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Ryan McClead is Principal and CEO of Sente Advisors, a legal technology consultancy that helps law firms turn innovation from a buzzword into an operational practice. He has spent more than two decades in legal technology, starting on a law firm help desk and working his way through knowledge management, global technology innovation leadership at Norton Rose Fulbright, and a stint as Senior Vice President at Neota Logic before founding Sente in 2018.

He is a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, a Fastcase 50 honoree, and the author of Your New AI Colleague: A Field Guide to the AI That's Going to Do Your Job. Before any of that, he spent a decade as a musical theater composer, which explains the cadence of his prose if not his career choices.

Back in the wild cyber-space days of the early 1990s the metaphors we used to describe our online tools were thrilling. We used web-browsers called Navigator or Explorer, we found our way in the real world using MapQuest, and we searched for content along the information super-highway using engines called Magellan, AltaVista, or Northern Light. 

I had the honor and pleasure of sitting between Mary Abraham and John Gillies at the ARK KM Conference in New York City over the last two days.  Mary and John are two of the most prolific and talented live tweeters on the planet. They attend conferences and tweet nearly every word coming from the

Several months ago I was asked by a partner to review the privacy policies and terms of service for a number of consumer cloud storage providers and to rank them according to how well they met his requirements based on firm policies, ABA missives, and a handful of other relevant opinions about client confidentiality and

Next Thursday afternoon at 3:30 PM in the Maryland A conference room of the Gaylord National Resort in Washington D.C., Sean Brady and I will be giving our presentation: APP 13 – The Future of Data Delivery Or: How I Learned to Stop Browsing and Love the App.  

Ours is the last session on


I don’t like meetings. I feel like meetings often fail to accomplish much beyond getting project team members into the same room once a week. We talk about the work we did the previous week, and we talk about the work we hope to do during the next week, but there are better ways to communicate


Last Wednesday, my wife and I were on day 3 of a 4 day Vermont cheese and maple syrup tour.  It was about noon on the hottest day of the year and we were driving down Route 35, about 30 miles from anywhere you’ve ever heard of, when I took a sharp corner and quickly

In light of the recent LinkedIn password debacle, I thought I would share a password secret I’ve been using for a while now, client side password hashing. 

Password hashing takes a simple password, runs it through an algorithm and spits out a more complex password.  Stanford University researchers developed an algorithm for passwords that

The Consumerization of IT.  Bring Your Own Device. Personal Cloud Storage.  These buzzwords have sent IT departments the world over into a tizzy.  In fact, 37% of all IT related articles written in the last 2 years have been about one of these three concepts.  (I totally made that stat up.) We, as IT people,