Fringe Legal

Alice Stephenson is a founder and tech lawyer driving inclusion and innovation in law and promoting individuality within the legal profession.Alice founded Stephenson Law in 2017 to create a law firm that does things differently. Tackling each stereotype head-on, she is on a mission to build a forward-thinking, innovative law firm that puts people at the heart of everything it does.  Alice's goal is to inspire young women to challenge the perceived barriers to success and see that anything is possible.In this episode we discuss:07:23 - Problem-solving11:00 - Self-reflection and being comfortable with mistakes13:57 - Client experience18:27 - Measuring lawyer value outside of billable targets22:44 - Breaking down barriers Full Transcript on FringeLegal.comAlice Stephenson - Breaking down barriersAb: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. And welcome to the Fringe Legal podcast. I am thrilled to have Alice Stephenson as my guest today. Alice is the founder and a tech lawyer driving inclusion and innovation in law and promot

Innovation and Transformation Perspectives From Around the WorldAb: [00:00:00] Innovation and transformation perspectives from around the world There is tremendous variability in how the legal industry approaches innovation and technology initiatives, and the range is greater still when you expand the scope to different jurisdictions and regions worldwide. Through a series of interviews with innovation leaders and a review of published materials. I explored some of the factors that influence innovation levels across different regions. Namely, we focused on the UK., a number of African nations, Australia, and India. What I've found is that many interrelated  factors are at play: regional regulations, the maturity of the legal services industry, competitive pressures, and willingness to make financial investments in innovation and technology initiatives. Of course, there are also significant variations across firms within the same region, mostly influenced by the business culture.  Before we consider those fact

Contracts are crucial to the legal process, however more frequently the process of contracting can be painful. In this episode we discuss how to remove unnecessary barriers from contracts while offering the same protections, benchmarking the performance of your contracts, and Alex’s reflections on 10 years since founding Radiant Law.  Key quotes Quotes have been extracted from the live conversation and have been edited for grammar and minor corrections. “looking now from where we were 10 years ago when obviously no one was doing that and you know we were one of the first. There has been progress, but it's been slow. Really what's happened is that everyone's talked a lot. I fear that too many customers have been fobbed off too easily… I don't think there's been enough change, and where there has been changed, I think has been quite token” “Our contention is that contracting matters. These contracts are where you get your money into your business. So these contracts matter, but I don't think companies take it t

Alex Low is an expert in helping businesses implement and adopt marketing and sales strategies. He regularly speaks to experts through his podcast The Death of a Salesman and applies the principles at BeyondSales and DLA ignite. Oh and he's worked in the BD function at PwC, as Client Relationship Manager at BLP (now BCLP), lead Client Dev at JLL, and more. In this episode we discuss: Why good marketing and a strong personal brand has never been more importantHow to implement a marketing transformation strategy how corporate content vs individual content is consumedsource: dlaignite.comHow you can reduce your recruitment costs with a good marketing strategyHow to leverage LinkedIn to build your brandwhat can you different to strengthen your profileHow to optimize your profile for search and storytellingHow your brand makes you a more obvious choice in competitive pitchesDuring our conversation, Alex also recommended the following book: Technology vs. Humanity: The coming clash between man and machineYou can fi

In this episode of Fringe Legal, host Abhijat Saraswat speaks with Janet Stanton.I reached out to Janet after having read her article on the importance of strategic client management. We discuss the topic in detail including what it means, the benefits for individuals and the firm, implementation advice, and pitfalls to avoid.Janet is an accomplished business person who brings her experience from diverse industries and professional service organizations to bear on issues currently facing Law Land. Prior to Adam Smith, Esq., Janet was Director, Client Relationships Program at Orrick. Previously, she served as Executive Vice President at a global communications agency where she led several large, global client relationships for organizations such as Pfizer and the US Department of Defense.  She also served as President of a national communications agency.She was personally awarded a Certificate of Appreciation by the Office of the Secretary of Defense.Janet is a graduate of Vassar College, which she attended as

Making innovation everyone's business with Allister SpencerInnovation has as many definitions as the number of people you ask to define it. Regardless of what you think of as "innovative," the execution needs to permeate the business. Abhijat Saraswat speaks with Allister Spencer on how to make innovation everyone's business. In this episode, we’ll go over:Review the state of the unionearlier this year firms put their hand brakes on; some thrived, some fell apart. What drove this? What were the differences between segments (law firm sizes, law firms vs. in-house legal, etc.)?General hygiene across the professionHow firms can improve their operational excellence so they can make clients stickierget more clientsIncreasing profitsHow do we establish a baselinediscoverybenchmarkimprovementHow Alt-V approaches the abovelegal meth labTaylor Wessing workshop Quotes have been extracted from the live conversation and have been edited for grammar and minor corrections. What follows is a commentary based on the discussi

On this episode of Fringe Legal Edge – host Abhijat Saraswat speaks with six outstanding women.There are each uniquely impressive, but all have one thing in common. They met (as well as 14 others) through a Linkedin networking group at the beginning of the pandemic. This one act led to the writing of an anthology of their struggles, experiments, and triumphs.Ab speaks with Winter Wheeler, Shari E. Belitz, Esq., Lisa Lang, Laura M. Gregory, Esq., Deb Feder, and Christon Halkiotis.Their stories are endearing; they show authenticity, talk about insecurities, confidence, and about what can happen when you show up.Here is a peek into their stories:Takeaway 1: How Shari E. Belitz, Esq. shed the label of ‘side hustle’ and became “founder and CEO… No side. Lots of hustle.”Takeaway 2: How Laura M. Gregory, Esq., CPCU made insurance coverage interesting to the masses and grew her following from 1k to 6k in just six months! LauraHasItCoveredTakeaway 3: How Christon Halkiotis lesson about riding a motorcycle through curv

Chatter is a special episode where Abhijat sits down with Vincent Michetti to discuss 3-5 varied topics. In this episode they discuss: Deloitte buys Kemp Little: Deloitte UK has bought the law firm Kemp Litte, which adds 86 lawyers (inc. 29 partners) to the legal roster for the company. We've been through this before, throughout the 1990s the Big Five accounting firms (as they were at the time)—Arthur Andersen, KPMG, Ernst & Young (EY), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and Deloitte—made a concerted effort to enter the legal services market. It was relatively successful but was shut down following a wave of accounting scandals that saw the fall of Arthur Andersen, and new regulation introduced that restricted the ability of the Big 4 to offer non-auditing services to audit clients.ILTA Tech Survey: the annual ILTA tech survey was published recently, which collected responses from 470 firms, 103k+ lawyers, and 208k+ users. Overall, there was a much higher focus on the Cloud ( lots of o365, exchange online, clo

Ab: Hello everyone. And welcome to this experimental episode. And this episode will be using machine learning too. read out one of the articles I've written in the past. Probably will be getting a few of these in the coming months. So please do let me know what your thoughts are and excuse any mispronunciations from the ai you can find the full text of the article on fringe legal.com and as always love to hear your feedback. Enjoy.AI narrator 1: This is the audio version of an article, read by your friendly neighborhood artificial intelligence.AI narrator 2: Solving the Last Mile Problem for the Utilisation of Legal Technology  The last mile is a concept that specifically focuses on the movement of goods or services from the distribution centre to the destination – this final aspect of the supply chain is often the most difficult and expensive than any other part of the supply chain.This article considers the last mile problem framed as the utilisation of technology at law firms, and how solving it could prov

Eric Laughlin is the CEO of Agiloft - the no-code contract and commerce lifecycle management software company.  I think, as everything changed, people had to have had sort of two insights: one insight is that the world changes more rapidly than I even thought that it could. And then the second thing is, I, as an individual, as a human, was able to adapt more quickly than I thought that I might've been able to. And that sort of plasticity that we discovered in the world and in ourselves, I hope has allowed everybody to, think of a sort of positive outcome from this pandemic, which is, it allows people to be more, imaginative about what the future might look like. and that should have implications for the way that we work. And for the way that we have our family life and our personal lives, but it certainly has implications for the way that we think about technology. What technology we choose, what we think that technology does, how long we think we'll use that technology and, the rigidity or sort of plasticity

Ray Biederman is an experienced litigator with nearly two decades of experience removing obscurity from the eDiscovery process for other attorneys and corporate resources. Ray is the President and co-founder of DiscoveryMaster.co, CEO of Proteus Discovery Group, and Partner at Mattingly Burke Cohen & Biederman LLP.most people went to law school to practice law and not to practice technology, or practice updating Excel spreadsheets all the time. It's like the rule of 80% rule, right? You cover 80% of what the needs are, and then the other 20%, either custom build or figure out a workaround for it. As litigators, we're working in a pretty fast-paced environment, and that 20% is critical. So you don't want to make a move until you've got everything covered or you don't have to change your processes that much.And that was part of the beauty of what we've done; people don't really have to change their practices all that much, it unifies everything into one place and they get the information they need, but they

Adrian Camara is the CEO of Athennian. Athennian is a legal entity management software for in-house teams and law firms.

This is a replay from the Fringe Legal Virtual Summit held earlier this year. This panel brings together four leading knowledge managers and innovators to discuss some of the projects they have started or have seen sprouted in crisis situations.The panel will bring together a world view as we'll be joined by Thao and Priti is the US (New York and Chicago respectively), Barbara in Brazil, and Terri in Australia.On the panel were: Priti Saraswat, Bárbara Gondim da Rocha, Terri Mottershead, and Thao TranThis was recorded as a video and you can watch the video version at https://summit.fringelegal.com/talks/km-viewpoint-from-practitioner-to-enabler/

Ab and Vincent sit down for the first of the monthly “chatter” segments on Fringe Legal during which they discuss the Epic vs. Apple/Google saga, California vs. Uber and Lyft, and the upcoming Microsoft Surface Duo device.You can watch the video version of the recording here: https://www.fringelegal.com/august-chatter-with-vincent-michetti/You can Vincent Michetti on LinkedIn. 

Mick Sheehy joined PwC as a partner in October 2018 to build and run PwC’s Australian NewLaw practice, focussed on providing strategic consulting, technology, and outsourcing solutions to legal departments. Mick is a recognized international leader in the field of legal innovation and transformation, having won numerous international legal innovation awards and with his work the subject of a case study for Harvard Law School.  Mick founded and chaired the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Australia, an industry body established to share best practice legal operations and innovation knowledge.  Mick is a director of Fitzroy Legal Service, a member of the advisory board to Swinburne University Law School, has an extensive commercial and M&A background, and before PwC spent 14 years at Telstra where he was General Counsel.I felt that all the other departments were so adept at using numbers and metrics, in particular, to go and fight for internal funding. Whereas the legal department is hopeless at it. In

Andrea is a visionary leader with a passion for combining digitalisation with human potential. She has 20+ years of experience in the legal business both as a transactional lawyer and as a leader for various business areas (marketing, business development, innovation, and legal tech). If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to the Fringe Legal Newsletter to get 3-5 interesting ideas delivered every Sunday. Join 530+ people. It's free. Join at www.fringelegal.com/newsletterSummaryWhy every legal professional needs to know about digital transformationWhat does Innovation mean to Andreamany people mix up innovation with the change, or they mix up innovation with creativity and creativity is certainly necessary for innovation, but it's not enough. It's not the same... Many innovation projects include changing behaviors, adopting new working methods, adopting technology, but change is not equal to innovation... innovation and entrepreneurship is a key success factor for every single company, every single busi

Alma is an Evangelist at Litera. Alma is a legal technology expert and trusted advisor to Litera clients, helping them to bring innovative ways of thinking and practice to life. Previously, Alma was the Chief Innovation Officer, Legal Solutions, at Integreon Discovery Solutions. Alma joined Integreon as part of its acquisition of her litigation management software business, Allegory, where she was Founder and CEO.Alma has been researching the prevalence of knowledge management and innovation roles across the Am Law 200 firms. In this episode:we go through her findings which were frankly shocking to the both of uswe look at firms that are doing well in functionally and practically serving the KM and Innovation functionwhat's missing, the myth of km and innovation being widespread across the professionthe cost of not having these roles filled at your firmhow Alma plans to use the informationThis episode is presented a little differently. Alma and I were having such a great conversation that I just hit record. S

This is an audio version of the talk Ben gave as part of the Fringe Legal Virtual Summit 2020. You can watch the video version here: https://summit.fringelegal.com/talks/ben-white-results-of-over-200-in-house-counsel-interview/

Mike Whelan, Jr. We think we understand the complexity of the supply chain, but that complexity in a weird way, feeds efficiency, cost control, and quality in a way that we just wouldn't expect. We think we're all artisans. And of course, in a big firm, [and] in law school, we're taught to be sort of artisanal. Mike has worked in logistics, solo law practice, and legal media. He teaches about the overlaps between those activities and what they mean for attorneys and the companies that aim to serve them.Through his speaking, consulting, and writing, Mike aims to improve the lives of solo attorneys. The legal industry has many well-documented struggles. If we can harness the minds and compassion of solos—roughly half of the profession—we can have real impact on an array of social issues, including access to justice. That is Mike’s mission. Mike lives with his wife, four children, dog, two geckos, four cats, two birds, and hedgehog in the Kansas City area. (He needs a nap). Mike is also the host of the Lawyer Fo

Dr. Allan McCay has a PhD in Law (University of Sydney), is an admitted solicitor in Scotland, Hong Kong, New South Wales, and Tasmania (Australia). He is an author of several books, and teaches at the University of Sydney Foundation Program and will again be lecturing in Criminal Law at the University of Sydney Law School in semester 2, 2020.   And so, on that view, it seems like the human consciousness doesn't seem to add much because ultimately human decision making is algorithmic and as these algorithmic machines are getting better and better they will surpass us. And, there are dire implications for the future work.   As I was reading that, I kept from thinking, well if David Hodgson's view is right then that's not, that's not true. So if David Hodgson's view is right then there is some kind of advantage in the workplace from being a conscious human and the certain kinds of humans can, engage in a certain kind of judgment, when they make decisions that are not open to a non-conscious algorithmic machine.