Future & Trends

Last week, Apple’s long-expected announcement of the iPhone 7 was accompanied by an unexpected development: the elimination of headphone jacks , now replaced by wireless Air Pods to the tune of $159 per set. Not surprisingly, Apple’s move produced polarized reactions. On the one side, are critics such as the Verge’s Nilay Patel, who termed…

Six years ago, the ABA released Formal Opinion 10-457, which discusses the ethical obligations that lawyers must address in considering the content and features of their websites. Though undoubtedly late to the party — by 2010, many state regulators had already issued their own ethics rulings on websites — the ABA offered authoritative and important…

A recent Pew Study  reports that in spite of the increase over the past five years in the number of Americans who read ebooks (28%, up from 17%) and audio books (14% up from 11%), in 2016, a full 65 percent continue to read print books – 38% exclusively, with an additional 28 percent reading…

What if people really understood the documents they were signing?  That was the challenge that South African lawyer Robert de Rooy set out to address with the Comic Contract that he developed for one of his clients, Clemengold Mandarin fruit supplier.  As described here  and here, the Comic Contract uses visualization, with the parties depicted as…

These days, the legal profession is obsessed with the future of law. Burning questions — like”Will robots will replace lawyers?” or ”Can big data can predict case outcomes?”  or ”Are we ever going to even come close to ensuring access to justice?” — occupy thought leaders and academics and legal technology companies, and dominate conversation…

Just like oil and water, lawyers and legal technologists don’t mix well.  Too many lawyers remain dismissive of self-help and online solutions even if that’s all a client can afford, smugly chuckling to themselves – “hey, that’s more business for me when I have to straighten out the mess they’ve made.”  On the other side…

  To the Commission on the Future of Legal Services, These comments respond to the Commission’s issues paper seeking feedback on whether state bar associations ought to consider regulation of non-legal service providers – ranging from online how-to publications and websites to human-supported or technology-enabled form-filling services. The short answer – don’t. Because just as…

My respected colleague and legal tech pioneer Richard Granat  fears that hundreds of new entrants to legal services markets may be at risk if subject to some of the proposed regulation outlined in an issues paper released last month by the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Service, and available online here. The Commission asks whether regulation might be appropriate…