Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

Since she was a kid, Dorna Moini, the CEO of legal document automation company Gavel, knew she wanted to be a lawyer–specifically a human rights lawyer. So, right after she received an accounting degree from NYU she headed to law school and even took an internship with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

After talking to a trusted professor, she decided that before pursuing human rights law, it might be best to get other types of legal experience and she ended up working in big law for several years.

Even though corporate clients and large employers were her clients, Dorna never lost her desire to use her law degree for the greater good and took on a bunch of pro bono work–especially in the area of domestic relations.

While doing that work she figured out pretty quickly that a lot of it was repetitive, form based tasks that took time away from other work that actually required her legal skills. She asked a friend to build her an app that would automate the form creation process.

Basically she wanted TurboTax for domestic law. They called the app Self Help Law and it was a success. So much so that people within and without her firm started using it. In fact, it was so successful that people from other countries started asking her to design apps to fill out forms for the legal work they were doing. It was at that point that she figured maybe she should start a company and take her app to the masses.

In 2018 she quit her law firm job and became a full fledged legal tech entrepreneur. She changed the name of her company to Documate and the company began building a platform that would enable the automation of all kinds of forms.

Ultimately, the company turned into what is now known as Gavel and it helps its users automate the creation of all kinds of legal forms. It also automates documents related to running a law firm or legal department like intake forms and billing documents.

Joshua Schwadron Founder and CEO of Mighty visits the podcast to discuss how his company and law firm are disrupting personal injury law.

Even though Joshua has a law degree, he knew he did not want to practice law in the traditional sense.

Instead, in 2010 the entrepreneur in him founded Betterfly, a marketplace where consumers found service providers to help with projects like home remodels, yardwork or wedding plans.

Betterfly was acquired by a company ultimately purchased by Microsoft and Joshua found himself with time to move on to a new venture, and that would be legal related.

After Betterfly, he launched a litigation finance company and worked on it for a few years, until 2015 when he launched Mighty.

At first, Mighty also had a litigation funding component and tried to pair plaintiffs with funders by having them compete for cases.

Gaining traction with that model turned out to be a little harder than Johsua expected, so Mighty started building tech to help plaintiffs and their lawyers track liens against recoveries in their cases held by medical providers and other attorneys.

As you will hear from Joshua, Mighty is a purpose driven company and its goal is to make the practice of personal injury law more efficient so plaintiffs can take home better settlements.

That’s why he decided to found Mighty the law firm. A firm that requires lawyers to abide by a code of conduct and work to put the most money in plaintiff’s pockets.

The modern legal ecosystem and all its allied professionals is the topic of discussion with Lucy Bassli, founder of InnoLaw Group (formerly InnoLegal Services) and Chief Legal Strategist at Law Geex.

Lucy started her career in Big Law (at Davis Wright Tremaine) and ultimately landed a job in Microsoft’s legal department where she served as Assistant General Counsel. At Microsoft, Lucy was responsible for, among other things, the legal department’s procurement operations and contract management systems.

Lucy left Microsoft in 2017 and started InnoLaw Group–part law firm and part consultancy–where she helps law firms and law departments develop new ways to deliver and receive legal services.

In her role as Chief Legal Strategist for Law Geex, Lucy advises on the use of artificial intelligence in contracting, helps with product roadmaps, consults with corporate customers, and assists with the development of go-to-market strategies.

Lucy discusses the players in the modern legal ecosystem (regulators, industry groups, service providers, consumers of legal services and educators) and why to be really successful and efficient, all of them should work together.

She also explains what it means to be a unicorn lawyer–a lawyer that knows law, but also loves, understands and values process and technology.

We also talk about the “Big 4” entering the legal market and how law firm associates have a real opportunity to push for change.

Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.

Episode 40 is a great conversation with Matthew Holland, CEO of Field Effect Software, a cyber security company providing tools and managed detect and response (MDR) services to protect against cyber attacks.

Field Effect is Matthew’s second company. In 2007 he founded Linchpin Labs, a company that offered ethical privatized intelligence to governments and companies.

Matt started his cyber security career with an internship at Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE). Canada’s CSE is similar to the NSA in the United States. The CSE ultimately brought Matt into the Tailored Access Operations group to gather signals intelligence for the agency (intelligence from communications and information systems).

Matt explains why law firms and legal departments are prime targets for hacking. He thinks of law firms and legal departments as “the formalization of relationships between businesses and people and the documents, the communications around all those resources.” And, in those documents and communications, is the type of very sensitive information hackers hunt for. That is why law firm data security is key.

Matthew also discusses cyber security best practices for law firms and corporate legal departments (cyber security best practices for all businesses, really).

Matthew’s first and foremost suggestion to prevent against cyber attacks? Education. The majority of cyber incidents have a root cause in human error and cyber security education goes a long way. He also suggests the use of multifactor authentication (MFA), VPNs (virtual private networks) and password managers.

He also explains that an organization’s first step in implementing a cybersecurity policy or program is to designate a point person and figure out what kind of budget is available. Once a budget is known, organizations can then start to figure out the best approach to cyber security (what software to use and whether security efforts should be handled in-house or outsourced, like an MDR solution).

Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.

Brandon Wiebe, General Counsel and Head of Privacy at Transcend, offers tips about implementing data governance frameworks and how to utilize software in the process. Brandon’s company is a privacy platform that helps legal and compliance teams automate data compliance tasks.

Brandon explains that most data privacy laws, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and U.S. state laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), generally require similar things of companies:

• notice at the time of customer data collection
• implementation of data security obligations
• that companies have a lawful basis for collecting information and that use of the information is consistent with the companies stated purpose for collecting it
• individuals have the right to opt out of data sale or sharing.

Despite the many data privacy laws already enacted and new ones on the horizon, Brandon is quick to emphasize that data privacy teams should not let perfect be the enemy of good. They must get started somewhere in their data privacy policy journey.

He says the best place to start is an organizational data map detailing all the places in a company’s tech stack holding data subject to privacy regulations. Once a company has its data mapped, it can more easily comply with customer requests for information as permitted under data privacy laws and can also ensure it is not keeping more data than needed.

Brandon also touches on why AI can complicate data privacy efforts, but also notes that artificial intelligence can also assist with data privacy efforts.