as Justice Connect, an Australian legal services charitable organization, is demonstrating. In recent years, it has developed a number of innovative tools to help people get legal help and understand their legal rights. 

Our guest this week is Kate Fazio, head of innovation and engagement at Justice Connect. A former corporate lawyer, she leads the organization’s development of online and technology tools to increase access to justice and legal empowerment.   

In addition to its COVID-19 resource center, Justice Connect’s technology includes an online intake and referral tool, a cloud-based case management system, a Pro Bono Portal matter distribution system that they are working to expand globally, and the newly launched Justice Connect Answers, which allows people to ask discrete legal questions and receive quick, confidential answers from attorneys. 

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Even as the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled any sense of business as usual last week, the document-automation company Litera seemed to stay a step ahead, becoming one of the first major legal technology companies to take steps to continue operations, quickly pivoting to develop a lite version of its deal-management platform to offer for free, and completing the notable acquisition of Best Authority. 

Litera has been a company on the move since 2016, when a $100 million investment from K1 Investment Management led to the combination of four document-technology companies – Litera, Microsystems, XRef and The Sackett Group – into a single business. After K1 sold the company to Hg Capital Trust last year, two more major acquisitions followed, of U.K. company Workshare in July 2019 and deal-management platform Doxly in August 2019. 

Leading the company through these changes since 2016 has been CEO Avaneesh Marwaha, a former intellectual property lawyer who transitioned his career into a series of business-executive roles, including as chief operating officer of Keno Kozie Associates, a major provider of outsourced IT for global law firms. 

In this episode of LawNext, Marwaha joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the recent news involving his company, how his company is continuing to serve customers in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the development of Litera into the company it is today, and the company’s future plans. 

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On Monday, March 23, the practice management company Clio announced that it was committing $1 million to a disaster relief fund to help the legal community successfully navigate the challenges and hurdles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We want to ensure lawyers are set up to succeed as well as ensuring their their clients can continue to get the legal help they need,” Jack Newton, the company’s cofounder and CEO, explained.

In this episode of LawNext, Newton joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why his company created the fund and how it will be deployed. He also shares his thoughts on how the coronavirus crisis will reshape the legal profession and the practice of law, both over the short term and well into the future. 

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