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This week we are joined by LexisNexis’ Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer and Head of Global Talent Development, Ronda Bazley Moore. Ronda and a team of LexisNexis leadership in the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network & LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation Fellowship tasked 18 Fellows from Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCU) Law Schools with one very complex task: Uncover how LexisNexis products could be used to address and eliminate systemic racism in the legal system.
The 2022 LexisNexis Equity in the Law Symposium was held in Washington, DC, where the 18 Fellows presented the results of their findings on how to reduce/eliminate system racism. The results were split into six separate clusters:
  1. Equity for Youth in the Legal System
  2. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Legal Education
  3. Diversity in Leadership of Legal Profession
  4. Diversity and Equity in the Courts
  5. Equity in the Criminal Justice System
  6. Racial Equity in Wealth and Ownership
Ronda describes some of the novel ways that the Fellows proposed to leverage the data, resources, and power held by LexisNexis to achieve the audacious goal set before them.
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Crystal Ball Question – Legal Value Network Conference

Amanda Norris, Senior Operations Manager at Integreon steps up this week to answer our Crystal Ball question. Amanda has a very interesting expectation on how support staff at law firms, specifically Legal Assistants and Legal Secretaries, provide support both in-person and remotely over the next few years.
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Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript 

Continue Reading The Mission: Eliminate Systemic Racism in the Legal System – LexisNexis’ Ronda Bazley Moore (TGIR Ep. 179)

We have a number of repeat guests on the show this week, but all with new stories to tell since their last appearance. 
Nikki Shaver and Jeroen Plink have joined forces to launch Legaltech Hub. Their mission is to provide a single place for those of us looking at legal technology so that we can have a clear picture of who are the players in legaltech solutions. We talk about how the two began their collaboration efforts to expand upon Nikki Shaver’s original idea for Legaltech Hub and launch it as a startup business. 
For those of us in the legal industry, whether it is a practicing lawyer, knowledge management, IT, library professional or other allied professionals, we all understand that when it comes to evaluating technology in the legal industry, it can be overwhelming. Jeroen and Nikki discuss how they set up the structure of Legaltech Hub, and who are the intended, and even the aspirational users of this system.
We also discuss the competitors in the industry and how they believe Legaltech Hub distinguishes itself from the pack.

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A quick shoutout to our friend Chevazz Brown for the resent launch of his DiversePro mobile app. 
Crystal Ball Question
This week’s LegalTech Crystal Ball question is answered by another TGIR Alumni, Sameena Kluck. Sameena sees an improvement in personal branding and authenticity in the legal profession.
Alumni Episodes:
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Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 155 – Nikki Shaver and Jeroen Plink on the Launching of the Legaltech Hub

This is a topic we’ve wanted to discuss since early 2019, but teaching stints in Helsinki, and a global pandemic pushed it back almost three years. But we did not forget about the topic of The Right to Be Forgotten! However, in that time, even the phrasing of the topic has changed to The Right to Erasure. Our guest, Anne Klinefelter, Director of the Law Library and Henry P. Brandis Distinguished Professor of Law, catches us all up on the current issues surrounding data privacy and the Internet both here in the US, as well as in the EU.
Klinefelter’s view of privacy is that while we haven’t done a great deal of work to protect individual’s privacy in an economic model based on surveillance capitalism, we have done some things. Her vision of the future is that the Internet still has the capability of being the Utopia we once hoped it would be, but it will probably get far worse before it gets better. And those who benefited from the weak data privacy regulations may end up being the very people who come in and change it for the better.
We also talked with Molly Huie from Bloomberg Law about the 2022 DEI Framework survey which is now open for law firms. Molly lists out a number of new data points included in the framework, including neurodiversity, origination credit, and partnership tracking topics in law firm diversity efforts.

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Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com.
Music: As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
Transcript 

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 152 – Anne Klinefelter on The Right to Be Forgotten in the Age of Internet Surveillance Capitalism

With the influx of Venture Capital and overall interests in Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), the rest of the legal industry is finally figuring out what InnoLaw‘s Lucy Bassli has known for years; contracts are sexy. We sit down with Lucy to discuss her second book, CLM Simplified: Efficient Contracting for Law Departments and the potential of making the contract process faster, better, easier, smarter, more efficient, operationalized, and automated is the concept that is so appealing. Lucy Bassli’s experience in-house with Microsoft helped launch her new career advising other in-house and outside counsel on legal operations, and how to really communicate with one another in ways to produce true innovation.

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Information Inspirations

The Debt Relief Clinic was named the 2022 recipient of the Louis M. Brown Award for Legal Access for its commitment to increasing legal services to low-income Tennesseans and reaching that goal through the innovative use of technology.

We talked about the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance back in August of 2020 (Ep. 83), well our guest, Skadden’s Brenna DeVaney along with Cravath’s Kiisha Morrow talk with Thomson Reuter’s Thomas Kim to catch us all up on the progress that LFAA member firms are doing in order to keep up the momentum we all felt after the summer of 2020.

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Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com.

Music: As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 148 – InnoLaw’s Lucy Bassli on the Sexiness of Contracts

While neurodiversity might be an unfamiliar word for many, its meaning is simple. We all have different brains. For the legal field, there is value in this, as we need to be able to look at problems in different ways and find new approaches to solving those problems. Haley Moss is an author, attorney, and advocate for neurodiversity, and is neurodivergent herself. Haley has autism, which she sees as both a disability and makes her different. But it also makes her interesting, and while she doesn’t know what it means to be neurotypical, she is fine with that and sees her difference not as a curse, but as a benefit. It is the difference in the way that she processes information, solves problems, and it is the neurodiversity that drives her and others to be innovative. She wrote her first book at age 15 and has a desire to use her experiences to help the next generation.

Haley Moss explains that we can’t just look at neurodiversity disabilities in a vacuum. After all, this is the only minority group you can join at any point in your life. The more we understand the issues surrounding neurodiversity, and accommodate for those issues, the better we will be as an industry and a society.

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Contact Us
Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert.
Voicemail: 713-487-7270
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com.
Music: As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 139 – Haley Moss on How Embracing Neurodiversity in the Legal Profession Makes Us All Better

Back in May (ep. 117), we had Bloomberg Law’s Molly Huie on the show to talk about the Bloomberg Law DEI Framework survey she and her team created and were pushing law firms to contribute. So we close the loop on this conversation by asking Molly to come back and talk about the results of the survey. There were over 30 firms who participated in the survey with 28 of those firms making “the cut” to be included in the 2021 DEI Framework results. Molly walks us through why these firms jumped onboard this inaugural survey, what issues they may have had in collecting and answering the over 90 questions in the survey, and what reactions they had to the results of the survey.
The survey results are free to download from Bloomberg Law’s DEI Framework page, and the 2022 edition of the survey will be out in the first quarter of next year for any firms who want to see if they make the cut for inclusion in the DEI Framework.
 

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If you like what you hear, please share the podcast with a friend or colleague. Or, reach out to us and let us know what you think.
Contact Us
Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert.
Voicemail: 713-487-7270
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com.
Music: As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 135 – Results of the Bloomberg Law DEI Framework with Molly Huie

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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Information Inspirations
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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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.
Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 119 – Law and Cultural Psychology with R&G Insights Lab’s Dr. Caitlin Handron

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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Information Inspirations

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. 
Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 117 – Molly Huie on Bloomberg Law’s New DEI Framework

Attorney Sophia George has one strong suggestion for those looking to increase equity in the legal industry: Hire minority lawyers! In order to help individuals find diverse lawyers, Sophia joined in the project created by Jackson Walker Partner Chevazz Brown called DiversePro. The online database works to connect diverse lawyers with potential clients who are looking to find lawyers from communities where they share a culture, language, or life experience. With a starting list of 250,000 lawyers in the DiversePro database, Chevazz Brown created an environment for diverse lawyers to go in and claim their profile, or create a profile, identify your practice area, specialty, school, and what makes them unique. We discuss how Chevazz and Sophia use DiversePro to help others find them, and the way they are working to get other diverse lawyers to do the same.

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Information Inspirations

James Goodnow talked with Bill Henderson about what they see as a flaw in the ingenuity incentive of law firms. In a normal business environment, ingenuity creates opportunities for everyone. In the legal industry, the opportunities are significantly limited to lawyers.

There is a quiet hiring boom going on in legal. In the fight for talent, the Harvard Business Review has some suggestions so that you line up the best people based on potential, not prior experience.

Sometimes a dress code or required uniform is a bad idea (bar exams), sometimes it can create equity (British Barristers.)

Sticking with dress codes… Stanford Law Professor Richard Thompson Ford wrote an entire book on it.

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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.

Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 107 – Sophia George and Chevazz Brown: Finding Diverse Lawyers via DiversePro