Do you understand the impact of emerging technology on your business? These are highly curated modules that can be combined to assist you or your organization think about the future of work and how you can serve your customers better.

The Impact of AI on Business

• An Explainer: What is AI and why it is it becoming so important?
• Briefly outline various components of AI – in plain language
• Delve into Generative AI – LLMs (Large Language Models and Multimodal AI)
  • Discuss the primary applications being used:
  • OpenAI and ChatGPT
  • Google Bard
  • Zoom Summary
  • Microsoft Copilot
• What are the near and long-term impacts?
• How can we better understand this space for our internal and external customers

Exponential Technology & Artificial Intelligence

Data explosion is all around us. In order for humans to be expert in something over the next several years they will need tools to augment what they know to make better decisions. In this discussion you will get a better understanding of what is happening around us with technology and what impact it will have on the Legal Landscape. We will dive into the following subject areas:

• Exponential Technology
• The Tide of Worldwide Technological Change
• Law Firm Impact from Exponential Technology
• Disruption
• Who are the players – what impact they may have on law firms?

The Metaverse and the Dawning of Asset Tokenization and Digital Contracts

Are you ready for this? Probably not, but please bear with me, because the legal implications will be enormous.

Imagine, if you will, a world resembling our physical one, but completely virtual, immersive, colorful, all-encompassing one with land, rivers, houses, farms, people, animals, full cities, stores, businesses, concerts, and everything else contained in our physical world. Sauntering down a bustling city street, minus the smells, is as easy as walking on a moon that orbits an earthlike place. Platforms with full replication of our physical world are being built through a wearable device to create this Metaverse. You may ask, why? That seems ridiculous! Fourteen years ago, before the iPhone launched, we didn’t imagine the myriad of things we could accomplish by simply touching a piece of glass faced tech today. It would have been a leap of faith to see where we sit now. This is that next leap.

In the Metaverse, people will interact, transact, have ownership of assets, have relationships, build things and companies, create IP, have copyright issues, advertising, crimes may happen, insurance will be developed, and a massive host of other IRL (In Real Life) things that all will require legal to be involved. Not to mention the scaling of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) which has begun. Clearly this is a burgeoning market. While I have been engaged in this space for several years, the publication of a white paper by ReedSmith on the Metaverse underlined its importance for the legal industry. This was shared with me earlier in the year prior to publication. It is a worthy read if you wish to continue down the rabbit hole.

• Understanding the Metaverse
• The underlining technology shift
• Legal implications
• Opportunity and Risk

DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs – FinTech & LegalTech Collide

How much would you pay for this “hoodie” jpeg, picture to the left? Nothing? Maybe $20?

It was free to anyone who wanted him a CryptoPunk (#7129) in 2017. Well, it sold six months ago for $100,000. Now it is valued at $1,000,000. One of the reasons the NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are becoming very expensive is because institutions are now investing in them – seen as the future of unique contractual digital art ownership. The financial world is on the precipice of significant change and these are just the early days of how legal will be involved.

DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is moving the needle on porting all things from our current financial paradigm to a code based model with greater transparency and governance.

In this discussion we talk about:

• DeFi
• NFTs
• DAOs
• The legal impact of new contracts built on code

Future Work – Preparing Now for the Landscape in the Decades Ahead

In this talk, I look into the crystal ball and see how technology will transform our lives over the next 50 years. Breaking down the major themes we all shall encounter.

• Geopolitical dynamics
• Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies
• Data, ethics and trust
• Our changing environment

Cryptocurrency – Everything You Need to Know

Financial technology, as manifest in the world of cryptocurrencies, is becoming a bigger part of everyone’s lives, both personal and professional. Information professionals need to be able to understand and communicate effectively the following

• How these technologies work
• What are the impacts on banking and securities law and regulation
• The short, intermediate and long term implications for commerce in general.

In addition, it is vital that all legal professionals have a deeper understanding of the these technologies so that they can identify career opportunities. Information professionals need to be able to move beyond the theory of these technologies and understand the practical application of them so that they can better do research in relation to financial technologies and cryptocurrencies.

Emerging Technology

The world is progressing at an exponential rate. By 2040, it is predicted that for $1,000, you will be able to buy a computer capable of processing information as fast as the combined brains of all 9 billion people expected to inhabit the planet. Imagine the impact this computing power will have on financial operations, data management, and business workflows.

Technological progress at this scale will undoubtedly transform industries such as FinTech, LegalTech and companies of all sizes, redefining how we work with documents, conduct searches, interact with internal and external information and manage complex workflows.

In this presentation, we’ll explore the effects of these major emerging technologies on business operations and information systems. Together, we’ll dive into an open forum around the following topics:

• Processor Differentiation
• Artificial Intelligence & Agentic AI
• Open Source AI
• Blockchain Technology & RWAs
• Data Analytics
• Robotics
• VR/MR/AR

Blockchain

It is predicted that Blockchain technology will impact nearly every industry in a dramatic way over the next several years. What initially began as the underlining technology behind Bitcoin has boomed into something that the top 50 banks in the world are embracing to improve efficiency, security and transparency in the market. There is little doubt that law firms will be early in the adoption of this technology to better automate process and provide better services to their clients. The Smart Contract is the first area that will be leveraged in this space. In this presentation you will see what effect Blockchain technology and the Distributed Ledger will have in Legal. We will have an open forum around the following topics:

• What the Heck is Blockchain?
• Why are we seeing this occur now?
• What is Happening Now for Law Firms in this Space?
• Where will Blockchain take off in the Legal Industry?
• What the Future May Look like with Blockchain?

Blockchain 2.0

Blockchain has been talked about the last several years as a hypothetical. It is now being used. In this discussion, we will cover what Blockchain is and how it is starting to creep into the Legal landscape. The initial focus is on the state of blockchain in Legal. We will also touch on some of the seminal concepts with Blockchain including encryption, smart contracts, permissioned blockchains and DeFi. Lastly the conversation will discuss specific industries that Blockchain is starting to disrupt. We will have an open forum around the following topics:

• Quick Recap of How Blockchain Works
• Breaking Down Encryption
• Blockchain 2.0
• Timeline and growth of the industry
• Regulation
• State of Blockchain in Legal
• Enterprise Blockchain
• Smart Contracts
• Different Industry Impacts
  • Auto
  • Supply Chain
  • Port Security
  • Real Time Tax
• Future of Blockchain

Digital Identity

In an increasingly more complicated world filled with Fake News, organizations are threatened nearly every day by hackers and with the pilfering of our personal and private information from organizations like Facebook, controlling our identity is of the utmost importance. And with the coming deluge of applications and IoT devices, identity is the foundation for how we will interact with each other and these intelligent devices. As the Legal Industry adjusts, what impact will this new form of identity have on eDiscovery, transactional and general litigation? The changes ahead to the legal world, as we redefine what it is to be – electronically, will be immense.

• The Pending Crisis of Identity
• Discuss the Forms of Identity
• Tokenization & Future of Identity
• Legal Implications
• Definitions around what identity will look like from a legal perspective and how that impacts both the business and practice of law.

Fundamentals of Cloud Computing

The 21st Century has yielded a fundamental change in computer technology: the cloud. This technology is near-ubiquitous in today’s world and increasingly an inexorable part of how lawyers do their jobs. Not exclusive to an IT department, the cloud as a concept is one that is fundamental to many aspects relevant to attorneys. In this presentation you will learn about what consists cloud computing, how the law treats cloud computing, and how lawyers use the cloud by discussing the following topics:

• The Cloud as a concept
• Public v. Private Clouds
• Single Tenant v Multi Tenant Hosting
• “as-a-service” models of cloud technology
• Financial and Security Concerns of the Cloud
• Data Privacy Challenges
• US laws governing cloud technology

The Legal Platform & APIs

With the proliferation of thousands of LegalTech start-ups around the world, all focusing on various components of solving issues with the business or practice of law, the movement is to a Legal Platform. The integration of hundreds of tools into a seamless interface and leveraging APIs is the future. This enables security, interoperability, and workflow management. The walls of legal providers are coming down, so you can work better, faster, and smarter. In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions, communication protocols, and tools for building software. How will law firms, corporations and government agencies leverage these new platforms and integrations for their own success?

• The current state of LegalTech
• What is a Legal Platform?
• Digging deeper – what the heck is an API?
  • ​Examples in the World
  • Legal Examples
• The importance and direction of APIs and Legal Platforms
• What this means to you

Innovation

Law firms are innovating how clients are served simultaneous with the legal industry undergoing multiple transformations in the years since the 2008 Recession. This is due to macro-level changes in the legal industry, exponential advancement in technology, and reflections of these realities in the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. This CLE surveys the entirety of this topic, identifying some of the multiple definitions and manifestations of “innovation” conceptually. This CLE discusses the following topics and their impact on the legal industry:

• Industry data chronicling post-Recession innovation strategies and resulting financial effects
• New legal services business models and legal service delivery methods
• The role of data analytics and legal technologies
• Innovation efforts regarding the ABA and state model rules of professional conduct.
• Takeaways for attorney workflows

Cybersecurity & Dark Web

We are all aware of, and probably have experienced first-hand, the effects of an unwanted data breach. Maybe you were forced to change an online password, acquire a new credit card number or you lost important files corrupted by malware. At best, these incidences have been hassles. At worst, entire identities and fortunes can be compromised.

Now, consider your law firm and its clients. What effects would a data breach have on the work-product, attorney/client privilege and financial stability of these organizations?

What are the biggest threats?

Status of law firms, corporate, and in-house security

Actions to mitigate security risks

What is happening for Clients & Law Firms, Corporations and In-house?