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Raymond Blyd

  • Raymond Blyd

Electrifying Insights from Big Data In Law
Electrifying Insights from Big Data In Law 1920 1080 Raymond Blyd

We recently presented a Masterclass at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM), and while preparing I had a couple of insights.

As with Artificial Intelligence*, I mostly shied away from the “Big Data” discussion because I felt it was engulfed by Inflated Expectations. Without the right tools to visualize it, more data only provides more problems. Big Data is now all grown up and the evidence is in the apps.

Big Data impacts Legal…Big Time

Our presentation was part of an Executive Education program called “Leadership Challenges with Big Data” and sandwiched between all the professors presenting were Peter & I. Since we only had 45 minutes and were the last act before lunch, we decided to stick to real-world examples to explain the impact of Big Data on the legal sector. While compiling these examples, I was amazed by not only the variety of ways (text recognition or sentiments analysis) but also the variety of data that can solve legal problems. Not only legal matter like legislation or jurisprudence but also non-legal matter such as news, time & billing, court records, and insurance data. Even social media and location data are valuable in helping to decide a legal course of action.

Less Law – More Automation

There is this slight difference between tools for the business of law and the practice of law. In the practice of law, data analytics and visualization play an important role in predicting outcomes or explaining complexities. Legal forces, such as conflicts or compliance, are fueling these tools. At the business end, companies are faced with market forces like costs, customers, and competitors. This requires different apps that support efficiencies and consistency…by way of automation, not just answers. Case in point: this paper states that the global financial meltdown was the result of failures in contracts. Now if a systemic use of faulty contracts can bring down the entire global economy, it can also take down your company. One way to prevent this is by designing and automating smart contracts to the point that law becomes invisible.

Big Data is the new Electricity

Hearing the other speakers in the program talk about the impact of data on their sector made us all realize: data sits at the heart of every industry. Data powers most decisions like electricity powers most tools. Without the support of data, one feels like a kite in a storm. In the past, we could get by on software without data. One could fire up an empty word document and start drafting. Now, software platforms infused with Machine Intelligence* are connected to devices and sensors not only generate but also consume data. It means apps come pre-build with data and intelligence providing us with super powers at a push of a button: Look Ma, no drafting!

..and with great powers comes some bewilderment.

WK Big Data.044

* I prefer the term Robolaw because legal doesn’t require (even simple) AI to solve itself. Legal is 80% illogical reasoning that will be fixed by automation and 20% emotion that should be ignored by robots.

  • Raymond Blyd

What is Perc? A Way To Outsmart Robots
What is Perc? A Way To Outsmart Robots 1920 800 Raymond Blyd

This might sound crazy but what if we could outsmart robots?

We depend on them for a majority of our daily tasks and it is increasingly harder to make decisions without the assistance of an algorithm. Meanwhile, machines are learning at a faster pace and making most of our skills obsolete. But robots have weaknesses, and if we want to stay ahead we will need to exploit them.

Premise

One of the good traits of the legal profession is its demand of Continued Legal Education (CLE). Many countries have a similar system in place to assure legal professionals are qualified to perform their duties. While the current CLE requirements are skewed towards traditional skills, the premise is sound: you need to keep training to stay fit. The survival of any professional will ultimately depend on their ability to adapt and learn…continuously.

There are Two parts to training: first is the type of skill and second is the effort involve to acquire it. Once you join the workforce, your freedom to learn evaporates. Simply because your time gets limited. Training resources are growing in abundance and getting cheaper all the time. Some offer clever ways to help you learn complicated stuff by first assessing your level. I believe this is key: Measurement precedes any Improvement.

Basically, there are Three types of skills actively being solicited: Hard skills, Soft skills and Vapor skills. The first 2 are measurable with numerous tests like teasers, IQ, personality etc. I suspect vapor skills are a bit trickier to capture and measure because we so little understand these skills. Yet they are the most valuable skills according to the brightest minds. Albert Einstein called it: the father of new knowledge and Steve Jobs encourage everyone to follow it above all else. I’m talking about Intuition.

Promise

The past 2 years I have been quietly tinkering on this thing called: Perc. Perc started as legal technology but quickly evolved into something else. I started with studying quantitive and qualitative characteristics and designing companion visualizations. While exploring these graphs, I stumbled on something: not only could I measure and display knowledge, experience, and personality based on data, I could also use metrics to capture my intuition. And when I became aware of it, it increased my confidence in trusting my intuition.

While MIT claims it can beat human intuition with big data analysis, some believe humans beat robots by handling big decisions with little data. With Perc I intend to prove it could also boost your intuition.

Project

Perc is a project to create an iOS app with a companion watch app which helps to educate the user and spread acquired knowledge with everyone. I feel I have a few good years left before my skills and my entire profession become obsolete. That’s why I like to put them to some good use and create Perc to help us stay ahead of robots.

Meanwhile, feel free to connect, follow or sign up to be the first to know by clicking the 3 dots.

  • Raymond Blyd

3 Epic Insights From Hunting Legal Apps on Product Hunt
3 Epic Insights From Hunting Legal Apps on Product Hunt 2560 1600 Raymond Blyd

In “Who will beat Law Firms?” I mention that Product Hunt had just 22 legal apps. That number seemed a bit low, so I went back to see if I could find more. And what I found was Epic. Here are my 3 main insights while collecting legal apps on Product Hunt.

Product Hunting

Product Hunt (PH) is a site were new products get submitted and Product Hunters can upvote them. This creates a daily list of most popular products. The main difference between startups syndicates, crowdfunding or other marketplaces is:

a) PH primairily hosts  real products you can start using right away;

b) And this makes the PH experience, one grounded in practice rather than promise,

First, I did a couple of searches with keywords like “legal” or “law” but my results missed some valid products. I then expanded my keywords and browsed other collections, which is another cool feature of PH. These collections broaden my horizons and boosted serendipity. This resulted in a tangible “Legal Tech Hunt” collection with 65+ apps which nicely offsets my fantasy “Legal Visualizations & Designs” board on Pinterest.

My Cool is Cold

What struck me was the fact that cool products had little upvotes. Premonition uses AI to find the best lawyers, how cool is that! It had only 1 vote ?…so I gave it one more.  ROSS, an AI powered Attorney, did ok so I guess AI may only be suitable for judging the law but not the lawyers. But it’s not just me, legal industry darlings like Ravellaw or Casetext got relatively little love from Product Hunters. I initially found 22 apps because I was looking for particular legal characteristics. Eventually, I  found more legal apps when I stopped looking for legal apps.

Insight: I view products from the perspective of a Practitioner of Law and not as a Consumer of Law. Therefore, I subconsciously love the things that would only work for me.

epic 2

Practical is Popular

Topping the collection are straightforward legal apps for entrepreneurs. The top 3 are products which basically replace lawyers and empower consumers of law. Actually, 2 of them look similar to a well-known Legal Unicorn. The rest of the list is sprinkle with simple tools that help you avoid lawyers and court battles e.g. Clear helps you find and clear potentially damaging social media posts. Or Clerky which makes startup legal paperwork painless. These products make legal complexity invisible and anybody can use them right away.

Insight: Product hunters like practical, simple and fast. Their psychology towards legal services has evolved and so have their product preferences.

epic 3
Blockchain is Epic

I’ll be honest, I’m no expert on Bitcoin nor Blockchain but I think it’s awesome. I’m not the only one getting all warm and giddy ? at the promise this technology embodies for the legal market. Examples like Ascribe or Bitproof help protect Intellectual Property with Blockchain. Any Intellectual Property Attorney, with enough alcohol running through their veins, will admit that copyright law in a digital space can actually not exist. Computers copy, it’s how they operate on every level. So if the law states it’s illegal to copy then we would never be able to use the Internet. No lawyer nor contract can protect you from actual digital theft, but cryptography can. It’s Epic.

Insight: Technology is not only making legal protocols invisible, it’s making them redundant in a digital space.

epic 4

Summary: Legal professionals may not be the best at picking the hottest apps. Hunters (and future CEO’s) prefer the most practical apps to accomplish business goals and personal fulfillment. In the end, technology will make the need for legal protocols obsolete. Now before these exquisite specimens get sued into extinction…Come hunt with me…

? Legal Tech Hunt

[icon name=”pinterest-square” class=”” unprefixed_class=””] Legal Visualizations & Designs

  • Raymond Blyd

Corrected: Do Legal Unicorns Exist? Yes, They Will
Corrected: Do Legal Unicorns Exist? Yes, They Will 698 393 Raymond Blyd

Sometimes we make bold statements just to challenge our own assumptions. Dare ourselves to look closer and see if our reality is just a lie. While charting 912+ legal startups I wrote: “I did not spot a unicorn…yet“. How would I know what a legal startup unicorn looks like? What is a unicorn anyway and could these ever roam in a legal startup landscape?

What is a Unicorn?

A unicorn is a venture-backed private company worth more than a billion dollars…on paper. For argument’s sake, let’s pick the top unicorn valuation ($47+ Billion) and benchmark this amount against the market value of the #1 rank company in the world ($270+ Billion)*. A unicorn would be about 17 % the value of the industry pinnacle. With this number we can now measure a unicorn in any industry. So when a startup valuation ventures into the 15-17%  bracket of the industry leader in revenue or market value, it becomes a Unicorn.

An additional observation: the name Startup implies that it’s a young company. Meaning we’ll need to set a time constraint so we’ll state that they shouldn’t be older than 5 years.

unicorn2

*Note: Apple has the biggest market cap however its numbers are just too crazy to use as a benchmark.

What is a Legal Unicorn?

Looking at the list of the biggest players in the legal service market, the #1 Law Firm has a reported $2.5 Billion in revenue. So according to my scientific ratio a legal startup with a $45.9 Million $459 Million  valuation would be a Legal Unicorn. You can also do this exercise on neighboring industries such as legal information providers. However, this would raise the bar to $214.2 million $2.142 Billion but I shall not dwell on this track. For this exercise, we’ll stick with looking at companies trying to displace the Practice of Law e.g. Law Firms not the Business of Law e.g. Legal Information Providers.

Do Legal Unicorns Exist?

When I said: I did not spot any unicorns, my reasoning was clouded by ego devoid of data…and this happens often ?. I believed I would know it when I see it, even when camouflaged and hidden in the 912+ legal startups on Angel.co or anywhere else. Now that I devised this yardstick, I can more accurately assess if my intuition was correct. So between 40-50 million dollars valuation a legal startup would reach Unicorn status. Do we currently have legal startups with valuations in this range?

To answer this question, I needed to descent into this absurd world of venture capital, fundraising,  Pre-money or Post-Money Convertible Notes etc. In short, there seems to be no limit on valuations, yet there is a sanity on the willingness to fund. And the logic reveals itself in so-called rounds. Herein lies the key to my argument: funding usually starts with seeding after which follows a series A, B rounds and so forth. I stated that there are few rules on limits but it appears that each round of funding has a virtual ceiling e.g. 100k-$1million usually is considered Seeding. And between $1 million- $5+ million is considered to be Series A. Now stay with me: when you are entering in Series funding than investors expect at least a 10x return on investment. Example: a successful $2 million series A round will put a company at a minimum $20 million valuation.

However, companies aren’t bound by this limit and they can set their valuations much higher e.g. Buffer raised $3.5 million at a valuation of $60 million post-money. By this reasoning, if a legal startup receives $2+ million or more in VC money, it’s roaming Legal Unicorn meadow. And if they are able to get between $500k – $1+ million then we can call them Legal Centaurs.

Yes, eventually we will have Legal Unicorns [icon name=”trophy” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]. One example: Shake raised a total of $4 million before it got acquired. This would put its valuation between $40 – $70 million, according to our Buffer Theorem.

There is one more thing: above I briefly mentioned age but did not elaborate on how it equates to the value of startups. Looking back at my previous post, I was searching for a correlation between the creation of legal startups vs economic events. I may have been looking at it all wrong…bold statement ?.

[updated: July 8, 2015. Thanks to Ron Friedman for pointing the error of my ways ?]

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  • Raymond Blyd

Who will beat Law Firms? An Interactive Chart
Who will beat Law Firms? An Interactive Chart 1920 1080 Raymond Blyd

Updated: Dec, 2015

In my previous post I wondered: If the increased demand for legal services is shifting away from law firms, where is it heading?

Some believe it’s mostly heading back to corporate counsels and law departments. But that’s basically rebuilding a law firm within a company. Moreover, it seems wasteful to me to produce expensive legal solutions for a single company and not reuse it for others. There may be another option and I’m curious to see if it could replace Law Firms?

Legal Startups

Venture Capitalist are rolling dice in a global casino in search for unicorns, centaurs and sacrificing dinosaurs. I listen to them explain why incumbent businesses will go extinct and be replaced by startups. So I went charting the landscape of legal startups and across databases such as CrunchBase, Kickstarter and Wefunder. I even checked out Dutch crowd funders such as Symbid to see if I could find a category “Legal”. While CrunchBase seems to have the largest database (2,191), it also includes DLA Piper which I hardly consider a startup. So I settle on Angel.co [icon name=”angellist” class=””] and thus began a journey with unexpected turns but rewarding discoveries*.

Numbers

The question which initially fired my legal Producthunt (22) was: Did the 2009 crash or any other event influenced legal startup activity? I’m undecided, but it has been a steady growth of new startups on Angel.co from 2010 (2) through 2014 (337).

[chart id=”1935″]

There are approximately 900+ registered startups and in the last couple of months we’re averaging one startup every day. The most popular month is February (Average: 27) and but if the chart below is any indication, we have a nice streak (July, August, September) ahead of us.

[chart id=”712″]

Note that Angel.co has two categories: Legal  and a newer one: Legal Tech. Startups can register multiple tags so there was overlap between the two categories. In the above chart, both categories are included.

I questioned if this division of tech vs traditional is normal or unique among ‘dinosaurs’ such as finance. It seems the 80/20 rule is more pervasive than we think. [update: June 15, 2015]

[chart id=”1513″][chart id=”1510″]

Since Legal Tech is the freshest category I was curious to see if growth would be more dramatic but it looks too early to judge.

[chart id=”1533″]

Observations

I’ve been reading weekly alerts ever since I registered with Angel.co and here are a couple of observations:

  • Compared to other industries, it seems the Legal Startup scene is still in its infancy with 900+
  • Specifically, Legal Tech is just 150+ compared to Fin Tech 1500+ and growth seems slow.
  • The sheer volume may not be enough to produce unicorns and thus attract high rollers.
  • The most popular models seem to be Management (149) and Marketplace (72) e.g. Legalzoom
  • I was hoping for more Compliance (40) e.g. Lawbot.co or Access to Justice (20)  startups like Modria. Models which replace not support legal processes.
  • This leads me to believe that the majority of legal startups don’t chase markets that can not afford legal services. Not even the ones that can afford, but mainly the ones that benefit from the complexity of legal services.

Back to my initial question: Will startups beat law firms? I did not spot a unicorn…yet. I believe the numbers need to go up to attract more Bondrew’s and investments. I wish the legal startup scene would stop chasing its tail and finds its tennis ball.  That’s why I applaud any initiatives that stir passion and reignite the practice of law.  So while I’m certain disruption is imminent, it may not go as fast.

*This was a labor of love over the last 4 months. Along the way, I learned to use API’s, understand JSON and even getting JSON feeds into Google Spreadsheet. But my proudest achievement was born out of a simple desire to display the numbers above in interactive charts [icon name=”bar-chart” class=””]. I thought I could only do that by controlling the platform so I needed to build my own site.  I was probably wrong to think I could not do it any other way, but I’m glad I was [icon name=”child” class=””].

  • Raymond Blyd

Psychology of a Legal Service Purchase
Psychology of a Legal Service Purchase 2048 1152 Raymond Blyd

It recently dawned on me that I might be missing a rudimentary reason underlying the legal industry: why does anyone want to pay for a legal service?

“…As always, consult a lawyer…” isn’t mandatory, it’s just a mantra. What is the psychology behind the legal service purchase? And has this behavior shifted?

Path

How did I reach this epiphany? An accumulation of 3 factors. First, to seduce people to use your product is not a technological- nor a design -but a Psychological Effort. I learned this while following a course on the psychology of successful products ranging from games, Listerine and the iPhone.
Next, Design Thinking philosophy reiterates the importance of an Open Mind when solving Wicked Problems. Example: is the predicament of the legal industry simply a case of transparency? This was my assignment while receiving a certificate for Design Thinking in Business Innovation. It was also eloquently stated by Margaret Hagan in her lecture “Next Gen Legal Services: The Possibility of Legal Design”. Lesson: beware when addressing a challenge with a deceptively obvious solution.

Finally, it hit me when I was listening to a Customer: they explained why they would not be interested in using a product. Even if it was ethically or legally required to do so. Not even if it was the coolest app on the web. I realized that any ‘new’ product that wants to seamlessly insert itself into the routines of people’s lives will have to Hack Habits.

Pleasant

What I wrote in “Pleasant Habits vs Tedious Tasks” was a belief that any legal product must be beautifully designed in order to prompt a change in user behavior. Not only a gorgeous interface but also mindful interactions. But after hearing the customer explain their reasons for discarding one cool app after the other, I changed my mind.

I realized that world-class designs and awesome use cases would not be enough to persuade future consumers into changing their habits.

After 8 years of enjoying some of the most well-designed mass market products the digital world has ever seen, we have become immune. It’s not just the fact that we have become accustom to beauty or addicted to convenience. But by consuming large quantities of immaculate conceptions, it has forever altered our collective consciousness. As humans, our minds have been reprogrammed and it’s now up to psychology to figure out how we will operate in Robotopia.

Purgatory

Where is the legal industry heading while the economy recovers? Most signs point towards an increased demand for legal services. Better yet, there is evidence that legal spent is up but Law Firms aren’t position to capitalize. Law Firms face “Fundamental, Potentially Irreversible Changes” and are struggling to find a long term view.

 

While other mysterious animals like Axiom Law outgrow incumbents with an approximate growth rate in the range of 11–18%. By comparison, S&P 500 CAGR is 10.47%. According to the chart below, demand for Law firm services was under 0.5%.

psy4

Ultimately, all industries will face a disruption at some point. The Legal Industry is not exempted, not even by law.

 

Psychology

 

Why do we pay for legal services? Here are some reasons:

  1. Legally obligated by regulatory pressures to comply i.e. filing taxes;
  2. Morally or Ethically obligated such as representation in litigation;
  3. It’s too damn complicated to do it yourself;

In Robotopia the following rules will apply:

  • if a system is based on rules it will be automated;
  • if a resource becomes too expensive, a network will surge to source it;
  • if a process is too complex, a culture will subsist to simplify it;

The word that keeps coming back to me is…frictionless. And this revelation hit me while listening to the End User: they will not be swayed unless a legal service is a smooth fit in their mind.

 

Power

 

When will we shift from the traditional to the modern purchase behavior? Another glance at the chart above suggests the shift already happened in 2009. A more interesting question is: who will capitalize? After the democratizing of Information (Google), Resources (Uber, AirBnB) and Capital (Bitcoin), Legal is next. And the one, who paves a silk road to legal’s servitude in one click, will win.

  • Raymond Blyd

How First-Principle Thinking Uncovered The Mythical Legal Professional Universe
How First-Principle Thinking Uncovered The Mythical Legal Professional Universe 1920 1121 Raymond Blyd

It’s 2007 and here’s the challenge: conceive the next big legal product. ‘Cite’ — Evernote for legal research — never made it out of the lab, but the lessons are still valuable.

One of the artifacts was a mind map which seems to uncover the universe of perhaps all knowledge professionals. 8 years after conception, how can it still hold true?

Cite See

First a few words on Cite. There were many reasons why ‘Cite’ never was. I’ll elaborate on one: Cite was actually modeled after Fleck, a dutch based Web Annotation platform. Fleck is one, in a long list of web annotations services, launched on the promise of the Read/Write web. Fleck now lays among the fallen, but its demise may hint to an underlying psychology: Is there an appetite for open annotation on everything?

While web annotation is a darling idea of the digerati, it hasn’t yet gotten the projected traction. Rap Genius is a notable exception and I’m curious to see if Law Genius will have equal success. While Reddit is a more successful successor to Digg it, I do not see it as a true annotator. Equally, Evernote is more about storage with annotation as a value add. So is there an appetite? Inconclusive, but my guess is what literally works on paper does not necessarily translate well to the web. In short: analog to digital will not always parse but what does?

first2
Alexa Traffic Rank among ‘Annotators’.

Universal Thinking

So let’s flashback to 2007: How does one create a product that would not only be digital-first, but also be content- and matter agnostic. How can we transform a profession still entrenched in an analog world. In order to accomplish this transformation, one should first thoroughly understand a legal state of mind and culture: What does a legal professional actually do?

To answer this question we took an unusual approach. Normally we started with user interviews or journey mapping but this time we used First-Principle Thinking and search for Axioms, not assumptions. A famous follower of this method is Elon Musk.

“ … [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths … and then reason up from there.”

Elon Musk Uses This Ancient Critical-Thinking Strategy To Outsmart Everybody Else

For Legal Professionals this meant:

  1. How can we classify the type of Problem a legal professional solves?
  2. And what are the Steps to solve it?

We discovered that it is typical for a legal professional, that each Case must always be regarded as Unique. It stems from the ethical duty to be diligent with each problem presented. At face value, each problem needs different ground rules but most often the same rules apply to the same problems.

With first-principle thinking, you start figuring out when rules become universal. In essence, the more you zoom out of the intricacies of various legal matters, the more these universal steps come into focus.

Legal Professional Universe 2007

Depending on your zoom level, here are the Truths we uncovered to ensure proper handling of a Unique Case:
1. Tasklist: inventory of what needs to be done;

2. Search: where to find information;

3. Research: reconstruct the information into a solution*;

4. Review: validate your solution.

*Drafting was considered a fundamental step. However, we believed that if you ignore spelling/grammar/formatting, what’s left is copy-paste and rearranging text. From an intellectual perspective, this can be considered ‘research’.

first4
Cite deck 2007

To Uncover

Constructing a legal solution would mean to Mark, Annotate, Cite, Link, Organize and Share information in such a way that it would solve a client’s problem. Reasoning from these principles, a product (Cite) supporting these activities would be indispensable.

Traditionally, most digital legal products focus on Search (Information Retrieval) and classified it as Research (Information Digestion). With First-Principles Thinking, we could disengage and regroup activities and challenge the status quo. Thus opening up the gateway to the next level in legal technology products.

first5
Cite deck 2007

During this exercise, we stumbled upon a whole new way of conceptualizing product ideas. By using a mind map model for depicting the Legal Professional Universe, we could use it as a blueprint to uncover where products fit in users workflow. You could expand and replace endpoints with (new) products. It also highlighted Jumps between Steps and where integration would add value or not within a workflow.

A mixed map called The Legalcomplex Library debuted in Content is King, Search is Queen and Filters Are Their Offspring. For me, it spawned many ideas for many years.

Cite was an offspring and I wondered what could have been. Fleck may have been a signal that it would never be. For me, that is not the lesson. Critical First-Principle Thinking gave me a different lens to zoom into a problem and reconnect the dots. The lesson is that the world has changed. Analog rules do not apply to a digital world. If annotating is a favorite past time, it may be past its time. Yet the urge to remix will remain as it does in rap.

Originally posted on Medium

  • Raymond Blyd

DESH 3: Smart Legal Tech on your Wrist
DESH 3: Smart Legal Tech on your Wrist 1920 1080 Raymond Blyd

A while ago I wrote that I did not believe in legal technology on your wrist. I changed my mind shortly thereafter but I was haunted by my wavering because: how would it work?

DESH

DESH debuted on June 17, 2013, in “DESH: Your Personal Legal Assistant with Sense.” The idea: a robot that ‘reads’ your legal matter and assists in making intelligent decisions. It was inspired by the rise of personal assistants such as Google Now and Mynd. Google Now tells me if I would encounter traffic wherever I am. Mynd calculates my travel time and notifies me when I should leave for my next appointment. Both need little configuration and run invisibly in the background. I envisioned DESH to do the same for your legal activity.

 

 

Loupe (prequel)

DESH actually originated from an earlier concept called Loupe. While DESH is a front-end, Loupe would be the backend. Loupe is a concept whereby the (search) engine would convert any information into a  legal context query. For example, if Loupe recognized an amount or a date it would check the meaning within a specific legal domain. Similar to how Wolfram Alpha calculates data within a certain domain. Loupe rules would be:

“ 10 million” in Competition Law → Cartels = fine

“ 10 million” in Competition Law → Merger = Acquisition Price

DESH (sequel)

In “Seymour: Maybe I Was Wrong About Legal Wearables” I realized why wearables would be especially significant for legal professionals: mobility. I believe legal counsels, like physicians, would travel from client to client with little or no time to pause and do stationary PC work. However, pride prevented me from reducing DESH to a mundane calendar app. I needed it to be this intelligent decision-making machine.

 

desh3

DESH (today)

Compromise: it’s both. Rational: if it were a smartphone app with more screen real estate it would make sense to have it do a lot of fancy #Robolaw. But on your wrist is a different story. While mobile is the starting point, providing simple straightforward data is the max on a ‘watch.’ Apple encourages “light interaction” and describes these as “glances.”

How it works

  1. Launch the app to ‘glance’ your legal activity progress*;
  1. Turn the dial or swipe up to reveal your legal activity in a calendar item.

*News is approx 75% read, Cases read at 30%, Contract drafting is at 15%. That’s it. Does this make any sense?

This article first appeared on Medium.

  • Raymond Blyd

5 Confessions of a Trackaholic
5 Confessions of a Trackaholic 2000 940 Raymond Blyd
On Sunday, February 22, at precisely 16:44, my Fitbit Flex stopped syncing with my iPhone. I just finished 20 minutes on my elliptical trainer and I was feverishly waiting for my workout to appear…I realized I was shackled and gripped by the fear of losing my metrics. These stats made me healthy and happy so I didn’t want to let go…but should I?

 Fear Zero

tr2

I was a pack-a-day smoker until one Wednesday, after recovering from yet another flu, I decided to quit. I wanted to see how long I could go without smoking a cigarette. Since my brain was a bit preoccupied suppressing nicotine urges I decided to ‘outsource’ keeping track of time to a robot.

Smoke Free keeps track of several metrics, but the most important one for me was: Time. I started with seconds, then minutes which turned into hours, days and weeks. With each new record, my fear grew that these stats would return to zero. That fear kept me going.

Most champions agree: retaining a crown is very different than winning it the first time.

What I learned: my most powerful motivator was not the excitement of achieving a new record but rather the fear of losing my stats.

Meanwhile, another war was raging in my body: Fat. I ballooned to a panda-like 84 kilos. According to every app I used to calculate this I was obese. Then I met this wonderful person who told me a little secret: You can eat whatever you desired and still lose weight…Wow! It’s incredible! I was super excited I found salvation and consciously downplayed what came after…by counting Calories.

Diet Disillusionment

 

tr3

I set out to find the perfect robot to help with this minor calorie caveat. Myfitnesspal was the best because it did 3 things right:

  • Have a rich database including some obscure Suriname dishes
  • Was supported by a wide range of apps and services i.e. Argus,Runtastic’s Six Pack andPush Ups;
  • Most importantly: they did not hold my data hostage by playing nice with others.

Now everyone warned me it was a bad idea to quit smoking and diet at the same time but in hindsight, it was brilliant. I was literally consumed by thoughts of food for months while battling a nicotine addiction. Under duress, my brain couldn’t multi-thread and was forced to pick a craving. Each time it picked food over cigarettes.

What I learned: Hunger trumps nicotine hands down.

Calorie Cap

 

tr4

I hit my goal of 75 kilo in 6 months -losing over 7 kilos in the process by trying to stick to 1470 calories-a-day.

While April- June were pretty tough, I caught a wave in July and headed for a race to the bottom.

Here’s when Fitbit entered my life and gave me a much-needed boost.

I couldn’t stay under 1470 unless I burned more calories. However, I couldn’t precisely track how much I burned with just my iPhone motion tracking. I simply didn’t have it on me all the time.

With Fitbit Flex, I was able to literally track myself 24–7. Without a heart rate monitor, it’s not as accurate but at least it gave me some guidance on burn rate.

Ultimately, it wasn’t the fact that I kept count which helped me achieve these changes but the fact that I had to transform my life to do it. Not only with my nutritional choices, but my approach to life changed. I learned to get comfortable with continuous disruptions of my routines.

What I learned: Hacking Habits should be your habit as well. Dare to try something different every now and then.

Sleep Debt

 

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After conquering my demons (or perhaps just silencing them), I turned my focus on perhaps the darkest frontier in tracking: Sleep.

Raising babies reminded me how vital a good night’s sleep is. Better yet, sleep deprivation is equal to waterboarding in terms of effective torture techniques.

I set out to find a method to properly measure my body’s battery levels. I foundSleepdebt to be a simple and straightforward way to accomplish this.

Sleepdebt uses the Fitbit API to pull in your numbers and calculate your charge in terms of time.

However, adding this minor metric to my arsenal of stats finally made me come undone. It meant wearing my Fitbit Flex to bed…shackled in my sleep.

I never wore a watch. My dear old Dad, God rest his soul, always insisted I wear one but Imay never yield. Yet I wore this wristband while asleep so I would not be a grumpy jerk while awake. After 131 days of sleeping with Flex, on February 22, I was finally set free.

What I learned: I’m much happier being Untethered

Unshackled

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In writing this article, I made some discoveries:

  • Counting calories actually taught me about nutrition i.e. what to eat and how much;
  • My data is dispersed and siloed across the web, but that’s adifferent agony;
  • Freedom encourages -not inhibits- my discipline.

In my pursuit of self-improvement, I discovered what metrics really matter to me and how I can measure it.

Build, Measure, Learn is not only the cornerstone of any lean startup but eventually for any lean life. We are Born and then we’ll Measure and Learn to stay Lean.

This post was originally posted by Legal Complex on Medium.

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  • Raymond Blyd

Five Stages Lawyers Need To Embrace In a World of Robots
Five Stages Lawyers Need To Embrace In a World of Robots 2000 1125 Raymond Blyd

The Kübler-Ross model describes the five emotional stages experienced when faced with impending death or death of someone. The five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Similarly, change is an irreversible and unapologetic event. Here are 5 alternate stages for legal professionals to help navigate change in the legal market.

1. Acceptance
In Suriname, a mourning process is accelerated by having a party during and after the burial. It is believed that one should celebrate death. This is taken literally as coffin bearers joyfully dance with the deceased until they reach the final resting place.

Legal professionals aren’t shy about adopting new technology. Just look at smartphone and tablet adoption rates among lawyers in the past 4 years. I believe the pager, cell phone, and blackberry enjoyed similar successes.

However, adoption is not the acceptance of a new reality. The technology examples above just empowered existing workflows; it did not fundamentally change the dynamics of the marketplace. Technology like smartphones, just enabled lawyers to communicate more efficiently not necessarily differently.

We are now in the midst of a revolution whereby the core value of a legal professional(providing legal counsel) is shifting towards platforms, algorithms and data (Robolaw).

It’s not a faster way of drafting an agreement, it’s accepting the fact that you do not ever need to draft one.

Acceptance of the new reality should be a feast: a celebration of the fact that the tedious & repetitive have died and made way for the joy in legal work.

2. Trust
My faith in technology is derived from a belief that it has saved my life. Yet faith alone may not suffice in winning the hearts and minds of legal professionals. We’ll need evidence that robots can do a better job before we trust them.

Proof is mounting that platforms (crowdsourcing) and algorithms outperform humans in predicting legal outcomes. However it’s not like IBM’s Watson has already passed the multistate bar exam and is now a licensed attorney.

Legal work isn’t a chess match or an equation, but a complex nuanced construct of emotions in text. And herein lies the problem: the sheer amount of ambiguous texts.

5-4Due to data overload, it has become humanly impossible to find justice without the assistance of algorithms.

With Predictive Coding we have effectively conceded that the days of manually reading through stacks of documents have come to pass.

Trust in technology can be derived from either faith or evidence. However, in trusting legal technology, we may have already passed the luxury stage and ventured into necessity. Ultimately, we may not have a choice but to trust robots.

3. Mobility
I read this inspiring story: ‘Barefoot’ Lawyers Teach Ugandans Their Rights.’ It seems 97% of lawyers serve a population of 2 million people within the capital. The remaining 3% are left to serve a population of around 36 million in the rest of Uganda. In order to alleviate the travel burden covering an area of 241,038 square km, Ugandan lawyer, Gerald Abila, uses volunteers and a range of technologies like social media to educate and provide legal advice.

I’ll compliment Gerald on embracing technology to bridge the gap and his story highlights a fundamental principle about legal work: it is most effective if served in person. Mobility is the cornerstone of the legal profession. It is one of the main drivers of technology adoption among legal professionals.

If only the mobile tools were as good on the road as they are at home. I have dedicated most my writing in the last 4 years on this subject. I even went as far as to declare the death of legal research on desktop. I believe the cause of this imbalance has many factors. A root cause may also lie in the very nature of legal professionals (see stage 5).

4. Simplicity
#Robolaw: A World Without Law elaborates on the necessity of simplicity. Driven by the rise of digital currencies, the world is moving towards a frictionless reality – one where simplicity is handsomely rewarded and complexity is not welcome.

Yet, any legal framework is built upon barriers. The law revolves around setting rules and exceptions. Its goal is to avert risk and minimize misunderstandings. It is there to protect us from ourselves.

Nevertheless, legal products, and services need to become as clear and simple as a hand Shake. Actually, it may become invisible, even in the event of disputes. This future is more likely to happen if we let robots do the negotiations and dispute resolutions- just like we will trust them to drive our cars. We may only need a notification or a glance.

5. Adventurous
In the search for simplicity, one characteristic will truly serve us: experimentation. There are penalties for failure in every profession; in some the consequences are far more severe than others. However, I believe this new era is giving us a license to try new stuff. This era of relentless change has set us free from a stigma of dumb and has opened a world of daring.

One time a customer, a jetsetting lawyer, had an extreme request. He wanted me to create a product only he would use, custom made and tailored to his needs. I told him I could not because I couldn’t justify the costs versus return. I stated that if we had more customers like him I may be able to justify it. He said, “No, I hope there aren’t any. I want to be unique and my calling card is using these special tools.”

By now, you may have guessed what he asked for. He was clearly a risk taker and dared to be different.

My best friend and godfather to my youngest is a physician. He’s my reminder: I am allowed to dare & fail. Some really do not have that luxury.

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