Tag Archives: ILTA

ILTA-ON goes on: Biggest legal tech conference of the year presses onward

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Originally published on the Legal Executive Institute.

By Joseph Raczynski

In a year like no other, the most prominent legal technology conference recently wrapped their weeklong virtual event as the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) morphed its annual ILTACON event into ILTA>ON.

After initially vacillating on a hybrid in-person and virtual event, before ILTA decided to go with a fully virtual event with more than 100 sessions and various virtual activities. According to the site, ILTA>ON (as it was known) had roughly 3,800 attendees and vendors compared to past years of around 5,000 — a very respectable haul given the circumstances.

As with the 12 other ILTA conferences in which I have partaken in the past, each day begins with a keynote speaker. One of the highlights from the daily keynotes was the first day presentation by Stephen Carver, a professor at Cranfield University in the U.K., titled Leadership Under Stress: Exploring Project Failure at NASA, which dissected the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster.

ILTA

Prof. Carver’s talk explored NASA’s failures in planning, procurement, leadership, and change management with the intent to help attendees apply the learning to law firm technology projects. “It’s all about a really small bunch of people not communicating and not learning from their mistakes,” Carver said, adding that sometimes from failure, you have to reimage the entire organization.

Another keynote highlight was provided by Jia Jiang, CEO and founder of Rejection Therapy, a social self-help game, who regaled participants with story after story of his own self-induced humiliation tests — done as experiments in 2012 — to overcome his own fear of rejection. His goal? To be rejected every day for 100 days.

Embarrassing examples included asking strangers on the street for $100 to see their reaction, requesting Krispy Kreme create him donuts in the shape and color of the Olympic rings, and asking a pilot at a rural airport if he could fly his plane, even though Jiang had no flying experience. His underlining theme — fear of rejection can hold you back. It is our natural tendency is to avoid rejection at all costs, which can be detrimental to our businesses, careers, and lives, he said. His goal was to teach the importance of becoming rejection-proof, the basic principles of turning a No into Yes, as well as how to get more Yes answers.

Lastly, another keynote speaker, Richard Punt, who leads legal strategy and market development at Thomson Reuters, offered his insights in a talk titled, After the Quake: Predictions for an Uncertain Legal Future, where he took the audience beyond the here and now to see what the future of the legal industry might look like.

Making a virtual event work

The monumental efforts of the ILTA community of volunteers fostered as close to an in-person event as possible. The numerous educational sessions were available via Zoom and ran the gamut from leadership, business development, company track updates, data science, knowledge management, legal services, legal operations, marketing, and finally finishing on the future of the legal tech space.

Intelligently sprinkled among sessions were activities and events facilitated in a networking fashion, with the Watercooler and Hallway as places to meet informally. People could simply jump into the Watercooler and connect with small groups, or one-on-ones via video. Often after a specific session, people were encouraged to meet with the speakers in the watercooler room. This compares to the often bum-rushing of speakers that occurs at typical live ILTACONs, post-session. Other events included wine tastings and comedy events.

Overall, the level of engagement and content delivered at ILTA>ON was impressive. Another highlight included a session that walked participants through how law firms can create workflow apps using a combination of web services and data to build a process on Microsoft Power Automate. In their example, participants learned how they could build a COVID-19 check-in app for firm employees. Another great set of sessions was on data science, unpacking internal data at firms and how it can be leveraged.

Finally, I had the privilege of being selected to report on how ILTA did on their Law Firm 2020 Predictions that were made seven years ago. With a Back to the Future movie theme in the background, I reviewed past predictions to see what came true and what industry sages got wrong with legal technology between 2013 and today. I also peered into the abyss of legal tech’s future over the next five years, before taking a 1.21 gigawatts ride and shooting into that future, focusing on technology in 2030, 2040, and into the Singularity.

It was a Great Scott! moment indeed.

ILTACON 2016: When Will Blockchain and Smart Contracts Be Important in Legal?

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By Joseph Raczynski

“Blockchain is Hot: More than $1.5 Billion has Been Invested in Blockchain in the Last 18 Months”

  • Tori Adams, Booz Allen Hamilton

 

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — If someone had told you in 1993 that the Web would be integral to your life today, would you have believed them? Well, the discussion around blockchain technology at ILTACON 2016 harkened back to that same scenario of the early ‘90s. This is a reboot, where another new technology will revolutionize the world.

Moderated by the esteemed Ron Friedmann, Partner at Fireman & Company, we were led down the path of what to expect with blockchain. Rohit Talwar, CEO of Fast Future Research, started us off with his futuristic vision on what we can expect over the next five years. Joe Dewey, Partner at Holland & Knight, who specializes in blockchain, discussed the law and smart contracts. Lastly, Tori Adams, a data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton, illustrated her predictions on the reality of this technology in the near term.

Current Landscape

All major industries are looking toward blockchain — most pointedly, the financial sector. Talwar focused on one platform that is pushing this new space forward quickly — Ethereum — a pseudo-Bitcoin 2.0 that allows users to code on top of the blockchain. This can create huge advances in how the blockchain can interact with the world; utlizing smart contracts and digital identities, an even executing stock trades. In fact, Talwar stated that Goldman Sachs estimated a legal savings of $11 billion to $12 billion per year from streamlining clearing and settlement of cash and securities through such technology.

Near Future

The next significant phase developing now is the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) which means that processes and companies are completely autonomous. This technology has the ability to disrupt a disrupter, e.g. Airbnb. Let’s say you visit a DAO-enabled travel site. The condo owner places an ad on the site to rent their place weekly. You choose their place in Miami, agree to the terms (date of check-in and -out, etc.) and agree to the fee and deposit (paid automatically). When you arrive at the condo to check-in, simply enter the password at the door through an Internet of Things (IoT) tech-enabled doorknob (check out Slock.it) and you gain access. That lock at the front door knows who you are and how much you paid, and it can also see your contract for the rental of the condo and knows when you are to be out. The DAO can do all of this with one employee running the entire operation.

Law Firms Start to Embrace Blockchain

Several law firms are starting to make a foray into this space. Recently Steptoe & Johnson began a multi-disciplinarian practice to help manage the blockchain for clients. They will also be accepting Bitcoin as payment. Most importantly, they co-founded the Blockchain Alliance6, a coalition of 25 blockchain companies and 25 regulatory and law enforcement agencies — including Interpol, Europol, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the FBI — to educate enforcement agencies about digital currencies and blockchain technology. Other law firms including Holland & Knight see exponential growth of attorneys laboring in this discipline.

Smart Contracts

Holland & Knight’s Dewey said he believes the definition around smart contracts can be varied. For the purposes of this conversation, it is snippets of code that can change the ledger or a legal contract that is implemented on the blockchain. Of course, he outlined several benefits and challenges to this new innovation in the area of smart contracts:

Benefits:

  • Smart contracts are coded so there is less ambiguity than prose;
  • Verification can be achieved even within a trustless environment;
  • Self-executing; so once released, it is difficult to impede execution; and
  • Integrates well with IoT, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

Challenges:

  • Must balance transparency with privacy concerns;
  • Infrastructure needs to be updated;
  • Lack of experience with blockchain technology in IT departments;
  • Lack of education and understanding of the technology in other departments, including compliance;
  • Development of uniform standards and protocols; and (of course)
  • Need to overcoming custom and tradition (e., change is hard.)

So a real world example of how a smart contract was implemented can be seen in how Barclays did it with an interest rate swap prototype. Essentially, the investment bank set up an incubator of coders who worked with their legal department to understand how these swaps (trades) worked legally. They distilled three lines in the process that could be coded — (x) the amount of cash; (y) the interest rate; and (z) the currency. Once this information was garnered, the transaction could be solidified and then stored on a blockchain.

One of the most surprising revelations of the session came from Dewey when he stated: “Big news for attorneys, existing law — passed well before blockchain technology was contemplated —not only validates transactions, including the trading of credit interests accomplished through the use of the technology we are discussing, but as a matter of policy, strongly supports it.”

There is little question that this is an industry that will be growing rapidly over the next few years. Many firms are moving forward with practice areas and educating their attorneys on the technology to better position themselves for the coming wave.

Lastly, Dewey added some additional encouraging words surrounding the future of blockchain. In May, the State of Delaware — which is home to almost two-thirds of the Fortune 500 companies — announced a Blockchain Initiative so that corporate filings can be added to the ledger. “This is a clear sign that blockchain technology will have a significant impact on business,” he said.

ILTACON 2016 SESSION: NEW INTERNATIONAL STANDARD FOR CLOUD DUE DILIGENCE

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By Joseph Raczynski

The cloud is becoming increasingly ubiquitous at law firms. In fact, a recent ABA Technology Survey stated that 46 percent of cloudless firms will be transitioning in the next 6-12 months. In the session on the “New International Standard for Cloud Due Diligence,” Gregg Brown, senior director Technical Strategy, Computer Standards at Microsoft, and Patrick Oot, partner at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, discussed the changes to the cloud over the last six years and what is coming down the road.

Small- and medium-sized firms have embraced the cloud, while the largest firms have been more reluctant, saddled with restraints placed by their clients – especially in the financial industry. That said, there now seems to be some loosening of the straps in that particular space.

Benefits of the cloud:

The duo argued multiple reasons for jumping to the cloud. First, firms can take advantage of the latest innovations, features and capabilities with updates released every month, compared to waiting years for internal upgrades to their current systems. In addition, the cloud offers greater agility – not having to retrain or rebuild as needs expand.

Oftentimes, clients require more capacity on short notice, which the cloud can easily accommodate. At a base level, the cloud is a fraction of the cost of on-premises solutions – though add-ons can sometime raise the price close to that of an in-house solution.

As more firms adopt BYOD (bring your own device), the cloud enables firms to meet workforce demands with a per-user license. But with BYOD comes another layer of security concern, which the cloud can more readily accommodate as most vendors will be up-to-date with regard to security patches.

As Brown also noted, another inherent benefit to cloud technology is access to analytics. With all of its data in the cloud, a firm can easily deploy search and analytics across all of its information/eDiscovery, compared to what one might have with an on-premises solution.

Risks in the cloud:

As firms move to the cloud, one of the most persistent risks associated with the technology is multitenancy, means that a software application may not work well as designed in the cloud with multiple users trying to gain simultaneous access to it.  And of course, with complexity tied to data transfer laws, particularly between the US and EU, firms should consider the challenges of data access and the courts, Oot noted.

New ISO Standard Impacting the cloud in 2016:

Brown also described that by the end of 2016, there will be a new “Cloud Service Level Agreement (SLA) Framework” – known as ISO/IEC 19086-1 – published, which will offer a set of considerations for cloud agreements. He noted this will be a boon for law firms as it will lay out a guidance standard verses the normal compliance standard. This should have a positive impact, although Brown cautioned that these guidance standards will raise key questions and require analysis and evaluation.

Reflecting on the session, Oot and Brown surmised that technology still has a few pessimists, but that the forecast is looking positive as more and more firms opt-in. With its waxing advantages and waning risks, it appears that greater cloud adoption is near.

As they concluded, Oot and Brown pointed out one last benefit of the cloud – terms of service from providers can now be negotiated, where previously this was not permitted.

Based on what they outlined, there is little question that fewer barriers remain to adopting the cloud.

Joseph Raczynski is manager, Technical Client Management, Thomson Reuters 

ILTACON 2016: Re-Imagining Legal Technology for the 21st Century

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By Joseph Raczynski

“The story of disruption was just the first act of 21st century business, now begins the tale of total transformation.”

— Mike Walsh

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — So reverberated the words of Mike Walsh a Futurist/CEO of Tomorrow, across an audience of more than 3,000 legal professionals at ILTACON 2016, a four-day conference that centers on the intersection of technology and the legal industry.

Walsh gave the keynote on the opening day of the annual conference, and the lens he cast enlightened the onlookers to a futuristic view of our current world. He then bridged that technological vision to the 21st Century Legal realm and focused on several thought provoking questions.

Can you think like an 8-year-old?

The key to transformation is to be ahead of it. Through the optics of an eight-year-old we can view the direction that technology is shifting. They embrace mobile — why? Because parents have pacified their kids for years with iPads and mobile phones. Their learnings began on those platforms which became almost intuitive to them and will now dictate our future.

When will we be a truly data-driven world?

Now! The biggest social shifts are shaped by the data-driven world. Disney World offers the most advanced of data collection and use. Their MagicBands are linked to a credit card and function as a park entry pass as well as a room key. They know who you are, where you are, and increasingly know what you want — predictively. Food can be delivered to you without you ever specifying a location. All of this is using data and machine learning to better understand consumer, and thus human behavior.

disney

WeChat, an app primarily used in China, was also offered as a good example of where we are going. With this app, people in China can play games, pay for things and buy insurance — the whole time interacting with a bot that is constantly gathering data and learning. This is what we will begin to see in all businesses in the near future.

In preparation for his transition into a discussion around legal, Walsh offered another thought. The children of today will be the first generation to be raised partly by artificial intelligence (AI). If you think about the platforms that are prevalent now, kids are interacting with them increasingly — Alexa, Google and Siri. Law firms have to start thinking about how these eventual employees will work and interact with each other both inside and outside of the firm.

How will a 21st century law firm differ from a 20th century firm?

The world is now global. The largest corporations and law firms have back office and operations support overseas. As an example, Walsh talked about something he saw in India which illustrated where we are headed. An AI machine (physical computer) is situated alongside other staff in a cubical at an office center in India. It is fully embraced and accepted as a highly efficient employee — and continues to improve rapidly with its own productivity.

Speaking of actual human employees, recruiting people will transform, Walsh noted. The next generation of hiring future lawyers, and collaborating with clients should focus on rethinking how we hire. Offer a prospect a clean sheet of paper and ask them to come up with a solution to a problem. Another idea, after a month on the job, ask what processes the newbie might change based on what they are seeing.

int-about-mike

What kind of mental software are you new hires running?

Going forward, the operating system of a 21st century lawyer is as much about the culture as it is about the code. All firms will have to be agile, and firms will have to hire people that think that way. Everything around our traditional culture and space is changing. People will increasingly be working from other locations, so this concept has to be reimagined. Walsh’s suggestion was to think about the person you are hiring — are they energized by solving problems? Additionally, environments have to be reconsidered. How do you design an office for people that do not need one?

Lastly, are you leveraging all of your data?

Law firms are rife with all sorts of data. One question that Walsh suggested was worth posing is how are firms using that data? Increased productivity can be gained by applying analytics to the whole.

In closing, Walsh pleaded for the legal space to adjust their mindsets, how we see and use data, which people are hired, and what technological processes are in place. We need to think like an eight-year-old to see how the world will change and adapt now, he explained.

The data inside law firms has to be better leveraged and analyzed with new tools. When hiring, do so by unearthing agile people and creating more social workspaces. One of the best ways to do that is by rethinking your communities, picking some high-profile projects and challenging those new teams to experiment.

In conclusion, Walsh noted: “When preparing for this new future, embrace that the future means challenging everything we know to be true.”

LegalSEC: Email Security is Priority One for Law Firms

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By Joseph Raczynski

BALTIMORE, Md. — “Three strikes and you are out of the firm.” This is the mantra of one law firm when dealing with employees who click on spear-phishing emails, according to Mounil Patel, Strategic Technology Consultant at Mimecast, an email and cloud security firm.

Patel’s comments came at the recent gathering of legal tech and cybersecurity officials, the LegalSEC Summit, presented last week by the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) in Baltimore.

Simply stated, email is currently the largest hole in law firm and corporate security. Most other aspects of the firm have been shored up over the last several years, including firewall and antivirus protection, malware defenses, and monitoring of networks. However, as Patel pointed out, a law firm can have every monitoring and protection application in place, but email’s reliance on the human decision factor creates major headaches for the firm’s IT staff.

emailTo illustrate, Patel described one incident where he received an email from someone with whom he had worked years ago at a previous company. The email was directed to him and clearly appeared to be from his old colleague’s email address. The cordial note brought up some of their old connections at the previous company and then asked if he would kindly review the attached resume to see if there might be a fit for him at his new company. Patel naturally opened the PDF and the virus payload was released. The point is, with today’s more sophisticated email attacks, there is almost no way for people to know what are genuine correspondences from friends or colleagues and what is a “virus bomb”.

Patel’s advice:

  • Be suspicious of everything that comes into your inbox especially from the outside;
  • .EXEs and .ZIPs files should always be blocked or deleted;
  • PDFs can be difficult — be sure to run the latest patches from Adobe (creator of PDFs);
  • Be aware of where links and URLs are taking you;
  • Law firm or company IT departments should send weekly notes to remind people to be cautious; and
  • For finance, use internal non-email based systems for wire transfers and notifications.

 

It is interesting to note that many law firms and corporations are internally testing their own employees with such targeted spear-phishing attacks similar to the one Patel received. A client of Patel’s ran one such email security campaign and when an attorney was caught opening the attached files or following the links, that person immediately received a pre-recorded message via voicemail from the entire executive partnership that such behavior was unacceptable.

The message went on to state if they were caught twice more they would be terminated — three strikes and they were out.

One best practice noted by one chief information officer at the Summit was that before you start your phishing campaign, let the firm know you are conducting this. She found that attorneys began sending IT suspicious emails proactively. In addition, reaffirm those who do not click the phishing emails, by not noting that they are doing good work.

Email will continue to dog corporations and law firms for the foreseeable future. Ultimately it comes down to humans making decision on what to open and click on. At this point in time, a well-crafted targeted email attack appeals to most people, unfortunately. (In fact, the likelihood of an executive clicking on one of these attacks is at a stunning 96%, according to McAfee.)

So, heeding some of Patel’s advice could save your organization the pains of another attack launched via email.

LegalSEC: Cybersecurity, Rooted in 500 Years of History

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By Joseph Raczynski

Learning from colonial piracy about the war on cybersecurity 

“It is a small world.  It’s a fragile world.  No one is safe until everyone is safe.”  These are the cautionary words of Rod Beckstrom of The Rod Beckstrom Group, the keynote speaker at the cybersecurity LegalSEC Summit last week in Baltimore.  With over 350 legal technology professionals leaning into his every word, he set the stage for where cybersecurity is headed with an advisory tale from history now repeating itself on the Internet.  His intent, to arm the guardians overseeing 80-90% of the country’s IP information all sitting in the same room at that moment in time.

History of Pirates

In 1491, the “Erdapfel” of Martin Beheim was created.  It is the oldest surviving terrestrial globe – excluding the Americas.  This sphere was cutting edge technology of the day.  Like any technology its uses can be for the betterment of humanity or its decline.  Not surprisingly, around the release of the globe, piracy began to flourish.  Seafaring scoundrels viewed the world anew with this technology and seized upon its bounty.

These salty scofflaws took four unique forms in their day.  One group of pirates were sponsored by the Dutch, Spanish, and British empires respectively.  Another group realized they could band together using their private ships to attack on the high seas for gems and precious metals.  The third formed a coalition around pirating for a cause.  The last group were one-off ships that would attack others for jewels or money.  These four pirating entities have a present day adaptation.  They translate to State Actors (e.g. China, Iran, North Korea), Organized Crime (e.g. in Russia or Estonia), Hacktivist (e.g. Anonymous) and Lone Hackers (e.g. anyone and everyone).  One new addition, in the Cyber Age there is also the internal threat to organizations known as “Insider Joe” attacks which are very prevalent.

keynote

Present and Future

As Beckstrom described in this presentation, the wars over the years require time for forces to align.  During the Nuclear era, once the major powers acquired these arms, everyone realized it was in the best interest of each country not to use them, i.e. mutually assured destruction.  This is ongoing right now with Cyberwar.  He said that China or Russia could hobble the infrastructure of the United States tomorrow, but they realize that if they did that, the US would do the same to them, therefore no one conducts this sort of cyber-attack.

Law firms are not a sovereign territory so all aforementioned groups are threats and in turn are seeking them out.  These groups have tools which are sold on the Dark Web as out of the box solutions and can wreak havoc for firms in very little time.  In the graphic below Beckstrom outlines an ecosystem where various parties work together but in isolation to earn money or take down a company.  The scripts are created by people and sold to criminals.  While another sets of criminals have harvested millions of credentials.  In conjunction the Criminal Operator uses both to target a law firm or corporation.  Those proceeds or goods are then routed through Mules.  These are everyday people who simply accept packages and send them along to someone else which keeps the money flowing. In most of the law firm attacks, mules are not used, instead data is either released or held at random by the Criminal Operator.

rod1

The only way to combat this said Beckstrom will be a new world of robots fighting robots (computer bots), which is now occurring.  This next era defense is sifting through huge amounts of data and applying cognitive computing and artificial intelligence with a layer of deep learning on top.  In this light he underscored the importance of preparedness.  One of the world’s largest banks, JPMorgan, has decided to pledge a half billion dollars toward the fight on cybersecurity.

Beckstrom closed with the warning to each firm CIO that the time is now to invest heavily in cybersecurity.  Every one of the attacker profiles mentioned are attempting to break in and get access to law firm and corporate information.  Prepare now because time is short – we are not safe until everyone is safe – by taking the responsibility to invest.

ILTA’s 2015 Annual Technology Survey Security Highlights

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By Joseph Raczynski

Security weighs heavily on this year’s survey

It’s out!  The 2015 International Legal Technology Associations Annual Survey is stocked with insightful legal technology industry knowledge.  This is always an exciting time of the year for me as I get to compare and contrast the stories I heard during the year from law firm visits with ILTA’s survey results.  One dominant theme that prevails throughout the 2015 survey is change and security.  There is little question that many of the “new” ideas or concepts of several years ago have become the status quo and forced firms to adapt.  Sometimes the medium law firm space embraces these new ideas and concepts before Big Law, but more often that is reversed.  So what are some of the interesting trends this year?

top

Atop the trees and looking down, respondents focused on their Top 3 Technology Annoyances.  In order they are Security/Risk Management; Change Management and Expectations; and Change, User Acceptance of Change.  These three issues struck a chord for me.  Many with whom I spoke with throughout the year described these consistently as top pain points for the technology departments at law firms.

Security:

Staying with the security theme, Mobile Device Management (MDM), continues to grow in popularity with nearly 50% of respondents responding that they utilize it.  I assume in the coming years this will continue to rise.  Secure access points where users connect to the Internet are increasingly seen as important by law firms.  To this end, firms are creating policies forbidding users to connect to open WiFi at cafés or airports.  As a result this year Hot Spots or Mi-Fi devices have leapt in adoption with mobile phone hot spots up 20% on the current survey.

Encryption made wide gains across the board.  While there are many facets to encryption, each part of the survey referencing it, demonstrated significant gains over last year.  Specifically, each of the following jumped by a minimum of 10% over 2014; Laptop Hard Drive Encryption, Automatic Email Encryption, Removable Media Encryption, and Smartphone Encryption.

Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), Advanced Threat Detection, Data Loss Protection, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), are all on the rise across the various sizes of the organization.  One interesting tactic that I heard about several firms doing this year is Spear-Phishing their own users.  According to the survey this is on the rise and firms are indeed testing their own employees.  The goal is to educate and increase awareness with cybersecurity threats and how to avoid troubled waters.

Other Interesting Technology Trends:

  • The firm’s top management is viewing IT departments less as an expense, going from 44% last year to 39% of respondents this year.
  • Technology spending sees a mix between a slight increase 3% and staying the same up 3% respectively by respondents.
  • The two primary reasons for firms not moving to the Cloud; 44% Security and Cost 38%
  • Firms that have been through audits by a client in the last three years, 33% said yes and 67% no.
  • SharePoint is trending down slightly in adoption with 48% in 2015 versus 53% in 2011.
  • iOS dominates with Android second, but most surprising is that Windows Mobile dropped off considerably, down 13% from last year.
  • Additionally on the mobile front, support of one platform, i.e. OS or Android grew considerably last year up 11%
  • Office 2010 still reigns atop at 77% compared to Office 2007 at 12% and 2013 at 8%.
  • Desktop Operating System is dominated by Windows 7 (64-bit) at 73% followed by Windows 7 (32-bit) at 23% and far behind is Windows 8/8.1 at 3%.

ILTACON – “Watson, I Need You!” Augmented Intelligence for Legal

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By Joseph Raczynski

If you were to imagine the researching aspect of a law firm of the future, what would that look like? Kyla Moran from the IBM Watson Group led a discussion down the path of what we could expect. In what seemed like a shock to many in the room, Moran described an office similar to today, with one difference: Watson will work in tandem with lawyers, listening to queries and providing natural language feedback with an enhanced ability to understand the tone of the question or conversation. Moran termed this augmented knowledge or intelligence, noting this service will be your personal savant, ever-ready to assist with a wealth of knowledge.

What started as a million dollar investment, IBM Watson now has the ability to process 700 million pages of data in one second. As the system continues to develop, it is likely that in the future many, if not all decisions, will be influenced by cognitive computing.

Moran also spoke about the pivotal moment that shifted the cognitive computing industry. The game show Jeopardy thrust IBM onto center stage with the computer beating the best two players of all time. Moran said that the company learned some valuable lessons from that experience. First was the importance of memory. Watson had a treasure trove of information and metadata, but new in this sphere was the ability to enhance and understand contextual information. Watson could interpret Jeopardy’s tricky language like, “Chicks Can Dig Me,” a category about female archaeologist on the show. Lastly, Watson could see more than black or white, but rather an array of a thousand shades of gray. This important nuance allows the system to rank possible answers rather than a single answer. Ultimately these learnings have allowed augmented intelligence to now aid in human decision making.

While Watson has made much hay outside of legal market, medical, financial and now cooking; where does Moran see it helping law firms?

Moran said that one-third of an associate’s time is typically spent on research with 52 percent of associates conducting a free web search as the first step in their research process. She insinuated that this is one huge area that she expects augmented intelligence assisting. She also mentioned that this will accelerate the vacuums of law where 80 percent of Americans who need legal services are unable to acquire or afford it, while large numbers of lawyers are unable to find clients. This mixture is primed for the use of augmented intelligence to assist.

While the current state of legal adoption of IBM Watson is relatively low, there is no question that such technologies are set to explode over the coming years. With the rapid expansion of both structured and unstructured data, these tools will have to be utilized to better understand the enormous data surrounding legal professionals.

ILTACON – Legal Technology Innovation: Bolstering and Destroying the Legal Profession

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By Joseph Raczynski

The Napsterization of the legal industry is growing more plausible every day. The innovation and disruption seen in the music business around digitization and file sharing is happening right now to the legal industry.

Ryan McClead of Norton Rose Fulbright led a panel discussion, “Legal Technology Innovation: Bolstering and Destroying the Legal Profession,” at ILTACON 2015. Looking at the current state of the legal market, McClead drew a comparison to Napster and record companies circa 1999. The music industry thought their customers were interested in the CD and the packaging. The reality was all customers wanted was the music. Napster saw this and without intending to do so, used common technology to disrupt the record business.

McClead then applied this logic to the legal industry. His premise: law firms think that they are selling a lawyer’s time. However, if you ask a lawyer’s customers, they are most interested in the outcome, not the time itself. Law firms must adopt new technologies which focus on the outcome, not the time spent billing or even fixed pricing. With automation, firms can begin to replicate processes; establishing a faster, better, cheaper solution for their client.

McClead stated to the audience that the legal industry is partaking in its own version of the Napster event, adding “We have a choice to restructure our firms, rebuild our processes or the industry can do nothing, maintaining the status quo and see what happens.”

Stuart Barr, Chief Strategy Officer for HighQ, had an equally riveting discussion. He spoke about the real fears and promises of what is coming in legal. He noted that the advent of cognitive computing will see white collar jobs being eliminated. Using various examples, Barr cited how the revolution started with blue collar positions being jettisoned and will shift to white collar workers soon.

While jobs are being eliminated, new opportunities are emerging. Eight years ago, the mobile app industry didn’t exist; now it is a $100 billion business. Barr suggests that the legal industry will shift and lawyers will have to become more technical. He calls this new lawyer a hybrid legal engineer who knows both the law and technology.

The last discussion of the panel focused around M&A and contracts. In this arena, the panel saw huge possibilities leveraging cognitive computing. Currently a firm might review only the top 300 of 10,000 contracts for a large corporation’s pending merger. The firm may charge $500,000 for this work. The corporation is taking a gamble by not having the other contracts reviewed to save some money. With contract reviewing software, a law firm could offer to review 1,000 contracts for $750,000. In this scenario, both the corporation and law firm win.

The panel left many jaws agape after their rapid fire predictions. There is little question that many of these technologies are going to have a significant impact on the legal industry in the months and years to come.

Keeping It Secure – Internet in a Bubble

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By Joseph Raczynski

Absolutely! Feel free to use YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Gmail for business purposes at Kelley Drye.  As many firms struggle with internal access to these services for their employees, Kelley Drye has figured out how to satisfy employees and firm management by establishing a secure secondary path to the Internet in a bubble which they call Wild West Internet.

This inventive access was discussed at the “Keeping It Secure – Internet in a Bubble” session at the ILTA LegalSEC Summit 2015.  Judi Flournoy, CIO at Kelley Drye described the evolution of how they reached the Wild West Internet.   In part, the genesis was an outgrowth of a 300 part questionnaire request from a financial institution client.  With the significant restrictions the financial institutions placed on access they were forced to change their Web access policy.  The first iterations proved extremely draconian.  No access to personal email or social media was permitted. This met with incredible backlash from the staff.  In fact, there were attorneys in tears of frustration and anger, expressing feelings of disconnect from the outside world.  Peeling back the policy, the revised policy instituted individual access to those cleared by Human Resources on a one off approval basis.  Soon thereafter, throngs were making this request which became problematic.

Ultimately the solution and final policy decision involved creating a separate browser experience for users when they accessed YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Gmail for business purposes.  With the assistance of Lisa Stone and Thomas Moreo from Cornerstone Information Technologies, they built a perimeter network which sat within their larger network but behind an additional firewall.  Thus they were able to safeguard all of their primary systems and establish a walled garden where people could access those services.  There were multiple safeguards put into place including that fact users could not print, download or cut and paste back into the primary network.  Users agree to these in principle and understand the limitations, but both those users and the firm found this to be a perfect halfway point.

For more granularity on instituting this please see the following:

  • They used an ASA Next Gen internal firewall creating an outer perimeter – DMZ
  • Citrix ZenApp
  • Read only domain controller with shares for profiles
  • MacAfee with all of the blocks associated for pornography and gaming sites
  • Blocked: printing, downloads and the ability to cut and paste back to the firm environment
  • Loaded MS Office in the environment so people could still read Word/Excel