Stanford Looks to FutureLaw

The agenda of the first FutureLaw conference at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics wasn't your typical continuing legal education fare.

By Mark Michels All Articles

Law Technology News

May 7, 2013

 The agenda of the first FutureLaw conference at The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics wasn't your typical continuing legal education fare.

Tim Hwang, name partner at three-year-old legal startup Robot Robot and Hwang served as the program curator of the program, a division of Stanford University's law school. (Hwang is serious about the "Robots" in his firm's name, calling "Apollo Cluster" and "Daria XR-1029" senior partners.) At the inaugural conference,which drew about 250 law students, lawyers, entrepreneurs, investors, consultants, and technologists, Hwang declared that his goal was to assemble a group to discuss legal service ideas and developments that they "might not usually have a chance to nerd about with others." Simply put, Hwang wanted the conference to answer this question: "What awesome things are people working on [in legal services] that should be shared more widely?"

The recurring theme of the day-long program , with 26 speakers scheduled, was held on campus on April 26, from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., was that technology can drive a revolution in the legal market to meet a vast unmet demand.

• Daniel Martin Katz, assistant professor at Michigan State University's School of Law, and co-founder of its Reinvent Law Laboratory, said that surveys consistently document that 70 percent of the people who need legal services can't get them.

• Eddie Hartman, co-founder of LegalZoom, an online service designed to help people create their own legal documents, looks at these surveys (and other data) and concluded that the biggest competition lawyers face is not from other lawyers or law firms but from "non-consumption" in the consumer market.

 • Rocket Lawyer Inc. founder Charley Moore, who provided the opening keynote, attempts to serve this consumer market. Moore challenged lawyers to think like entrepreneurs, and embrace technology to create efficiencies to serve the consumer market. Jamie Wodetzki, founder of Exari Systerms, which sells document assembly and contract management software, said simply that "technology is the key enabler of change" for the legal market.

MONEY TALKS

A quintessential Silicon Valley program component was a panel entitled "Financing the Legal Revolution." One speaker opined that the companies that will really transform the legal market will be supported by venture capital. Blake Masters of Judicata said that startups can face a daunting challenge explaining the legal market to potential investors. Masters illustrated the challenge by showing a popular web video of a cat in a shark costume chasing a duck while riding a Roomba vacuum cleaner. Masters declined to say whether the duck represented the start-up or the VC. (One of the many versions of the video has an advertisement for Legal Zoom before the video starts, and more than 1.8 million hits).

 Robert Siegel, a general partner at XSeed Capital said that "a lot of innovative technology is being developed to automate what was done manually" in the legal arena. One such technology that caught Siegel's eye was Lex Machina's machine learning algorithm which, in part, explained xSeed's investment in the start-up. (On May 1, Lex Machina closed a $4.8 million Series A Funding round lead by Boston's Cue Ball Capital.)

Indeed, recognizing that data analytics will play such an important role in legal services, Katz argued that law schools should have classes like "Quantitative Methods for Lawyers" and statistics. (He teaches those topics at MSU.)

Another panel addressed the proposition that user interface and user experience design need to be a "fundamental element" of legal tools if they are going to have mass market acceptance. Margaret Hagan, an accomplished graphic artist attending Stanford Law School, captivated the audience with her drawings which colorfully communicate legal principles graphically.

 Hagan stated that her true passion is using human-centered design to make law more accessible, useful and engaging. Two companies that also showcased their designs for the group were Judicata, with its analytics-based (instead of key word-based) case law search engine, and Ravel Law , which uses visual analytics to display legal research.

 

Attorney Mark Michels is a director in Deloitte Discovery practice of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services. Email: mmichels@deloitte.com.