InsideLegal

2013 InnovAction Award Winners Recognized

Each year, the College of Law Practice Management (COLPM) announces the InnovAction Awards winners recognized for outstanding innovation in the delivery of legal services, demonstrating to the legal community what can happen when passionate professionals, with big ideas and strong convictions, resolve to create effective change. Below are the winners of the 2013 InnovAction Awards, which will be presented at the COLPM Futures Conference which will be held October 4-5 at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. Registration is still open and InsideLegal readers receive $100 off the registration rate. 

California Monitor Program, University of California, Irvine School of Law Consumer Protection Clinic
Key Team Members: Professor Katherine Porter and Michael Troncoso
Consumer protection laws are notoriously under-enforced, constrained by not only the availability of legal services and government resources but also by the difficulties of consumers to frame their problems in legal terms. Restrictions on class actions also have limited the incentives for lawyers to analyze consumers’ problems in a collective framework. The California Attorney General appointed Professor Katherine Porter to be a watchdog for the landmark National Mortgage Settlement. Porter, an expert in consumer law, took a novel approach to ensuring consumers got the rights set forth in the Settlement. The California Monitor Program built from scratch an innovative system for how government responds to consumers seeking help.

ReInvent Law Laboratory, Michigan State University College of Law
The ReInvent Law Laboratory at MSU Law was created by Professors Renee Newman Knake and Dan Katz in spring 2012 to promote innovation in the space of law + tech + design + delivery. Through scholarship, curriculum development, fast-paced conferences, and entrepreneurship training and competitions, ReInvent Law both analyzes and helps build the future of legal services. New courses include e-discovery and quantitative methods for lawyers, a professional ethics course focused on technology, and an entrepreneurial lawyering class that helps bring law students’ ideas to reality. A London study abroad program exposes students to deregulation and innovation in the UK legal market. ReInvent Law has brought thought leaders to the masses with free conferences built around 6-minute Ignite presentations in London, Dubai, and Silicon Valley. The Lab also partners with start-ups and legal tech companies to provide learning and networking opportunities for forward-thinking law students and practicing lawyers.

Riverview Law, Creating a New Model Law Firm
The UK’s Legal Services Act of 2007 was designed to “promote competition, innovation and the public and consumer interest” and served as a catalyst for new business models to deliver on this promise. While the market’s attention was predominantly fixed on the opportunities for individual consumers, one group of executives in an HR services business (AdviserPlus) believed a significant opportunity also existed in the commercial law arena. Presented with several alternatives for entering the market, the decision was taken to start with a blank slate and to build a new organization from the ground up. Drawing on principles more typically taught in business schools than in law schools, the team developed a streamlined fixed-fee business model around the answers to these questions and officially launched Riverview Law in February 2012.

 

Big Data Innovation Summit: Day One Learnings & Musings

I guess it is fitting that at the conclusion of Innovative Enterprise's Big Data Innovation Summit Day One, my brain is jumbled and severely overheated with big ideas all related to the 14 or so Big Data Innovation Track sessions consumed throughout the day. Topics ran the gamut from StubHub's big data strategy focused on ticketing transactions and their master plan to become a single source provider for the sports fan (not just for tickets) to how NASA is using big data analytics to make commercial airplane flights safer.

While I'll be the first to admit that a few of the sessions went squarely over my head (namely GrindGain's In-Memory Computing talk and TerraCotta's harnessing 'big fast data' session), there were many others that definitely got my 'big data juices flowing'. My overall feedback based on the nearly 7 hours of big data content is that despite many 'heavy hitter' vendors offering industrial strength analytics technology and big data architecture options, most companies (at least based on Twitter chatter and session Q&As) are still in the big data exploration phase. A good chunk of time was spent by multiple speakers explaining big data basics and sharing big data survey benchmarks, likely not being completely aware of the audience's overall big data prowess. This worked for me, plus the speakers and Twitter Nation provided some great big data resources as well (see separate, later post).

Something else that struck me was how openly commercial many of the speakers were when it came to mentioning and promoting their big data solutions and offerings. Oddly enough, this did not really bother me since hearing from the likes of IBM or HP about their Big Data Analytics and Sentiment technologies is pretty much industry standard anyway. It is just a departure from what we see in the legal vertcial where any speaker 'selling from the podium' is a big no-no and anyone doing so is pretty much 'shunned' for ever. Like I said, it did not bother me, in fact, many of the use cases featuring vendor customers were very informative and factual.

There were a handful of sessions that definetly stood out so here's my short Big Data Innovation Summit (day one) best of:

Most Memorable: The enthusiasm, energy and sheer brilliance exuded by WolframAlpha's CEO and Compuational Knowledge Engine creator Stephen Wolfram was something to behold (even just watching him via the livestream). Wolfram demonstrated Wolfram|Alpha, an answer engine with a new approach to knowledge extraction and an easy-to-use interface first launched in May 2009. In fact, Wolfram/Alpha is one of the answer engines behind Apple Siri and Microsoft's Bing. While I am still processing his explanation of the mathematics and 'logic' behind the unique search engine (he earned his Ph.D. from Caltech at age 20!), Dr. Wolfram's vivid examples of how we can all (not just math wizards) use Wolfram|Alpha engine to find and 're'-discover everything from pictures to a visual map of our facebook friend relationships were mesmerizing.

Best Use Case: Analytics & the 2012 Obama Victory. Andrew Claster, Deputy Chief Analytics Officer for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign shared how big data analytics influenced the Obama campaign’s fund-raising, messaging, communications and voter contact strategies. He also talked in detail about the roles and duties of Obama's 50 person big data 'Dream Team' which included 3 former professional gambles, a particle physicist, stem-cell researcher; 2 former Capital One Credit Card modelers and various PHDs, engineers from Amazon and Google as well as consultants from Accenture, McKenzie.

We are running late for Day 2 AM sessions so will report back within the next few days with more big data madness.

Big Data Innovation: Boston Summit Focused on (Big) Data that Matters

When we first heard about Innovative Enterprise and its Big Data Innovation Summit Boston back in March, we knew this would be a non-vertical specific big data event to watch and follow. The Big Data Innovation Summit taking place at the Westin Copley Place in Boston's Back Bay, September 12-13, includes the largest gathering of Fortune 500 business executives leading Big Data initiatives and is billed as targeting 800+ senior execs (81% are from orgs with more than 300 employees), featuring 40+ educational sessions, panels and hands-on workshops. The 80+ speakers include leading data scientists, engineering, architecture & big data analytics leaders and marketers, represent industry heavyweights including AT&T, CERN, Dell, GE, HP, IBM, LinkedIn, NASA, Netflix, PayPal, Salesforce.com, Sears, Walmart and Yahoo.

A closer look at the jam-packed session schedule reveals many flavors of big data ranging from innovation to analytics, marketing, visualization as well as Hadoop (and beyond) as well as interactive/lab sessions for techies. The Summit schedule is comprised of 6 tracks with up to seven mostly 30 minute sessions per track running concurrently on Thursday with 5 track-agnostic sessions on Friday. The annual Big Data Innovation Awards recognizing big data achievements within the data science community takes place Friday morning as well. Here are a few of our favorites: 

• Big Data Platform at the World's Largest Fan-to-Fan Ticket Marketplace [Sastry Malladi - Chief Architect, Stub Hub]
• In-Memory Computing will Change Everything You Know About Business [Jon Webster - VP, Product Marketing at GridGain]
• Monetizing Big Data with Analytics [Jeff Veis - Vice President, Solutions at HP Autonomy]
• Big Data Innovation and Crowdsourcing - Will They Make a Happy Couple? [Rinat Sergeev - Data Scientist, NASA Tournament Lab]
• Mobile Big Data Insights [Yanling Zhang - Head of Merchandising Insights, Nokia]
• Metrics, Monkeys & Marketing: Lessons on Using Big Data from MailChimp [John Foreman - Chief Data Scientist, MailChimp]
• Big Data Innovations and Applications at NASA [Nikunj Oza - Data Science Leader at NASA]

While InsideLegal is a Big Data Innovation Summit media sponsor this year, a previous commitment has us relegated to spectating/participating from the virtual sidelines so be sure to check out our Twitter feed throughout the day, as well as the one dedicated to the event #BIGDBN and #BigData.

College of Law Practice Management Futures Conference Coming to Chicago

Each fall, the College of Law Practice Management (COLPM) hosts their annual Futures Conference in conjunction with the College’s Annual Meeting and Induction Ceremony (see below for more info on COLPM). Originally the conference was closed to COLPM Fellows, but in recent years the event opened to those in the legal community. The conference allows for approximately 200 attendees, and is an incredible opportunity to network and brainstorm what the future of law will look like. The 2013 Futures Conference will be held in Chicago, October 4-5 and will take an in-depth look at the future of law practice management.

The COLPM partners with law schools including the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, American University Washington College of Law and again in 2013, the Chicago-Kent College of Law. Together, they host interactive programs featuring thought-provoking leaders who present on or facilitate discussions on the future of the profession and the resulting challenges to law firm leadership and management. This year's conference will feature some TED format sessions and will challenge participants to discuss the most pressing issues facing the legal industry today.

You can view the entire 2013 Futures Conference brochure but here's a look at the agenda...

Friday, October 4, 2013

• Keynote presentation by Stephen Mayson - Director, The Legal Services Institute
• What is the Market for Legal Services in the Future (from buyer’s point of view)? (TED format) — Ann Lee Gibson
• Presentation of the 2013 InnovAction Awards
• Innovation in the Law Firm (TED format) — Jordan Furlong
• Introduction of new College Fellow Inductees
• Reception
• Dinner with conference attendees at local restaurants

Saturday, October 5, 2013

• Justice Lawyering and Legal Education in the Digital Age
• The Crisis of Legal Education (TED Format) — Bill Henderson
• Giving Back Luncheon
• New Fellow Induction Ceremony and Dinner Saturday Evening (Fellows & Guests only)

The 2013 Futures Conference co-chairs are:

• Susan Duncan - President, RainMaking Oasis, Inc.
• Deborah McMurray - CEO and Strategy Architect, Content Pilot LLC
• Steve Nelson - Managing Principal, Law & Government Affairs, The McCormick Group

Interested in Attending?
Registration is $495 for COLPM Fellows and $595 for non-Fellow registrants. InsideLegal readers can register for a discounted rate of $495 along with ILTA, ALA, ABA, LMA members. You can register to attend the conference here and reserve your space at the W Hotel here ($269/299 room rate).

What is the COLPM?
The College of Law Practice Management (COLPM) is a not-for-profit organization formed in 1994 to honor and recognize distinguished law practice management professionals, to set standards of achievement for others in the profession, and to fund and assist projects that enhance the highest quality of law practice management. Each year, a new class of COLPM Fellows (who are nominated by their peers) is inducted into the College during the Annual Meeting.