The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
Justin Kan’s hybrid legal software and law firm startup Atrium is shutting down today after failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency than a traditional law firm, the CEO tells TechCrunch exclusively. The startup has now laid off all its employees, which totaled just over 100. It will return some of its $75.5 […]
Source: $75M legal startup Atrium shuts down, lays off 100 | TechCrunch
Spot is an NSMIv2 entity/issue spotter built by Suffolk University’s Legal Innovation and Technology (LIT) Lab. Spot builds upon data from the Learned Hands online game, a partnership between the LIT Lab and Stanford’s Legal Design Lab. Learned Hands aims to crowdsource the labeling of laypeople’s legal questions for the training of machine learning (ML) classifiers/issue spotters.
Source: Spot API Performance
In a nut shell you send a legal question and it returns a set of NSMIv2 tags. One could then use the those tags to link to resources that are using NSMI to tag/classify data. One catch here is that it is not clear how many public websites are using NSMI to tag content.
Fourth Cohort of Startups Named for LexisNexis Legal Tech Accelerator https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2019/09/fourth-cohort-of-startups-named-for-lexisnexis-legal-tech-accelerator.html
How We Helped Our Reporters Learn to Love Spreadsheets https://open.nytimes.com/how-we-helped-our-reporters-learn-to-love-spreadsheets-adc43a93b919
This is how the NY Times answered the “should reporters learn to code” question. Turns out a little tech fluency goes a long way. There’s something here to emulate in legal education and the practice of law.
Virtually nowhere to be found were the 90 percent of lawyers who practice outside biglaw, the business clients who do not run mega-corporations, the access-to-justice community, or those disenfranchised from the legal system.
— Five Days, Two Conferences, One Echo Chamber | LawSites https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2019/02/five-days-two-conferences-one-echo-chamber.html
Juro grabs $2M to take the hassle out of contracts | TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/09/juro-grabs-another-2m-to-take-the-hassle-out-of-contracts/
I’m LegalZoom CEO John Suh, and This Is How I Work https://lifehacker.com/im-legalzoom-ceo-john-suh-and-this-is-how-i-work-1822979049
This popped up on my Github feed recently. Looks like Prof. Michael Poulshock is taking a shot at using Github to manage materials for his Legal Decision Technology course being taught in the Spring 2018 semester at Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law. The course itself looks pretty interesting, according to the syllabus:
This course explores how legal decision technology can be used to expand public access to legal information. Students will learn about cutting edge legal decision technologies, hone their statutory interpretation skills, and build interactive apps that answer specific legal questions. This is a hands-on, lab-style class, but no prior programming experience is required.
The course is going to make use of tool called Oracle Policy Modeling which I had not heard of before but seems interesting. Heck, I’m even going to download a copy and take it for a spin.
Always great to see law professors taking advantage of interesting tool in the courses they teach. Maybe Prof. Poulshock will head to CALIcon18 in June to talk about the course and how it went.
The Github repo is at https://github.com/mpoulshock/Drexel-Legal-Decision-Technology-Spring-2018
3 Geeks and a Law Blog: Say Hello to Casetext’s CARA – Case Analysis Research Assistant http://www.geeklawblog.com/2016/08/say-hello-to-casetexts-cara-case.html
3 Geeks and a Law Blog: Teaching Technology in the Academy – Dean’s Roundtable Part 2 – The ABA Annual Meeting (West Coast) edition – http://www.geeklawblog.com/2016/07/teaching-technology-in-academy-deans.html