When Ralph Baxter joined the inaugural class of Legal Rebels in 2009, he was the CEO and chairman of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe. Just a year into the biggest recession since the Great Depression, he caught the ABA Journal’s attention through his initiatives that took Orrick from a domestic, California-based firm to an international heavyweight while navigating economic turbulence.
Many lawyers are reluctant to adopt new legal technology, says Monica Goyal, who developed platforms including My Legal Briefcase, which helps parties in the Canadian small claims courts, and Aluvion Law, which uses automation to cut legal services costs for small businesses.
Chatbots have a place in a law office, says legal chatbot creator Tom Martin, because they can handle busy work that eats up precious time in a lawyer’s day.
Perhaps in five to seven years, as Colin Rule sees it, half of U.S. citizens who file court cases will have access to online dispute resolution software walking them step by step through their matters, resolving up to 80 percent of cases.
While business owners and in-house counsels usually find outside counsels through referrals, Basha Rubin says that often doesn’t lead to a good result in terms of cost and experience. The New York City lawyer believes that data can fill the gap.
Michele Mirto’s commitment to access to justice started as a little girl. Her parents drove home the importance of community involvement by leading their kids to donate to the food bank and homeless shelter.
In his former job as chief business development officer at Frost Brown Todd in Louisville, Kentucky, James Beckett was hungry to learn how his firm could do better.
In the summer of 2014, as unaccompanied minor immigrants arrived at the border en masse, Stephen Manning was focused on a lesser-noticed but equally pressing problem: representing mothers with young children in family detention.
Legal technology suits Lisa Colpoys because “there’s always something new and shiny,” says the Chicago attorney who recently left a legal aid career to help build the boot camp for the Institute for the Future of Law Practice.
In the first-released Star Wars installment, Han Solo brags that he can captain the Millennium Falcon through a smuggling route in just under 12 parsecs—a parsec being a truly astronomical measurement of 3.26 light-years. The route itself is 18 parsecs, illustrating that Solo is a brassy pilot willing to fly closer to black holes and cut the route by a third.
When his law firm enlisted then-litigator Daniel W. Linna Jr. for a presentation on evaluating potential trial outcomes, he presented his Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn peers with a hypothetical case—a teaching approach he used later as an adjunct at the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law.
Philippa Ryan thinks a lot about trust. A barrister in Australia, she lectures on the subject, and her PhD thesis focused on the breach of trust and the liability of third parties. So when Ryan heard about trustless relationships enabled by blockchain technology, her interest was piqued.
Sitting on a beach in Florida with his wife, Jeff Carr was enjoying his retirement in April 2017 when he received a phone call asking him to join Univar as general counsel.
It’s too easy for attorneys to be aware that something isn’t perfect in their practices and accept the situation instead of pushing back. So says longtime legal innovator Nicole Bradick.
Since the late 1990s, Joyce Raby has spent a career bringing technology to legal aid. While a booster and believer in technology's potential to improve America's legal system, her experience is tempering.
"We've been saying for a very long time that technology was going to be the saving grace for the justice ecosystem," she says. "I don't think it is."
