Law Department Administration

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By Matt Coatney / AccessData

The legal services industry is hurtling headlong into a revolution in the way that we carry out virtually every aspect of our jobs. The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) – intelligence exhibited by machines that are trained to learn and solve problems – is not just an extension of prior technologies. AI holds the potential to dramatically change the field in a variety of ways, from reducing bias in investigations to challenging what evidence is considered admissible.Continue Reading Stop Worrying about the AI Revolution – It’s Here! Law Departments should focus on how it can help

By Lee Matthews and Matt Kivlin / Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions

When you order a meal at a restaurant, there’s a menu and a waiter to provide information, service and, if something goes wrong, accountability. It’s a pretty simple system, but it works. What happens when someone on the business side wants to order up something from the company’s legal team? It’s not always so easy. And that’s the issue that Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions wants to address. Lee Matthews, the new ventures strategy director, and Matt Kivlin, a senior director of product management growth markets, sat down to talk about their approach. The interview has been edited for style and length.Continue Reading I’ll Have a Contract with Those Fries: How one firm is trying to advance the delivery of in-house legal services

By Joe Calve, Metropolitan Corporate Counsel

It sounds like a bad science fiction movie. The people of planet Earth are, as usual, blissfully unprepared for the alien invasion. Spindly, big-headed creatures – legions of them – emerge from their improbable flying machines. They are nothing like us. What are their intentions? Are they friend or foe? How will we communicate? Can we work together in peace with this job-hopping, oversharing, disloyal, entitled, itinerant, social media-addicted alien hoard?Continue Reading Backstory: The Millennial Invasion

By Trisha Anderson, Inventus LLC

According to the U.S. Census, there are over 83 million millennials. They make up over a quarter of the nation’s population. The growth of this demographic has had an inevitable impact on the demographics of the workforce. By the year 2020, millennials will account for 46 percent of all employees.Continue Reading Millennials Are Leading—Is Your Company Following?: A new generation of employees is setting the pace for modern communication

By Reese Arrowsmith, Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC)

Intro: Reese Arrowsmith, who heads legal operations at Campbell Soup Company, is the inaugural chair of the legal operations membership section of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC). He spoke with us about his new role at ACC, the growth he’s seen in the field of legal operations and where he thinks it’s going next. His comments have been edited for style and length.Continue Reading ACC Is All In on Legal Operations: The association’s first chair of its ops section explains why

By Rees Morrison, Altman Weil, Inc.

The Roman god Janus looked both ways at once. That’s an apt metaphor for the divergence in how lawyers look at the use of data in management decisions. Some lawyers look askance at data being used to augment decisions; others look with favor on it. The more clearly that lawyers understand the conflicting bases for their own views and those of their colleagues, the more adroitly they will deal with data in decisions.Continue Reading A Metrics Conundrum: What Would Janus Do?: Lawyers are sometimes torn when considering how much to rely on data

By Yvette McGee Brown, Jones Day

Introduction: Yvette McGee Brown, a native of Columbus, Ohio, has had a varied career. She’s been a common pleas court judge, she ran the child abuse and behavioral health division of a children’s hospital, she made a run for lieutenant governor of Ohio, she’s served on the Ohio Supreme Court, and now she is a litigator at Jones Day. Given the diversity of her career, it seems like poetic justice that she serves as Partner-in-Charge of Diversity, Inclusion and Advancement at the firm. Below, she discusses her career and her role in promoting diversity in the profession, at Jones Day and beyond. Her remarks have been edited for length and style.Continue Reading Definitively Driving Diversity: Exposing students to law firm life early can make all the difference

By Aaron Fluss, FRONTEO

Aaron Fluss, the National Director of Managed Review for FRONTEO, talks about the value of creativity during document review and explains why, despite an explosion of data – and costs related to corralling all that data – technology can’t replace the human touch. His remarks have been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading How to Design Document Reviews To Cut Costs: It all starts with building the right workflow

By Charlie Platt, iDiscovery Solutions

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to meet with some senior in-house counsel from a Fortune 10 company. We were discussing data and the powerful ways analytics can be used in litigation. One of the attorneys appeared somewhat dismayed, saying that while analytics are amazing and she really wanted to make use of the technology, rarely did any of her cases contain anything other than emails and documents. One of her colleagues asked, “Aren’t you working on the <XYZ> matter?” She was. Her colleague replied, “I used to work in that division; have you considered the following?” and then proceeded to list about a dozen different data sources that were present – many of which were good candidates for analytics.Continue Reading The Ethical Hacker: Data, Disputes, Discovery and more…I Got 99 Problems, But No Data Ain’t One

By Metropolitan Corporate Counsel

The Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2016 Law Department Management Report has a bit of a good news-bad news flavor to it.

The good news is that law departments continue to gain “greater access to the inner sanctums where decisions are made,” as ACC puts it in its executive summary. The bad news is that their hard-won seat at the table derives, first and foremost, from the perception that a law department is cost-efficient.Continue Reading Backstory: Reconnect Redux