David Bushby

4 Truths About Time Management

I’m a big fan of clear, concise writing and Chris Hargreaves nails it with his four truths for lawyers about time management. Here’s the deal:

  • Saying no lets you say yes
  • You can’t do everything and you shouldn’t try
  • Working to your strengths is the better strategy
  • Generous productivity works wonders

On truth #4, I’m lovin’ this little nugget:

“Remember – it’s “time management” not “my personal solitary time management”… If someone is waiting for you to make a 30 second decision and you put them off for 6 hours while you worry about your own priorities, is that a good use of time overall?”

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In-house + Hyper-growth

For anyone in-house at a hyper-growth company or for those looking to join a startup as lawyer #1, here’s a wrap of the main issues you’ll face (and how to deal with them) from four lawyers steering the course at Stripe, Lending Club, Thumbtack and Silicon Valley Bank.

On figuring out top priorities, managing counsel at Thumbtack, Steve Siger adds:

“I find that figuring out what to do and the order to do it in is, often times, harder than doing the actual work. It takes quite a bit of time to determine what ‘urgent’ actually means at a given company.“

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Are You a Legal Engineer?

If you're a lawyer working in-house or in private practice and having a constant nagging feeling that there must be a better way, then perhaps this is for you...

In this call to action, co-founder and chief legal engineer at Wavelength, Drew Winlaw explains his epiphany moment which led him away from practising as a lawyer towards troubleshooting and fixing processes for legal teams.

In his words:

"That transition started with basics like teaching someone how to extract data from a legal practice management system in the right format to reduce their downstream administrative effort. That was the tip of the iceberg, and after that a lot of my work started with the question “Why can’t we do that?”.

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The Evolution of the Contract Stack

Here's a neat summary of what's in store for the evolution of contracts.

It sees three major technical phases affecting contracts: (1) PDFs > (2) e-signature > (3) NLP/AI/DLT.

But I'd argue that the more efficient victory awaits by letting APIs / IoT jump ahead of AI to take position #3 – a problem that the folks at clause.io seem set on solving with its 'Contract Stack'.

In their words:

"We firmly believe that the contract must transition from a static, manually managed, entity that to one that is dynamic, self-managing, and seamlessly integrated into business processes. This will only occur by enabling contracts to interface with data, auto-reconcile with other systems, perform transactions, provide real-time feedback and analysis to users, and integrate with other enterprise data." No AI required.

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From Disrupted to Disruptor

Startups come and go (particularly the latter) and after covering some 500+ legal startups since 2014, it’s such a rush to watch a successful lawyer give up a six-figure salary, start from scratch and disrupt the status quo.

Here’s a snippet of Nehal Madhani’s journey from Kirkland & Ellis, to working nights and weekends, committing thousands of hours of code, research and customer interviews, to build one of the most sophisticated (US) IP docketing platforms in the industry.

“From solo lawyers and freelance paralegals to top-tier law firms and large in-house legal departments at companies like Fresh and Ebsco; all are clients who entrust millions of dollars of intellectual property to Alt Legal’s software.”

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AI for In-House Counsel. No Hype.

Here's a non-hyped, balanced summary of how in-house counsel can gain the benefits of AI, summarised from a webinar (slide deck included) delivered by Ron Friedmann for Buying Legal Council, the trade organisation for legal procurement.

End the end, he sees AI being an incremental change, no revolution.

However:

"I would love to be proved wrong about incremental uptake. I’m just looking at the evidence I see today. I encourage law departments and law firms to experiment with and evaluate AI to understand its potential and be ready to spring into action as needed. AI could well be like the advent of the Internet – not important until fairly suddenly, it is."

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PR Crisis: Full Disclosure or Silence?

Here's a handy new column for lawyers who are their company's first legal hire, needing advice from an in-house lawyer who has been there before.

In this instalment, following the PR crisis such as Uber’s recent sexual harassment allegations or the Yahoo hacks or even the recent United incident, how should a legal department be dealing with the negative publicity? One of the lessons learnt:

"sometimes the best legal outcome is not necessarily the best business outcome (and that’s OK.)"

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e-Discovery's Shift to In-House

An excellent analysis of where e-discovery is heading (in-house it seems), authoritatively penned by Gregory Bufithis of The Project Counsel Group.

In it, Gregory draws a parallel with trends in mobile, setting out the coming ’S-curve reset’ from incremental tweaks to rapid innovation through artificial intelligence.

Interestingly, he now sees organisations viewing e-discovery as part of a broader information challenge – turning to in-house solutions and to vendors that are currently flying under the radar.

Citing the view of several corporations about one particular vendor:

“Look, we used to have [xxx] do this for us outside the offie. Yes one of the major e-discovery players. And they used [xxx]. But we started using Brainspace and it was incredible, the context/connection it provided. It clearly answers .. for us, anyway … that gnawing issue: when you have unstructured data, how do you actually go about analyzing it? Their concept searching is amazing. And we did it all in house.”

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Leaving The Comfort Zone

An in-depth interview with Spotify GC, Horacio Gutierrez on leaving his 18-year post at Microsoft, moving his wife and three children to Manhatten, and taking a bet on the music streaming company’s future.

For any in-house lawyer sitting in their comfort zone at an established enterprise, here’s some food for thought:

“I felt almost as though, if I had the opportunity to join Microsoft in 1982, before the company became public, and if I had become part of the seminal group of people to take the company public, and continue to grow it and expand it around the world… that is something that, around [Microsoft], the opportunity had closed. Even though it had grown in significant ways, it was no longer this feeling of being part of the project to help launch a new company.”

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"Best legal related snippets I have read/watched in ages."

— Caroline Ferguson, Business Transformation Manager at Simpson Grierson.