It’s Pi day. 3.14.21.  Pi is neverending and this year, ABA TechShow 2021 was as well. Pi has been my favorite number once a year for as long as I can remember, just like TechShow, there are somewhere between 6 and 8 pieces in a pie. Before you challenge me, as it’s early in this post, remember, others have done blog posts just on this subject. Who Knew?

In the last 6-8 days, what’s happened. For me, after a week in a Zoom Jury trial (think virtual shit-show over long hours trying not to screw up), it was out of the fat and into the ABA TechShow fryer, attempting to play catchup on regular case work and simultaneously manage 5 days (normally TS was 2 and ½ days in person) of 18 tracks by 115 different speakers, with some overlapping programming and a massive amount of legal tech differentiation.

I was able to hit about 16 sessions, some only part time, but the level of talent was high again this year. I did mostly choose in order of preference and based on interest + speaker choice. I was incredibly and awesomely surprised by some of the cool solo presentations by Stanley Tate and Regina Edwards.

Embedded into the mix was the philosophic and forward thinking preso by sponsors, Clio’s Jack Newton and Fastcase’s Ed Walters, who touted the telling stats such as –

*   ‘56% of lawyers answered our phone calls,’

*   39% of calls went to voicemail,’

*   57% didn’t return calls within 72 hours,’

 Thus providing more evidence that we, as a profession has not fully adapted to what Jack calls the “client centered law firm,”  placing the onus on us to move in the direction of what the client wants and needs.

Ed talked about the three horizons of movie rentals and how disruption has previously caused innovation with companies such as Blockbuster and then how Netflix, itself caused the disruption by destroying it’s own business model and innovating towards streaming, with Jack following with the Stat that it is now a 20 billion dollar business where previously in its heyday, it was only a 4 billion dollar industry. This proved prescient in the age of Covid where movie studios and theatres saw there new live releases effectively drop to ‘close to zero’ over the last year.

Citing William Gibson, Ed goes on to posulate that “The Future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”

Keynote ‘artist’ (I’ll call her that since she is so impressive painting a picture with such an accurate brush), Renée DiResta, a 2019 Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust and Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, tackled the topic of “Mitigating Misinformation” across the internet and following the tracking of information about things like bots such as Sockpuppets (those that create misinformation), Amplifier Bots (those that retweet or amplify a message), and Approval bots (those that seek to gain ‘likes,’ which then get a message to critical mass which then pushes it even further.

She differentiated between misinformation (those who may be inadvertently wrong) and disinformation (those intentionally wrong), and touched on the reality of “Unintended Consequences” that, according to the data, that Russian bots were far less likely to spread disinformation in the 2020 election (as compared to the 2016 election); and that, despite the failure of laws to address the issue, giving way to the technology platforms responses to quash it, that Domestic Ideologues spread vastly more disinformation in this last cycle.

She then raised the question of how moderation should be applied towards conspiratorial actors who act like state actors, talking about routine pathways of how this information spreads to examples of now-famous takedowns.

She then provided examples of how the categories of disinformation have spread from initially undermining confidence in election legitimacy to health information to companies and business, concluding that moderation, coming in three forms (remove/reduce/inform) often is not effective and that we are now in a challenge-place where we must balance freedom of expression with information integrity and identified several ‘emergent fronts,’ where this was starting to take shape and discussing ‘tradeoffs’ rooted in our now-existence.

The big brain talks are just one aspect of why legal tech CLE is part and parcel of the bigger picture, applicable to all, regardless of the practice area, and such a great instigator, impetus, and disruptor in our ever-questing legal lives. “We should all be so fortunate.”

miu

• Category: Interesting Articles