The Day I Became a "Technology Lawyer"

There was a recent article on Bloomberg Law entitled Tech-Savvy Attorneys in Heavy Demand Amid Emerging Tech that described a shortage of resources who possessed both legal and technology credentials. At first, I was a little surprised by the premise because my 20-year career in #LegalTechnology has put me right smack in the middle of a network full of these very people, so it feels like there is an ample supply of technology lawyers from where I stand. But as I travel the world presenting at CLE and Legaltech conferences, I do get a sense that there is still a lot of work to do to educate the profession as a whole on both sides of the legaltech coin: the innovative technology enabling the practice of law and the new legal issues arising from emerging technologies like autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and social media. Hence the current dichotomy of our profession: Does leveraging new technologies make us better lawyers? Or are we better lawyers because we understand what's under the hood of the new technologies?

Maybe it's both. "More and more we’re seeing hybrid lawyers with technical background that have a law degree...", David Navetta, partner in Cooley LLP’s privacy and technology practices, told Bloomberg Law. This is music to my ears because I still remember the day I consciously chose to become a "technology lawyer". I was standing in a Partner's office and she was having computer issues. To me, it was a simple fix. To her, it was the prospect of hours of frustration in completing her brief. At that moment, technology stood in the way of her performing her basic legal tasks. But with a few keystrokes and mouse-clicks, I transformed, in her eyes, from being just another "baby attorney" in the firm to being "the technology lawyer". Combined with my belief that technology was going to transform the practice of law, this was the moment that I realized what I wanted to do when I grew up. I may not have graduated at the top of my law school class like my colleagues at the time nor did I have the courtroom experience others had walking into this firm... but at that moment I had something that separated me from every other "baby attorney" and I wasn't going to let this newfound advantage slip through my fingers.

During the previous few years in law school, while clerking for a small law firm, I worked closely with their litigation support company building FoxPro and Access databases for mass tort cases, and in my personal time, I was designing websites for attorney friends and their small law firms all over the country. I didn't realize at the time what these part-time job and this weekend hobby were doing for my career because I was just a mediocre law student with bills to pay. That decision has led me down a path that includes leading entire technology consulting groups as well as chairing the Computer & Technology Section of the State Bar of Texas.

I was there at the beginning of Case Management going electronic. I helped design one of the earliest systems (which is still in use today). I was there when Case Management gave way to Matter Management (because why should the litigators get all the cool toys?) and then combined with e-Billing. I was there in the beginning of e-discovery (though this became an area where deep technology expertise passed me by). I was there as cybersecurity became an actual practice area and I was there as we moved from databases to Big Data to Smart Data to leveraging AI to analyze Unstructured Data. And for the past decade, I've been neck-deep in the world of contract management which has recently come into its own as a mainstream legal technology blending the quasi-legal nature of contract and commercial management with innovative technologies like machine learning and natural language processing (similar to the use in e-discovery) and others gaining momentum like blockchain and smart contracts.

I've always had this feeling that technology was going to have a significant impact on the legal profession and that staying ahead of the curve could help me distinguish myself from the pack (though I've gone from being just a mediocre law student among a bunch of smart kids to being just a technology attorney among rocket scientists (yes I'm looking at you Ron) and intellectual heavyweights (ahem, VirtuAL). So that's why I'm somewhat happy to hear that my career path still seems to be the road less traveled by. And to me, that has made all the difference.