Section News

Periodically, we receive questions about updating the Section’s iPhone/Android App. To that end, the we’ve prepared a simple step-by-step set of instructions to update the App.

Incidentally, in case you want to download new statutes, instructions for that can be found here.

photo credit: @jack_newton

I’ve been a neurotic ADD-OCD legal tech chasing nutjob for a bunch of years now. Probably not what you’d think might be a good lead for any writing much less speaking or even anything one might want to claim. But it’s about honesty, integrity; it’s about what I call “finding your true” (Don’t steal the concept former Lexis employee-turned-consultant-speaker…I’ve been there before). It’s a little like Jim Carrey in that movie…a little like Dennis Miller who coined the above referenced phase when he said “I’m ADD-OCD, so I’m constantly changing what I obsess over;” a little like ‘I just want my youth back or a little of my post-adolescent, testosterone laced verve when I was immortal. I turned #$%^&*years older this year. I’m not proud and I feel it. This does not mean I’m giving up on my Peter Pan complex…completely. It just means that I’ll simply have to juggle the past 5 years’ challenges and 2 years of ridiculousness, including all my bad choices and decisions (don’t worry, I didn’t become a South American drug mule or start playing in a piano bar or anything crazy like that); I’ll have to cast these aside and let my passions control a little more, balanced with the knowledge that maybe I’ll slow down just a bit, smell the roses a bit more and try to be honest in the give-back. This will be one of those times.

Techshow is simply the best…in person. It’s a caffeine-addled romp through what’s new, reborn, reinvented, and recalculated with an eye towards the trends and movements, all magnified through the eyes of cutting if not bleeding edge legal technologists, practicing attorneys, consultants, and just great humans. That said, Covid was a bitch. And it seems even still as #Hybrid becomes the new, new normal, transitions are still painful. Awesome as all get out is seeing posts and references to top-tier friends/colleagues/speakers/famous people such as Brett Burney, Kenton Brice, Jim Calloway, Regina Edwards, Debbie Foster, Jordan Furlong, Erin Gerstenzang, Joshua Lenon, Nefra Macdonald, Maddy Martin, Dorna Moini, (the) Jack Newton, Anne-Marie Rabago, Catherine Sanders Reach, Annette Sanders, Ben Schorr, Dan Siegel, Stanley Tate, Reid Trautz, Gyi Tsakalakis, Kristin Tyler, Ed Walters, Deneen Warmington and Allison Williams, and Co-Chairs rock stars Brooke Moore and Ivan Hemmans, among others.

This year, according to my website view, ABA Tecshshow 2022 has 194 speakers, 5 tracks for live presentations, 55 live Topics/presentations. The virtual track (thus the hybrid reference) for just $250.00. What’s notable is not what’s in the virtual track, which is limited to tracks called “Core Concepts” and “Virtual Tracks.” Not included this year…and by not included I mean lacking and ‘that which makes me feel bad’ is the Startup Pitch Competition (which I tried to ask for a streaming little bit of goodwill and which was apparently shot down by the ‘bigs’). Note that all the virtual topics are mostly recordings being played back, lack any significant audience or interactive component. To their credit, however, they did include the Keynote on Friday and 60 in 60 on Saturday. Kudos to them for this. Frankly, if you want at least 3 of the topics offered along with the Keynote and 60 in 60, the $250.00 price is worth it. As for me, it’s always worth it, even though it’s a reporting gig and thus free work and I’ll try not to ADD-OCD over my recent challenges and inability to carve out the time/$ for it. Everything’s a tradeoff in this world and we should all strive to leave more than we take. So, let’s chase it here.

In contract and as opposed to last year, ones I won’t be able to see or report on (it’s a rebuilding year) are –
a. Start-Up Pitch Competition (I’ve gone Jimmy Kimmel on this every year, getting close to picking the winning Bachelor and those that pitch here usually telegraph the trends that are peaking (think AI that soon became Automation, now all over the place in lawyer pitches and for good reason); and further highlight creativity, a component often muted in law practice but one which this writer predicts will separate future wheat from the chaff in the ever-changing law practice model.
b. Ethically Managing Modern Emergencies: Are You Ready? With Texas’ own Anne Marie Rabago, formerly of the State Bar of Texas’ Incubator program.
c. Come Play in the Sandbox: How to Advance Legal Services Through Regulation (I’ll attend anything with Ed Walters…twice on Sunday);
d. The Digital Client File (w/ Jim Calloway of the Oklahoma Bar and IMO, so incredibly significant and yet overlooked, given zoom hearings, digital presentation requirements, and the simple reality that most attorneys are not printing the file unless absolutely necessary; this translates to massive gaps in the total recall of evidence, documents, and overall presentation; unsolicited note: I’ve been working on things like smart documents and linked outlines and pleading indexes that provide real-time instant judicial or attorney gratification with the ability to click and go to almost anything; combine this with mind maps/graphics hashtags (#) and issue codes and you have a real virtual legal reality. I believe that the coming hybrid environment will demand higher performance than the ‘dumbing down of legal’ we have experienced in all online hearings. This is, of course, a much bigger conversation than possible here but note that Calloway has the chops to talk us off the ledge and smarts to point us all in an incredibly relevant direction even if it has yet to be extrapolated this far in workflows.

Check out the Program Guide here, the full schedule here, the Core Concepts virtual schedule here and the Virtually Everything schedule here, and pricing and registration here.
Virtual offerings ($250) that you can access now through Saturday and note that as a virtual attendee, you have access to all the virtual topics at any time this week.

Mark I. Unger is a solo practitioner, mediator, and consultant in San Antonio, Texas, and former Chair of the Computer & Technology Section of the State Bar of Texas.
LinkedIn (miunger)
Twitter (@miunger)

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