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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.

The five-word phrase in the title of this post is likely the second most common five-word phrase I utter on a regular basis.  The most common being, “What a crock of sh**!”

Coincidentally, I uttered my most common five word phrase on Sunday, January 29th when I first heard about the Trump travel ban on

I recently gave a ‘client case study’ presentation at the HighQ Client Forum in NYC (recapped here). On the day, I opened my talk thusly:

I am of the opinion that I could tell you absolutely everything I have done at the firm for the last three years in excruciating detail, with charts,

I wrote a post last week in which I called for a moratorium on the term Artificial Intelligence in relation to the law.  Instead I suggested that you should just replace AI with the term Automation because “they’re exactly the same thing, at least as far as the current legal market is concerned.”

Some people

I am calling for an official moratorium on the term Artificial Intelligence in relation to the law!  Everyone please just stop using it. It’s a needlessly charged word that only confuses and clouds the underlying issues whenever it comes up.

From now on any time you feel the need to use the term Artificial Intelligence, replace