This post was originally published twelve years ago today. However, as I ponder the topic posed by Northwestern Law Professor Michael Zuckerman about how law students shouldn’t use automated writing technology because they will miss out on learning how to do initial drafts, this post seems as relevant now as ever. – GL]

I read a lot. But, I don’t usually read the same book twice (because I already know how it is going to end!) But, I do love me some SciFi and Vampires and Humor, so when I get that all rolled into one, I make an exception and read the book again. I do it for fun, not for business research or to get some type of deep philosophical experience out of the deal. However, coming in on the bus this morning, and re-reading Christopher Moore‘s 1995 book Bloodsucking Fiends, I read a passage that made me put the book down and really think. (You can read the passage starting at page 84 via Google Books.)

Moore’s characters, a bum who is known as the Emperor of San Francisco [who I later learned was fashioned after San Francisco citizen Joshua Abraham Norton], and a young aspiring writer named C. Thomas Flood are discussing the well-dressed business folk who are scurrying about. The Emperor calls them “Fallen Gods” because the things that have made them successful are going away and they will soon be losing out to the “chinless techno-children… and their silicon-chip reality.” Then the Emperor says something that really got me thinking. “Uncreative thinking is done better by machines.”
Now, skip ahead 14 [26] years and the chinless techno-children are now seen as the new Gods. The old Gods and their ability to push paper around has been replaced by the new Gods’ ability to push large amounts of data around. The new Gods’ success has simply been to find a more efficient way of pushing information (a.k.a. ‘paper’, ’emails’, ‘databases’, etc.) around. But, has the increase in efficiency helped make either man or machine more creative thinkers? Or, have we created a situation where we’re still on an uncreative path, but making up for it in volume?
When we look at technology in the legal setting, whether it is legal research, knowledge management, or electronic discovery, we’ve seemed to have taken the last 14 [26] years to increase the scale of what we do. We can now push more information around — We can now store Terabytes of information — We can now virtually capture every keystroke that an attorney makes. But, have we made ourselves more creative, or have we simply increased the volume of information each of us can access? Uncreative thinking is still done better by machines. What we really need to ask is whether we are using the efficiency of the uncreative machines to push these tasks off of our people and allowing them to use their creativity to come up with better and more effective solutions?
Thanks to a book about vampires, I was reminded that machines (computers, software, databases, etc.) are efficient yet still uncreative in handling information and should be designed for our human resources to be more effective and creative in accomplishing their work. So, when you’re ready to upgrade that hardware or software, you really should sit down and ask yourself this: “How does this make my people more creative and effective?”

 


Suffolk Law Professor Shailini George joins us to talk about her new book, The Law Student’s Guide to Doing Well and Being Well. Professor George talks about the need for law students to take better care of their mental and physical health in order for them to not only do well in law school but to be better lawyers once they enter the profession. Whether it is stopping task switching, setting boundaries on their time, or allowing themselves to be bored, she lays out a guide for students to do better, by being better to themselves.

She shares some of the techniques and projects she developed in her classroom, that help law students better understand how they need to focus on the task at hand.  And, how to reduce the number of distractions that call out for their attention. This Fall, Professor George begins teaching a new course based on her book to help students create healthy habits and lifestyles and to develop coping mechanisms to better handle points of crisis that may come their way.

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Information Inspirations

Products like Casetext’s Compose and Brieftext.com worry Northwestern Law Professor Michael A. Zuckerman that law students will use these tools to work around the practice of drafting documents, and learning the process through doing. We think that perhaps technology doesn’t have to be seen as replacing the learning process, but rather enhancing it.

We’ve heard a number of legal tech stories, mostly involving men, but in this Women Love Tech article, Laura Keily explains how she developed Immediation in 2019, while also raising two young children. When COVID hit in 2020, Immediation suddenly became a very big deal.

Greg discovered that the big push to come back to the office can open up unexpected opportunities, including artificially increasing those serendipitous interactions by hanging out near the ice cream machine.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out some new standards for the FBI to use in order to confiscate journalist’s information. The balancing of the First Amendment and the need for FBI investigations seems to be shifting in the new administration.

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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 125 – Shailini George on Law Students Doing Well and Being Well

Dentons Nextlaw Labs‘ Maya Markovich understands that rational lawyers would observe market dynamics and client pressures to weigh the costs and benefits of adapting their behaviors to survive change, stay employed, and make their work more fulfilling. But, people don’t always make rational decisions. And, law firm’s economic structure incentivizes lower efficiency as a method of obtaining higher revenue. 
Wordrake‘s Ivy Grey thinks that firms need to stop thinking of short-term gains at the expense of necessary long-term changes that will help lawyers create more value with their time. This shift really helps clients with their overall legal needs, not just the immediate need.
Join us as we walk through issues of change management, behavioral science, ethical fading, and legal industry business models and where Markovich and Grey believe the industry is headed in the not too distant future.
Check out Maya and Ivy’s three-part blog series:

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It’s the legal innovation’s Oscars time of the year. Many of our friends and colleagues have made the list of this year’s Fastcase50 and College of Law Practice Management Fellowships. Congrats to them all!!
Legal Innovators have some habits they need to change. Victoria Hudgins addresses those in her article on CIOs Reveal 4 Mistakes Every Law Firm Innovation Leader Should Avoid.
Speaking of bad habits, Zack Needles discusses the very bad habit of law firms who want to bring in the hot new CINOs (Chief Innovation Officers) to help advance innovation within their firms, but cannot see past the yearly budget, revenues, and profits to let the innovators try things that may fail before they succeed. Needles worries that this will cause a revolving door for CINOs with little chance of being given enough room to actually bring about innovative change in the firms.
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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 124 – Maya Markovich and Ivy Grey on Creating More Value with the Time You Have

When we all started working from home last March, we each did something to help us keep sane and stay engaged with our families, our friends, and our peers. Eugene Giudice found a unique way of doing just that with a daily note to all of the above. After more than a year of these daily inspirational emails, he put them into a book called Reflections During a Pandemic: Thoughts While Sheltering In Place. Eugene’s writings mark places in time and bring back memories of those periods of hope and despair. As we begin exiting the pandemic, it helps to reflect back on where we were, and how we managed to get through it.

Information Inspirations
Wolters Kluwer just released the results of the 2021 Future Ready Lawyers survey: Moving beyond the pandemic. Marlene presented this week on a panel to discuss the findings.
There are three sessions (Marlene’s is on June 30th)
Roger Williams Law School in Rhode Island is requiring all of its 2Ls to take a course on “Race & the Foundations of American Law” starting this Fall Semester. To learn more about Critical Race Theory and how it is taught in law school, listen to Cheryl Harris discuss her program at UCLA Law School.
Foley & Lardner presented a session on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) and the new areas of legal practice that are to follow along with this blockchain technology.
Private company ownership of law firms may be expanding into Florida soon. The subcommittee of the Florida Supreme Court just returned its recommendations (“in concept only”) to follow the Utah Regulatory Sandbox. TO learn more about what Utah is doing listen to Lucy Ricca’s interview on Pioneers and Pathfinders.
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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 123 – Eugene Giudice on Reflections During a Pandemic

Leading a professional association over the past year has been tough. It’s like getting all of the work, and not getting any of the fun experiences of traveling to meet people around the world. For the American Association of Law Libraries’ President Emily Florio and President-Elect Diane Rodriguez, they’ve made the most of the situation they found themselves in. (Hat tip to the past-President Michelle Cosby, too!) As Florio and Rodriguez prepare for AALL’s second remote annual conference in a row, they are leveraging the experience from last year’s remote conference to make this year’s experience even better. A longer conference. More individual interactions. A virtual tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And, expanded vendor opportunities. In July, the favel will be passed to the new president, but Florio still looks forward to sticking around for another year as the association and the executive board begins the process of getting back to face-to-face interactions, and an in-person conference in Denver in July of 2022.
Links:

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Reuters Legal News commentator, Jenna Greene, seems to have cracked the formula for AmLaw 100 firm’s slogans. It’s actually more of a haiku.
Remember those ads in the 1980s of “This is your brain on drugs”? Well, the 21st Century version could be “This is your brain on email.” The Innovation Hub podcast discusses Cal Newport’s study on how distracting the constant checking of email is to productivity.
Jon Greenblatt and Bryan Parker over at Legal Innovators put on a heck of a webinar last week featuring the deans from UConn Law School, William & Mary Law School, Howard University School of Law, and The George Washington School of law. Even these forward-thinking law school deans admitted that the students are ready for more “change” than they are providing. Just remember law firms… these students are coming your way.
Marlene shares her experience with Andrew Lawless’ Introduction to High-Performance Habits, and how it helped her focus on areas like influence, self-care and productivity, and expertise.
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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 122 – AALL’s Emily Florio and Diane Rodriguez on Leading an Association Remotely

As we make our way to the next version of the workforce in a post-pandemic world, we look back at a discussion of the Delta Model Competencies with Northwestern Law School’s Alyson Carrel and Vanderbilt Law School’s Cat Moon. This interview from November of 2019 is possibly more relevant today than it was when we initially recorded it. While we typically focus on the T-Shaped lawyer model of being an expert in certain areas of the law, and knowledgeable of the necessary disciplines and technology. Moon and Carrel add a third layer to this model to cover the personal effectiveness skills needed to provide effective legal services.
In their recent substack articles, Moon and Carrel have continued expanding the Delta Model competencies to fit the current disruption in the legal services industry. While the pandemic is the most obvious disrupter, there are many other factors within the work environment that make the Delta Model even more useful today as it did in its inception.

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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 121 – The Delta Model Lawyer with Cat Moon and Alyson Carrel

Summer Associates and the upcoming Fall Associates had a unique experience with their On-Campus Interviews (or OCI) over the past two years. Some of the recruits still have not actually met face to face, the members of their firm who hired them. We talk with Kerry Benn, Director of Series, Surveys & Data at Law360 about Law360 Pulse’s recent survey on this topic and see how the firms, the students, and the schools adjusted during the pandemic. The survey of over 1,200 law students breaks down the popular firms and practice areas, how COVID impacted the process, and how things look as students make their way into the firms this Summer.

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Our previous guests Cat Moon and Alyson Carrel are teaming up with Dennis Kennedy later this month for a TRB (Thorn, Rose, Bud) Retrospective. They are asking for law students, legal educators, law school administrators, and education experts to apply for this three-hour event to be held on June 24th and share their COVID era experiences and talk about what they should STOP doing (thorn), KEEP doing (rose), as well NURTURE (bud) once the pandemic comes to a close. 
The offices may be reopening in some areas, but in the theme of “let no crisis go to waste,” Perkins Coie and some other firms are using this transition back to the office to test things like hoteling, reverse hoteling, and telepresence rooms. There won’t be a return to a normal office routine, but the next year is going to show us what is “next” in how we work in a post-pandemic legal industry.
Back in Ep. 112, we talked with Dan Packel about FisherBroyles’ desire to show that a distributed law firm could compete with the AmLaw200 firms. Well, it turns out that they can. FisherBroyles came in at #198 this year and showed that alternative methods to the traditional law firm works. This is making other firms take notice of the competition.
Trailblazers in diversity efforts want neurodiversity included in the conversation. Last week’s guest is one of those trailblazers. In her recent Medium article, Dr. Caitlin Handron openly discussed her battle with bipolar disorder, and “outed herself” to her boss and to the world in order to take steps toward normalizing the discussion of neurodiversity in the workplace. Let’s all learn from her bravery and willingness to be vulnerable, and continue this conversation with our colleagues at our own workplaces.
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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 120 – How COVID Changed Law Students’ On Campus Interview Experiences with Law360’s Kerry Benn

Dr. Caitlin Handron

When Ropes & Gray launched their R&G Insights Lab consulting arm, one of their goals was to create a dynamic legal team with specialized expertise in analytics, behavioral science, and strategic consulting. Dr. Caitlin Handron completes the behavior science part of that mission, and she talks with us about how that expertise helps guide clients on issues of risk and compliance, DEI goals, and cultural assessments. Dr. Handron’s experience at Stanford University’s SPARQ “Do Tank” prepared her for applying behavioral science to the real world of the corporate environment and put those scientific techniques into practice. While it may seem strange for a law firm to apply these types of scientific principles to the advising of clients, Dr. Handron mentions that the legal environment is really not much different from the rest of the world… as much as we lawyers would like to think we are.

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In a recent Bloomberg Law article, former TGIR guest, Olga Mack discusses no-code and low-code processes will be the key to automating tasks, and that a recent Gartner report pointed out that these processes will help reduce legal tasks in in-house legal departments by 50% in just a few years.
Ryan Steadman writes that the rising costs of mental fatigue us costing us dearly at law firms, and that technology is both a solution and a problem.
The Artificial Lawyer took a look at Wilson Sonsini’s Build-A-Bot program and how Summer Associates are required to design bots to improve their processes by using tools like Contract Mill and Documate.
The prosecutors in the Rudy Guiliani case have once again shown that redaction only works when you actually properly use the redaction software. Otherwise, you end up with embarrassing details uncovered on CNN.
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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 119 – Law and Cultural Psychology with R&G Insights Lab’s Dr. Caitlin Handron

As much as we complain about the PACER federal dockets, it pales in comparison to most of the state court docket systems when it comes to tracking and searching cases at the state and local levels. Josh Blandi, the co-founder, and CEO of Unicourt is leveraging APIs and normalizing court data across multiple state and local courts to help clean up the data and make searching and tracking better. Josh joins us to discuss how they are gathering the information, the roadblocks that state courts and the private companies they contract with throw up to restrict data, and some new advancements in Unicourt’s APIs that link multiple pieces of data to allow for better analytics. We also discuss the collaboration between companies like Justia, Fastcase, and others to pool their resources and reduce the overall costs of accessing the very expensive data that courts produce. One other side project Josh is doing with Public.Resources’ Carl Malamud is the Code Improvement Commission GitHub where they are posting the state statutes for Georgia, Tennessee, and other states for anyone to download and use without any copyright or licensing restrictions.

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Information Inspiration

Rocket Lawyer just announced that they will be testing the sandbox of non-lawyer ownership in Arizona. Rocket Lawyer already established such an operation in the UK and in Utah, and they and eight other companies have applied to the Arizona Supreme Court for their approval to start operations there with the goal of providing legal services for less than the price of hiring an attorney. Eyes are moving over to California now to see if they are the next state to create a sandbox for companies to provide alternative legal services.

The legal job market is hot! Leopard Solutions released a report showing that there are almost 8,300 open and available attorney jobs in the 1,000+ law firms they are tracking. Recruiters are overloaded with opportunities, so if you have a decent practice, expect some calls. We speculate that the same is going on for many of the law firm support positions. There’s going to be a lot of movement over the next year.

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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca. 
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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 118 – Unicourt’s Josh Blandi on Improving Access to Federal, State, and Local Court Data

To modify the quote from Field of Dreams, “ask for it, and they will come” applies to this week’s show as we mentioned the Bloomberg Law Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Framework survey a few weeks ago and suggested that they come on the show and talk more about it. Molly Huie from Bloomberg Law is running the survey and joins us this week to talk about what the mission of the survey is, and how it differs and supplements other surveys and certifications currently in the industry. The DEI Framework is Bloomberg’s effort at creating a benchmark for DEI results in the legal industry. With corporations asking law firms for their diversity statistics, the DEI Framework may work as a common metric between firms and clients. Huie discusses the nearly two-year process of pulling the survey together, their efforts to work with other DEI partners in the legal industry, and the process of how to score firms who submit data. While getting diversity statistics may be a challenge, Huie thinks that the DEI Framework will get firms to start collecting the data and measuring their success. Firms can use the contact form to request access to submit their data. The survey is open until the end of August.

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Dechert is collaborating with Silicon Valley design firm Ideo to create a human-centered design approach for their new innovation program. With around 100 hours of training and projects lined up for the initial 40 participants, Dechert is looking for “real-life or business challenges” to solve.

The Utah Supreme Court expanded its regulatory sandbox to include legal advice on medical debt advice given by non-lawyers.

What happens when you combine a collection of mini-hackathons and the concepts of eSports gaming? You come up with something that NYU Law Professor Houman Shadab calls the No-Code Sports League.

Michigan Legal Help is assisting in Access to Justice issues through DIY tool kits arranged by Michigan counties.

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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca. 
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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 117 – Molly Huie on Bloomberg Law’s New DEI Framework