Matthew Homann:  Bio / Blog / Web / Twitter

Big Data Analytics has fascinating ramifications when applied to social media and analyzing business-driven behavior and client relationships. Take search giants (i.e., Google) and social shares (i.e., Facebook) and how they customize and analyze our consumer behavior. The benefits for businesses of all sizes is astounding, from a solo practitioner to a firm with thousands of attorneys. While facing this exciting frontier, however, will we need perceptive evolutions in privacy to move in tandem with this emerging landscape to ensure Big Data doesn’t become Big Brother?

Eric Hunter:  Bio / Web / Twitter

The building blocks of the legal profession – law school, bar admissions, professional regulation, ethics, discipline and malpractice liability and insurance – are all undergoing revolutionary changes.

Your parents got legal services from a lawyer that grew up around the corner and had an office on the other side of town. That lawyer was educated in the US, admitted to practice in the same state and a member of the local Rotary Club.

Your kids will buy legal services – or even get them for free – from a lawyer, a non-lawyer, or even an automated online service on a server that could easily be on the other side of the world.

ThIS presentation will ask ten challenging questions the legal profession must answer as we move to the provision of legal services in a global village.

Dan Pinnington:  Bio / Blog / Web / Twitter

Today it is a mantra that the legal profession is going global and the world is becoming flat, yet the law remains the poster child for parochial national divisions — every country and jurisdiction has its own law, with its own structure, in its own language. This creates greater barriers to global legal cooperation and competition than any tariff or policy ever could.

I will discuss how using a meaning-based language to express basic legal concepts could allow a computational approach to creating a universal legal translator. I’ll also discuss a possible first step of this project — building an open source statutory taxonomy — and consider its huge implications for legal research and comparative law. Finally, we’ll consider what this all means for competition and public policy.

Philip Rosenthal:  Bio / Web / Twitter

Is it too early to talk about the future of virtual law practice? This is not about more supposed Starbucks lawyers. It is not about lawyers sitting on the couch wiping Cheetos grease on their shirt while watching Dowton Abbey reruns and waiting for Google to shove clients toward their online client portal.

The future of virtual law firms is the collision of full-service representation and the online delivery of legal services. It is about removing barriers for client access to lawyers. It is about delivering sophisticated work in innovative ways. It is about utilizing creativity when building a law firm but not forgetting about the old-school hustle necessary to make it happen. It is about outsourcing effectively, collaborating with branded networks and using expert systems for decision making. That is the future of virtual law.

Chad E. Burton:  Bio / Blog / Web / Twitter

Whether its mind games or online games, we amuse ourselves with games every day. When a game does not exist, we make it up – from “Hi, Bob” to beer-pong.

Digital games are becoming ubiquitous whether we simply entertain ourselves with online solitaire or join a group to overthrow a foreign government on a Massive Multi-play Online Game (MMOG).

So, can lawyers game-up? This talk focuses on the changes that can result from the use of MMOGs to help expand access to legal services and solve broader social problems.

Will Hornsby:  Bio / Blog / Web / Twitter

Do you *really* know what people want? You think you do. But the painful truth is, it’s a lot simpler and more obvious than any wacky idea you can come up with. Your clients, your leads, and referral sources, more than anything else, want to watch cat videos. This simple insight will allow you to think differently about your marketing and your customer service. How? Well, you’ll have to show up for LexThink.1 and find out.

Larry Port:  Bio / Blog / Web / Twitter

So, even though I know I’m not *supposed* to start a “professional” presentation description with the word “so,” that’s what I’m doing here. Proudly.

I’m doing that because it feels good to break a rule or two from time to time. And I’m putting this proposal out there because I want to talk about stress. And rules. Because we lawyers have a lot of both.

So I want to talk about stress and rules.
And how much we hate stress (and sometimes rules).
And how these rules (and stress) often ruin an otherwise decent job.
And what to do about all that stress.
And what should be done with all those rules.

Maybe it would be “appropriate” for me to put “rules” in “quotes.” This is necessary because I’m not referring to those rules of ours that are “inviolate,” like “Don’t steal your clients’ money,” or “Don’t lie to the Judge.” This is also because I don’t want to be “investigated” or “disbarred” by the State of Michigan.

To be clear, I’m on my high horse tilting against those “rules” that aren’t really rules but that still have an inordinate impact on our lives and careers. Quiet, foul, soul-stealing. Like turkey “bacon.”

So together, for 6 minutes, let’s all learn from the Rats. Let’s eagerly split some infinitives. Let’s squeeze the toothpaste from the middle. Let’s break the pasta, use comic sans, slurp our soup, wear white after Labor Day, and

…mmmm, it feels good sometimes.

Who’s with me? To the barricades!

Randall A. Juip:  Bio / Web / Twitter

Legal Project Management assisted by technology can put the law back in lawyering and the profitability into efficiency. The Billable Hour business model is being rapidly replaced with an efficiency model for the legal industry. Corporate clients are driving this sea change and demanding that outside law firm achieve the same “do more with less” outcomes legal departments are being held to by their executive management. It’s time to learn how both sides of this equation (law firms and legal departments) can thrive in this brave new world.

Larry Bridgesmith:  Bio / Blog / Web / Twitter

In bygone days, lawyers who read and understood every piece of possible evidence were able to represent their clients very effectively. With the explosion of ESI, this is virtually impossible even in non-complex litigation. The rise of machines has helped with “predictive coding” and “technology assisted review.” Yet it is still probable that relevant evidence will not be located, and key evidentiary relationships not found. Technology is needed to promote intelligent lawyering by being able to find “unknown unknowns” – outlier documents and relationships that word searches and text analytics cannot find. This type of technology would disrupt the entire ECA, text analytics, and predictive coding in ediscovery.

Roe Frazer:  Bio / Web / Twitter