We first met Richard Susskind in 2008 at the launch of his book The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services and then again in 2010 when he was the keynote speaker at the ABA TECHSHOW. We then had the chance of doing a video interview with him at Georgetown Law during Georgetown’s “Law Firm Evolution” conference.

His main points have always been :

1. Deep and rapid technological advances (of the disruptive kind) leading to major threats to various aspects of the traditional law firm business model

2. Relentless connectivity, and the burgeoning electronic legal marketplace

3. The “decomposition of legal tasks” into component parts that can be delegated to various sources: in-sourcing, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting

We had the chance to see him speak again last year at LawTech Camp London, a rather innovative event on law and technology run by Michigan State University which sponsors a new “law laboratory” called Reinvent Law to showcase innovation in the profession.

His latest book is now out in paperback, Tomorrow’s Lawyers, An Introduction to Your Future,… Read more

Valerie Pelton … a Principal of EAM Capital and its General Counsel … gets to go to all the cool media events.  Well, she lived and worked in Hollywood for a number of years so why not?  She recently came back from the Sundance Film Festival and said her favorite movie (a documentary) was “Google And The World Brain”. It examines the failed book settlement and questions whether placing the world’s knowledge in the hands of a corporation. Google, can after all, change its mind about levels of access to its scanning project without much oversight.

Note:  last last year Google and the Association of American Publishers agreed to a settlement over making digital copies of books, but that settlement did not affect Google’s current litigation with the Authors Guild.

The problem is bigger than Google, with implications for all when major corporations gather intimate information about its customers. Implications aside, that’s what you get in a commerce driven world.  She managed to hook up with Casey Newton,a CNET writer and old chum, who wrote a review of the … Read more