It looks like Vokle wants to become the video chat forum for the masses. Originally envisioned as a political platform, Vokle makes it so easy to broadcast and receive real-time streaming commentary that it just might make public debate over the Internet a reality. The platform has also been embraced and roundly praised by Arrianna Huffington … but I like it anyway.
Prism Legal’s Ron Friendman liveblogged (a/k/a real-time blogged) Richard Susskind’s discussion of the future of the profession at ILTA 2009. Here are the Top 10 disruptive legal technologies on the list:
Document Assembly. Has already changed markets. Providing document assembly online allows for economies of scale. Charges and hours don’t have to relate, making this technology “disruptive.
Always on Connectivity. Lawyers can, and are expected to, be on call 24/7. Deal with it.
Electronic Legal Marketplace. Your value in the a frictionless marketplace. Clients can select legal services in the electronic marketplace and even choose to go with non-lawyer alternatives.
E-Learning. Law schools have long been falling down on the job. The Internet can revive learning with realistic simulations.
Online Legal Guidance. Interactive advice systems in the “latent legal market” (see Suskind, The Future of Lawyers). Sounds like self-guided document automation.
Legal Open-Sourcing. A la Wikipedia. Crowd-sourcing communities of interested individuals can result in better answers than throwing the problem to a single individual. Consumers more likely to talk to friend with similar problems than a lawyer.
Closed Legal Communities. See Legal Onramp. Clients and In House Counsel can pool legal information and check a common knowledge-base before consulting pricey outside counsel.
Workflow and Project Management. High volume, low value work can be made into off-the-rack solutions; making certain lawyers into de facto project managers. Project management requires significant training, but lawyers aren’t getting any. This is a disruptive trend because it highlights the fact that as efficiency increases, billable hours decrease.
Embedded Legal Knowledge. In the future legal knowledge will be built into compliance systems making the contributions of highly-trained counsel less necessary except for unusual assignments.
Online Dispute Resolution. Dispute resolution as a service. Services like CyberSettle versus time spent in Court or in the arbitration system.
Making Pacer User Friendly
Friday I stumbled on Recap and was impressed. How impressed? I downloaded it immediately and signed the online petition to make federal case-law available for free. Yeah – that impressed. Recap seems to have impressed some others as well; it has even enlisted top-shelf talent like the lawyer-activist-millionaires over at Justia (you might be more familiar with their last project, Findlaw).
How it works: Recap saves every document you view on PACER, adds meta-tags and other features, makes the item easier to find, and posts it to a central locale. The next time a user goes to PACER and wants that document, if it’s already been “liberated” then the user can download it free of charge.
Granted, you end up paying the 8 cents per page, which means that someone else gets a free ride, but the idea is that someone else could be doing the same and so on. Of course the fact that Recap exists begs the question of why we Americans must pay to view the fruits of our own justice system. Westlaw and Lexis figured out that answer a long time ago.
To use Recap you must use Firefox, the open-source alternative to Internet Explorer. But I suggest you download Firefox even if you don’t download Recap. It’s just a better browser.
Feedback: If you’ve used Recap or have an opinion sound off in our comment section or contact me, Hacker in Chief, at mhedayat@mha-law.com
As part of his Government 2.0 initiative (wtf?), President O’Bama named Aneesh Chopra America’s Chief Technology Officer. Congratulations Mr. Chopra. By the way, since when does the United States have a CTO? Since right now: that’s when. Take it away Aneesh …
Here’s the thing. I’ve been writing, speaking, and generally complaining for years about how our judiciary and our government in general needs to adapt to technology. Now that it appears to be happening under “Generation O’Bama” I can’t shake the feeling that’s it’s all kinda phony. Am I the only one?
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