Why law students need to know about tech Law firm application processes When I was a law student, I attended a conference at which somebody was speaking about the importance of this thing called “commercial awareness”. “Who can tell me the current price of oil?”, the speaker asked the audience. A few sensible estimates were dismissed as being incorrect. …

Why is adoption important? Lots of discussion about legal technology is driven by buzzwords. Things you could do, the promise of artificial intelligence and complex data science. Legal tech startups are widespread now, producing apps that look like they were designed by Apple. Against this background, it is easy to forget that less sexy…

Meet the whiteboard The legal toolkit For many lawyers, word processing, email, document management and document comparison tools are essential parts of the lawyer toolkit. Some lawyers may venture into spreadsheets and slides. Others may even start using project management software or modern communication tools. But not that many have ever used whiteboard tools. Remote working…

There are two primary models of document collaboration in law firms. The first is the old-school method of sending out a Word document, receiving comments back, and typing changes into the live document. …

Amid all the hype around legal tech, lawyers are doing more document comparisons than ever. Find out why. — I spend a good portion of my time acting as a “translator” between lawyers and everybody else. One of the most difficult things to explain is the “redline”. Not least because it is known by several other names: a comparison, blackline, ChangePro, DeltaView, compare, diff, tracks etc. The easy bit…

I attend a lot of product demos. 50% of the conversations in these demos are about features. Does it do [this]? Does it integrate with [this]? How is it different from [this]? This is all quite understandable. It’s essential to know a product’s basic features in order to get a…

I’ve always been interested in software, and when the opportunity to pivot my career from being a lawyer to become a “product owner”, I jumped on it. The new role involved developing software for lawyers and our clients — something I’ve been doing now for the last 18 months. This…