Bottled Law ... Students and tech whizzes design life in the law of tomorrow ... NewLaw versus BigLaw ... Arming and training young lawyers with tech skills ... Removing the slog and having a better life ... From our tech rounds-person, Wallace Cloud
The plague has sparked its fair amount of creative energy and now we are told that law and the way it is done will never again be the same-old-same-old.
Enter Bottled Law, a business born of the lockdown and put together by Wenee Yap, who has a history in technological support for lawyers, along with a group of tech savvy law students.
Wenee Yap: the glueNaturally, Bottled Law genuflects to the reasonable foreseeability of a duty of care, and in today's environment that requires lawyers to possess technological proficiency.
"Upskilling" is the mission for tomorrow's lawyers and what the Bottled Law people are providing is "LegalTech, innovation, and NewLaw with industry webinars, professional certifications and a global network of experts".
It claims there are no equivalent enterprises offering assessment and certification for innovative lawyering and so it seeks to fill the gap between the rhetoric and giving law students real tech skills.
"NewLaw" is the subject of its first webinar held on July 18 - a subject without a clear definition, which nonetheless seeks to understand disruptive legal technologies, flexibility in the working lives of lawyers, different pricing models, and how you can be a lawyer and still bloom as a human being.
Needless to say, NewLaw and BigLaw are quite different cultures. If, as a lawyer, you see yourself as an adornment to elitism, NewLaw is probably not for you.
Another one hour Bottled Law webinar on July 25 delves deeper into software, technology and practical skills.
Come August 22, there's a CPD seminar called "Tech Hacks for Lawyers" - tips and tricks in the use of technology for document management.
Next down the slipway is a CPD ethics-based video. Technology and ethics - the new frontier. Needless to say, there are no snails lurking inside any of these programs.
For law students in 2020, the price of entry is free.
Wenee Yap describes herself as the "glue" at Bottle Law. She started SurviveLaw as a way for students to connect with the myriad of issues they confronted as they slogged through their degrees. The College of Law must have liked the concept because it bought the platform.
Nate McCurley: co-founderShe went to LEAP, the legal software business as global head of communications, and from there was recruited by thedocyard, a cloud based system for keeping track of documents in commercial transactions.
Yap says: "Lockdown should have taught us one thing: the successful don't panic. They observe, then act - informed by as much fact-checked information as is available.
"The future of law lies in its new lawyers, in law done better, with less of the dull, repetitive tasks nobody has ever liked.
From our perspective in tech, firms need to reconsider how they train junior lawyers. Instead of using due diligence or similar tasks, law schools and graduate/clerkship training programs could put greater emphasis on client experience, client service, negotiations, communications, clear legal writing, and use of existing technology - research tools, artificial intelligence, and workflow platforms like thedocyard."
Co-founder Nate McCurley put it this way when he spoke to Justinian:
"Lawyers are so busy focusing on where their feet are on any given day that doing things differently hasn't been a priority. It requires time for behaviour to change and time on most days seems better spent on billable hours. There are certainly better and more efficient ways of doing things thanks to technology, so the risk of not adapting may mean falling behind the competitors."
Things have moved rapidly since the pandemic changed the way the world functions, and now Bottled Law finds itself a finalist in the Lawyers Weekly awards for innovator of the year.
Others of the inaugural Bottled Law startup team are Margaret Cai, president of the Australian Law Students Association; Monica Bayas Inglis, a law student at UTS with a background in criminology; and Jennifer Zhang, also studying at UTS.
For webinars and CPD program see: Bottled Law