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While technology is part of innovation, technology alone is not innovation. We brought in three guests this week to talk about what they are doing to innovate in the area of process improvement and give us some examples of some of the projects they are working on.
There is a methodology when it comes to how law firms handle process improvement. O’Neil’s process starts with communicating with the attorney and staff teams to determine what pain points they have and evaluate the current workflow. Sometimes it is as simple as tweaking the processes that already exist by adding or removing steps in the workflow, or by adding or removing the number of people involved. Sometimes it means reaching out to Alana and Jack to see how a technology tool like HighQ can improve the overall workflow through automation and improvements in communications and clearly defining and assigning steps in the overall process.
The firm’s clients are also involved in the process improvement design as well. Carson and Godsey mentioned that including clients in the overall process enables them to define what they need, and makes the law firm/client relationship stickier so that the clients really feel like a part of the firm’s efforts toward process improvement and creating a better value for the client.
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Contact Us
Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert.
Voicemail: 713-487-7270
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com.
As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca who has a new album coming out in October!
Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 129 – Zen and the Art of Process Improvement – Tiffany O’Neil, Alana Carson, and Jack Godsey

Listeners know that we love asking our guests to pull out their crystal ball and tell us about the future. Joseph Raczynski is a futurist who works with Thomson Reuters, so he came prepared with a crystal ball ready to answer our questions on what the future has in store for the legal industry. We even get into the “red pill”, “blue pill” Matrix when it comes to how AI and emerging tech can go for good, or for evil. Joe gives us a peek into a future where some estimated 85% of the jobs of 2030 don’t exist today. While that might sound a bit scary to most of us, this futurist says there will be plenty of new opportunities emerging for those ready to take on a more decentralized world.

Information Inspirations
Tim Corcoran’s “When and Why Clients Hire Consultants” walks through four reasons organizations hire consultants. If you are wondering if you may need a consultant, this article is a must-read.
Carl Malamud and Public Resource.org may be setting their sites on another government publication which states are claiming copyright. This time it is Jury Instructions in Minnesota. 
Speaking of courts, Paul Hastings has a nice database tracking the status of courts across the United States during the pandemic.
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If you like what you hear, please share the podcast with a friend or colleague.
Contact Us
Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert.
Voicemail: 713-487-7270
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com.
As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca who has a new album coming out in October!
Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 128 – Joseph Raczynski – The Red and Blue Pill Matrix of AI and Emerging Legal Tech

Our good friend April Brousseau joins us to discuss her role as Director of Research and Development at Clifford Chance’s R&D Hub. The fact that a law firm has a dedicated R&D group shows how innovation cannot simply be a part-time task that someone at the firm takes on. April’s diverse background as a law librarian, lawyer, and knowledge management leader paved the path to her current role in the R&D Hub and the innovation program. She discusses how they’ve adapted the Three Horizons Strategy from the likes of Gartner and McKinsey, and how they are transforming the core of their operations to complementing services and business assets at the firm, and looking at the future of legal services to stay ahead of the disruption curve. We also learn what a HiPPO is inside a firm.
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Information Inspirations
Electronic filing of court documents was supposed to speed up the process of getting court information accessible. But according to this opinion piece from Courthouse News’ Bill Girdner, it’s actually hampered access, specifically to the Press.
Just when you thought there couldn’t be anything new under the sun, Twitter conversations uncovered there is a 3rd Amendment Lawyers Association. And they are raising #3A arguments with the CDC’s new eviction moratorium.
The First Edition of Introduction to Law Librarianship is out. This free e-textbook, open access publication is designed to help those considering entering the law library profession, as well as those teaching others entering the profession.
Legal tech is definitely a part of practicing in the legal profession. Some think it is so much a part of the profession that it should be tested on the Bar Exam.
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If you like what you hear, please share the podcast with a friend or colleague.

Contact Us

Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert.

Voicemail: 713-487-7270

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com.

As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca who has a new album coming out in October!
Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 127 – April Brousseau – Innovation in the Legal Industry Can’t Be a Side Gig

In an industry focused on revenue and profit, where does something like customer experience stand in the priorities of legal providers? Leigh Vickery, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Level Legal, as well as CEO and founder of Queso Mama, says that we need to look at the corporate and legal industry world differently. Instead of putting shareholders and partners first, they need to fall much further down the list. If you take care of your employees and your customers first, there will still be plenty left over for the shareholders and everyone is better off in the end. 
We dive into the topic of how other industries approach customer data and use the information to create a better experience. Can examples like Eleven Madison Park restaurant teach the legal industry better client interactions? Vickery believes so. Metrics like Profits Per Partner might show the industry how profitable the law firms are, but perhaps we need different metrics to show how satisfied the law firm’s clients really are. See Leigh’s article on Economics of Mutuality.

Information Inspirations
Casey Flaherty has an excellent article on how incremental improvements can create better returns on investment than big moon-shot projects. Check it out, right here on 3 Geeks. 
Wikipedia biographies are surprisingly difficult for women to not only get them on the platform, but to also keep them from being deleted. UNC Professor Franchesca Trapoti discusses the bias in her paper, “Miscatagorized: Gender, Notability, and Inequality on Wikipedia” and Marketplace Tech breaks down some examples.
Bob Ambrogi’s two-part article/podcast focuses on the unique resurrection of UpCounsel’s “legal as a service” model, as well as the interesting crowdfunding to raise capital. It’ll be interesting to see how well this crowdfunding goes, and if other legal services use this model.
Hey kids, lemonade stands are “legal” in New Hampshire and Illinois.
The Netherlands is using AI to pick up butts on the beach. Cigarette butts, that is.
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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. 126 – Leigh Vickery on Creating Top-Shelf Customer Experience in Legal


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.
Transcript

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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Information Inspirations
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.
Transcript

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.
Transcript

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.
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Information inspirations
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.
Transcript

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.
Transcript

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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Information Inspirations
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.
Transcript

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 120 – How COVID Changed Law Students’ On Campus Interview Experiences with Law360’s Kerry Benn