In our last episode before the new year, we're talking with Ralph Baxter, a true pioneer in the legal industry. Ralph is a strategic advisor to law firms, legal tech companies, and corporate law departments, but he is probably best known for his leadership at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP. As chair and CEO of Orrick for more than two decades, he launched several groundbreaking initiatives that modernized the way the firm operated and served its clients. Today, he is a member of the board of directors at Intapp, and a member of the legal advisory board at LegalZoom. Ralph's work has extended across the legal ecosystem: legal education, law firms, law departments, legal tech companies, and public interest projects and regulatory reform. He also devotes time to thought leadership, writing a blog, and speaking at seminars and events.

In our wide-ranging discussion, Ralph talks to us about his initiatives at Orrick, the key to change management, how generative AI will change legal pricing models and legal work, and the advice he shares with people considering a legal career.

As 2024 comes to an end, we will be taking the next two weeks off. Thank you for listening in on all the wonderful discussions we’ve had this year. Thank you to our guests as well. We will return with new episodes on January 8th. Happy Holidays!

We're pleased to welcome back Ed Walters, a thought leader in legal tech and innovation. Since Ed last spoke with us, he has become the chief strategy officer at vLex, which merged with Ed's previous company, Fastcase. vLex is a platform using AI solutions to streamline workflows and provide lawyers with greater access to knowledge and resources. About a year ago, the company launched Vincent AI, a legal intelligence platform that references real cases and materials from vLex’s law library of over one billion legal documents. The tool is used by law firms, legal departments, and law schools around the world. In addition to his role at vLex, Ed continues to teach as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center and at Cornell Law School. He also writes on various topics about innovation in the legal industry.

Today, Ed talks about how Fastcase merged with vLex, the response to Vincent AI, and how he hopes generative AI will enhance access to justice and improve lawyer training.

Today's guest, Taylor Sartor, is the creator and legal director of FosterPower, a movement to improve the lives and futures of youth in foster care in Florida, by providing them information on their benefits, protections, and legal rights. Taylor is also a senior attorney at the L. David Shear Children’s Law Center, where she represents youth in foster care. Taylor focuses on issues related to human trafficking, disabilities, commitment in psychiatric facilities, aging out of foster care, and school-to-prison pipeline prevention, among many others. She came up with the idea for FosterPower while she was still in law school working with youth in foster care who had many questions about their rights and the resources available to them. The organization offers answers to these questions through a mobile app. An alum of Stetson University College of Law, Taylor is also the founder of Child Advocates of Stetson Law, an organization that recruits law students to become guardian ad litem volunteers, mentors, and leaders to advocate on behalf of children facing abuse and neglect. Additionally, she served as an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Children’s Law Center from 2018 to 2020.

In our wide-ranging discussion, Taylor talks with us about the range of issues youth in foster care must contend with, how FosterPower earns trust from its users, where her passion for youth in foster care comes from, and her experience as an Equal Justice Works fellow.

This week, we welcome Nelson Quintero, the co-founder and chief operating officer of ECFX, a company that fills in the gaps in legal workflows with automated solutions. Nelson is an attorney with over 20 years of experience in the field of intellectual property, focusing on patent and trademark prosecution for both US and foreign clients. ECFX's main solution is an automated process for managing the flow of electronic court filings. He thought of the idea for ECFX with his friend Dan O'Day, a lawyer and programmer. Nelson and Dan developed the software as a way to extract documents and gather information from a large volume of emails associated with electronic course filings, hoping to boost efficiency and cost savings. Since its launch, ECFX has helped numerous law firms of all sizes meet their automation needs.

In our conversation, Nelson spoke about his experience launching ECFX during the pandemic, why IP law had suited his personality, dealing with change management, and his advice for lawyers pursuing entrepreneurship.

This week, we are replaying the latest installment in our virtual roundtable series, titled “Understanding the Legal and Commercial Challenges of Disinformation and Deepfakes.” For those who may not be familiar, a deepfake is a type of synthetic media where images, videos, or audio may seem real, but have been manipulated or generated with artificial intelligence. While some synthetic or manipulated media have legitimate applications, the ability of deepfakes to exploit and spread disinformation poses various commercial and legal threats, which organizations must be prepared to address. Our panel included Catherine Porter, Chief Business Officer of Prove; Hon. Paul W. Grimm (Ret.), professor of the practice of law and director of the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke Law School; and Puya Partow-Navid, partner at Seyfarth.

We discussed a variety of topics, including the biggest risks of deepfakes that organizations must tackle for consumers, the impact of deepfakes on courtroom and evidentiary rules, the legal frameworks in place to protect against deepfakes and disinformation, and technological solutions and best practices for businesses.

Today’s episode of Pioneers and Pathfinders takes a slightly different approach. We are joined by Tony Thai, a returning guest, who is the CEO and Chief Engineer of HyperDraft, a contract automation software platform for various enterprises. We’re also joined by Byong Kim, Senior Director of Technology Innovations at Seyfarth. He runs Seyfarth Labs, which is a tech R&D team that leads the way in applying emerging technologies to the legal profession. Earlier this year, the three of us led a highly curated roundtable at Seyfarth’s New York office for in-house counsel, innovation leaders, and Seyfarth partners, where we had an open conversation on best practices for the implementation of AI and automation. This was a confidential conversation, so we didn't record it. Today, we won’t be talking about specific people or comments made at the roundtable, but we thought we'd go over what we had learned from it and how we see the progression of AI and automation in the industry, as well as best practices.

We discussed how generative AI is often treated like a "solution in search of a problem," how organizations are approaching implementation of the technology, potential security and confidentiality concerns with using generative AI, and advice for legal professionals starting to use this new technology.

Our guest this week is a leading thinker on the application of generative AI in the legal profession. Dr. Megan Ma is the associate director of Stanford’s Law, Science, and Technology Program, as well as the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics—better known as CodeX. She also teaches courses in computational law and insurance tech. Dr. Ma has a background in a variety of fields: She majored in political science and economics, has master's degrees in health law and economic law, and earned her PhD in law. Additionally, Dr. Ma is an advisor to the PearX for AI program, and serves as editor-in-chief for the Cambridge Forum on AI, Law, and Governance, as the managing editor of the MIT Computational Law Report, and as a research affiliate at Singapore Management University in their Centre for Computational Law.

We had a fascinating conversation about Dr. Ma’s lifelong interest in linguistics, how "empathetic" large language models can be for users, how generative AI could change lawyer mentorship, and her thoughts on the future of technology in the profession.

This week, we're joined by Nicole Clark, founder and CEO of Trellis, a state trial court research and analytics platform. For several years, Nicole was an attorney in private practice, handling business litigation and labor and employment matters. The idea for Trellis came from her experience doing research for complicated summary judgement motions. Nicole worked with software developers on an early version of the tool, collecting state trial court data and creating an extensive database of tentative rulings issued by judges in Southern California. As Nicole's practice flourished from using the database, she decided to turn it into a scalable legal analytics platform that would help democratize access for state trial court data. Outside of her work at Trellis, Nicole shares everything she has learned over the years about legal analytics with other legal professionals by authoring articles for ABA Journal, New York Law Journal, Texas Lawyer, and Santa Barbara Lawyer. She is also regularly featured as a legal expert in Southern California Record, and has appeared as a guest on podcasts produced by Above the Law and Corporate Counsel Business Journal.

In our discussion, Nicole spoke about her transition from practicing law to developing Trellis, her experience starting college at 16, how lawyer engagement with tech has changed in recent years, and her advice for those considering making a leap to business.

Today's guest is Ted Theodoropoulos, CEO of Infodash, a cloud-first legal intranet and extranet platform. Ted has over two decades of experience in the legal tech industry, having led the development and delivery of innovative solutions for law firms. Over the course of his career, he has worked as a database engineer at Microsoft, senior vice president of Bank of America, and president of Acrowire—a technology consulting firm. At Infodash, he and his team help law firms leverage their Microsoft 365 investment in order to stay connected with their employees, their clients, and their work in the new age of remote and hybrid work. This year, Ted was named ILTA's 2024 Innovative Leader of the Year.

In our conversation, Ted discusses his experience at ILTACON 2024, what new legal professionals should understand early in their careers, how he has been using generative AI in his personal and professional life, and his vision for the future of Infodash.

Today's guest, Lourdes Fuentes, is the founder and CEO of Karta Legal, a legal operations and law firm management consulting firm dedicated to transforming law firms and legal departments through efficiency. Lourdes has over 30 years of experience in the legal field, focusing on insurance litigation, legal technology, and legal operations, among many other areas. As a practicing lawyer, she took an interest in eDiscovery and document digitization at a time when these processes were still very new. Having gained years of experience and knowledge, she shifted her focus toward improving the delivery of legal services for law firms and legal departments. In her work, Lourdes utilizes curated design thinking, Lean Six Sigma, and Agile project management tools and techniques tailored to the management of the business of law and legal processes.

In our wide-ranging discussion, she talks about the origins of Karta Legal, the challenges of encouraging lawyers to embrace technology, how her thoughts on generative AI have changed over time, and her advice for those starting a legal tech business.