The Iron Tech Lawyer Competition, 2015 Edition

I attended the full Iron Tech Lawyer competition on Wednesday and then spoke at (and attended most of) the first conference put on by the Georgetown University Law Center in conjunction with the ABA Journal, titled “From Revolution to Evolution—Digital Tools in Law Practice”.

This post addresses the competition: a later post addresses the conference.  For pics and other's comments you can follow the hashtag #irontechlawyer and follow @GtownLawIronTech.

I have previously covered the Iron Tech Lawyer competition; in essence, it is an app development contest targeting a legal services-type challenge. What’s great about it is that the students get to address client problems by combining their legal reasoning and analysis with advanced technology. The technology (provided by Neota Logic) is sophisticated enough to be able to embed a big chunk of their legal understanding, but simple enough to develop and use that they can provide a web-based app that actually could be useful.

I was intrigued this year by the different strengths and approaches shown by the six teams (of three or four students each). Some teams did a great job at identifying a clear user need that could be met by an app, or had carefully teased out a coherent use-case for their solution; some had thought carefully about what sort of design would be a good fit with what their users needed, or perhaps designed their app while thinking about and preparing for its further development; and some had developed a strong, coherent presentation or showed strong presentation skills.  The subject matter ranged from Native Alaskan tribal child protection issues to federal disability rights to California elder law. 

All of them were able to get remarkably far in the 10 weeks or so that they had to develop the app; if it is any consolation to them, they should know that any kind of significant, enterprise IT project takes significantly longer than the time they had in class.

The judges evaluated and questioned the students about how they teased out the user / client needs, or identified the client population; how they learned about the underlying law and built it into their applications; and also the type of output or result that could be obtained.

Details on the six apps, also described here, follow.

ADA2GO

The first team’s Americans with Disabilities Act app focuses on Title III, relating to accommodation of individuals with disabilities in the provision of public facilities.  Examples include restaurants, hotels, salons, and bowling alleys.

It is targeted at both individuals not aware of their rights and businesses not aware of their obligations. They tried to focus on the needs of their disabled users, making sure for instance that the app would work with screen-readers.

They started with a potentially discriminatory situation rather than a venue. Tried to provide context-specific examples. Hover-overs provide definitions and examples.  The app also connects to the correct Department of Justice area. After answering a series of questions, the users are provided a final report, which can be in .pdf form. It provides a description of the users’ rights and responsibilities.

The app’s decision tree leads to different sets of .pdf reports.

They worked with the Department of Justice division that supports the ADA.  They heard that the disabled user community would not necessarily have sophisticated technology, and would also might need to use screen readers. They tried to make the app simple and easy to use.

I really value the team's attempt to make the app about disability rights particularly accessible. I think they may have bitten off more than they could chew by addressing needs of individuals (potential claimants) AND businesses (potential defendants). This app has very broad potential applicationn. 

Alaskan Native Child Welfare Assistance

The app addresses the extensive removal of Alaskan Native children from their families, with frequent placement away from Native Alaskan families.The focus of the app was on the tribal representative needs rather than the individuals opposing removal in a particular case.

The challenge is that most tribes can’t afford a lawyer.  Many of them are located thousands of miles away from their tribe.  Yet the tribe has the right to intervene in state court child removal cases,

and has a right to a guardian ad litem who knows about a specific Native Alaskan tribe. The app provides information about particular removal situations and also yes/no answers about tribal and individuals rights, for instance, that the tribe can participate telephonically in removal hearing even if the representative can’t be there in person.

This app had a very interesting targeted focus and use-case; I have some experience with child protective work, and appreciate the attempt to provide more information to tribes, who have needs that apparently are not being properly addressed, leading to injustice and loss of tribal integrity.  The outcome of the app seemed to continue to contain a a fair amount of legal jargon, however, making the resulting information perhaps hard to digest.

California Legal Aid / Elder Law

The challenge is the LawHelpCA.org web site, which has a ton of information, is not easy for users who may not understand legal terminology (such as “capacity.”). 

They use four different approaches to showing information. The app contains plain language descriptions of aspects of California elder law. It provides pieces of information to the users depending on their answers about their situations.

The team saw their app as a "proof of concept", and clearly spelled out how the app could be further developed and expanded.

A user could (in the future) indicate if she was simply interested in learning more about, for instance, in-home care, or could indicate that they need specific questions. 

I especially appreciated this team's focus on what it could effectively accomplish within the time and resource limits that they had, and the way they structured the work they did with an eye towards potential expansion.  That's often the way apps like these might get started in the "real world" (see Minimum Viable Product).

Disaster Assistance & Recovery Tool (DART)

This app addresses needs of hurricane and flood survivors to access the many different resources and help that can help them. A secondary user is Lone Star Legal Aid.

Their goal was to simplify legalese, keeping the language to a sixth-grade level, and also have it available either in a mobile form or via PC browser.

The app helps find disaster assistance resources and apply for loans. 

They wanted to make the app user friendly, provide guidance, tell users how to avoid pitfalls, and educate them. User-friendly to them meant very few questions on a page, with a yes-no question response leading to an additional question on the same page.

They leveraged an expert’s knowledge of what people commonly get wrong to provide tips and links to forms along with deadline warnings.  Answers led to a list of types of eligibility, along with a set of next steps, application forms, and a .pdf download.

The app contains four separate decision trees for eligibility determinations. They hope it can be expanded beyond hurricane and flood disasters, and also to other states. 

This was the winning app, according to the judges.  I concur that DART did a great job focusing on a needy population and delivering targeted, well-designed help.

Transnational Anti-corruption Advisor

This app represents the first attempt in Iron Tech Lawyer to work with foreign law or with an international law firm.

A4ID “Advocates for International Development:  Lawyers Eradicating Poverty” was their partner / client.

The app allows users to assess whether they have or are about to violate the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or the UK counterpart the United Kingdom Bribert Act of 2010. They had to blend two sets of laws, and faced users who may not be familiar with the US or UK legal systems. Cultural expectations might differ also between US/UK and international users.

They wanted to make the app simple to use, and easy to extend. They used short subheadings, and integrated definitions of key terms.

They broke down the law into 9 small decision trees.

While it was interesting to see a foreign focus for this app, I was concerned about the leaps in judgement required of users, and potential client consequences for the unprotected information held in the app.

Veterans Benefits Disability Advisor

The team was shocked to find that there are 3.5 million disabled veterans in the US, constituting over 15% of all veterans.  They worked with the Bob Parsons Veterans Advocacy Clinic.

Veteran’s benefits law is a very tangled web. Many veterans could have been better served in going through the benefits acquisition process if they worked with a veteran’s services organization.

The application helps with several specific processes, such as obtaining medical records or determining discharge status.  

Conclusion

Being there was better than observing on the web, particularly in giving a better perspective on the presentation skills of the different teams.  The Iron Tech Lawyer competition and class continues to give law students a great perspective and actual experience on what it is like to apply legal technology to solve real-world problems.

Boston Legal Innovation Meetup and "Tech-Enhanced Legal Services"

Last Thursday July 18^th I attended the 2^nd Boston Legal Innovation Meetup, hosted at the Suffolk University Law School and sponsored by that school’s Institute on Law Practice Technology and Innovation (“SILTI”). Adam Ziegler, former Goodwin Procter associate and now start-up innovator at Mootus, organized the event, titled “Tech-Enhanced Legal Services,” and featuring a broad range of experienced legal innovators. (Bob Ambrogi covered the first event).

I am pleased to see this series of meetings get organized, and am also very happy to see legal innovation / legal technology programs launched at two Boston-area law schools. In addition to the program at Suffolk, which started in the 2012-2013 academic year, my former Bingham McCutcheon colleague Dan Jackson is directing a program called “NuLawLab” at Northeastern School of Law. These programs join only slightly more established programs at Georgetown Law School (see the ILTA KM Blog on Iron Tech Lawyers) and at Columbia University, inter allia (Richard Granat identified 13 such programs in May 2013.)

My understanding is that Adam and the other organizers are looking for ideas for future meetups. Contact him at LawInno , the hashtag for the event going forward is #lawinno. 

The meeting showcased Andrew Perlman’s Google Glasses; document assembly expert Marc Lauritsen; document assembly vendor Terry Lee of Exari, and LawWithoutWalls Miami University professor Michele DeStefano. 

Google Glass At Work

The meeting started off an appropriately geeky note. SILTI’s leader Andrew Perlman demonstrated Google Glass, the mini-computer masquerading as a chunky pair of eyeglasses. Once the Bluetooth connection to the projector was set up he demonstrated voice commands, taking pictures, taking video, Googling the next Red Sox - Yankees game and Googling images of Niagara Falls. It also has built-in messaging and, appropriately for wearable computing, can provide turn by turn directions to Quincy Market.

He proposed several uses for this technology in legal academia. He'll be using it in his legal teaching by providing another way for students to ask questions.  He proposes that they could also be used in a legal clinic where the pretend client would wear Glass and record the law student taking the "client" interview. 

In legal practice, he suggests that another possible application would be to use it to record a deposition and have a Google Hangout going where other lawyers view the deposition and make suggestions through Glass, potentially saving client spend on lawyer travel.

The Document Assembly Landscape

Marc Lauritsen next spoke and gave a sweeping overview of the document assembly, automation, and management area, its past and future. Marc teaches "Lawyering in Age of Smart Machines" at SILTI and has his own document automation consulting operation, and is a very well-informed practitioner of this art.

Mr. Lauritsen analogized the recent history of document assembly to the "Cambrian Explosion" that led to a wild diversity of primitive marine life 500 million years ago. There was a comparable explosion of document automation companies over the last fifteen years; the market remains small in comparison to the market for legal technology generally, but has matured in terms of the number of players.

Document automation includes creation, analysis, and management of documents. Document creation includes power drafting and auto assembly.  Analysis might include disassembly of clauses within an document, or validation, or meaning extraction. Document management might include storage and tracking of the documents themselves, or of the legal obligations therein.

Mr. Lauritsen mentioned that the remaining document automation vendors cover a wide range of use-cases:

·         Content Bundles such as Smokeball (for small law firms)

·         Legal Services—LawHelp (there is huge latent demand for intelligent legal documents serving middle- and lower-income people).

·         Automated Legal Reasoning—Neota Logic

·         Document Analysis / Benchmarking—KM Standards

·         Software Management-style Document Assembly--CommonAccord

Going forward, Mr. Lauritsen suggested that there will be innovations in collaborative online drafting, with intermixture of freeform drafting and Q & A. Computers might suggest reuse of a clause, or might raise an alert when a drafter attempts to define a term already defined. The growth of interactive systems will change the nature of practice. (Ed.—his thoughts here reminded me of Kasparov's notes about computer-assisted chess, where amateurs working with three weak computer programs were able to beat grandmasters playing without computers as well as the most powerful chess-playing computers playing alone).

Are we free to code the law?

Mr. Lauritsen has recently written on the legal implications of online legal software. Should it be suppressible as the unauthorized practice of law?  Mr. Lauritsen has forcefully argued that it should not.

A Vendor’s Perspective On Document Automation

Terry Lee spoke about the development of a successful document automation company, Exari. While I knew that Exari is a serious competitor in the law firm document assembly market, I confess I was surprised at the extent to which its services have been adopted outside of legal organizations such as law firms, and at the major drivers for its adoption.

Exari started out in Australia, then it went to London; then the big banks realized they needed auditable ways to create documents.  They work with 15-20 of the largest firms, but their clients also include large banks which use Exari for onboarding documents and the like. The prime driver is auditability and control rather than efficiency (though it is more efficient).  Most of the time lawyers are involved, but the market has expanded well beyond law firms and legal organizations; They've automated non-disclosure agreements. 

A collaborative portal allows two people to work on a document at the same time.  There's been some talk about collaboration at the industry level. Exari is all .xml behind the scenes. It is all browser-based, with creation, editing, and approving documents all possible through iPads and the like.

Mr. Lee described a typical adoption process for Exari. It might start with in-house lawyers using the forms; then lawyers getting the people in the line of business to use the forms; then the line-of-business people getting the corporation's clients or vendors to fill out the forms. 

Document automation in smaller firms is often integrated with practice management software.  Exari doesn't itself provide practice management software or target smaller firms.

Exari has partnered with Vermont Law School to develop a course on how to use document automation; they've hired the first person to come out of that program. 

Who Should Innovate? Legal Practice vs. Legal Education vs. Legal Vendors

Prof. DeStefano founded the “LawWithoutWalls” program at the Miami University School of Law.  She has a very unusual background with a combination of non-legal advertising experience, legal practice, and academic excellence.

She suggested that legal educators and legal practitioners are blaming each other for the legal industries’ failure to innovate and meet clients’ 21^st century needs, with questions like “When are legal educators going to train young people to be 21st century lawyers?” and “When will practicing lawyers start to innovate?” Rather than mutual finger-pointing, she argues for cooperation between the academy and practitioners to develop young lawyers and legal technologies that will meet future needs. She calls for more permeability between law providers and law schools, and also law-related service providers like Exari.

An example of that permeability is her program’s partnership with the international “Magic Circle” firm Eversheds, where that firm provides funding and expertise and obtaining opportunities for its lawyers to work with legal innovators and law students. She believes that an LPO will likely partner with a law school. 

Despite vast and continuing improvements in technology, there will still be economic activities like litigation funding that people with law degrees will be able to do better than others. 

Prof. DeStafano acknowledges that we don’t know what the entire range of future legal careers will be. How can we train lawyers for jobs that haven't been created yet? She suggests that students need to learn higher-order skills such as cultural competency or creating a business plan through attempting them, though they may fail at first.

Networking & Next Event

As can happen at meetings with a lot of bright people from diverse backgrounds, the chance to chat in small groups afterwards was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the event. I talked to a former Microsoft in-house counsel (who was friends with my University of Michigan law school roommate), a solo practitioner who is moving into coaching startups on IP issues (and who blogs), Suffolk Law School deans, an experienced elder law attorney; and others.  My thanks to Suffolk for the generous donation of space and after-event food.

The next Boston Legal Innovation Meetup will be hosted by Northeastern School of Law on Wednesday September 11, 2013, and is titled “Legal Design: What Can Lawyers Lean From Design Thinking?” The event is public; simply obtain a meetup account and join the event (and group).