Every Friday on Legaltech Week, the panelists come together to discuss the top stories of the week in legal tech and innovation. This week, in a special year-end edition, the panelists will pick their top stories of the year and offer their predictions for what’s ahead in 2023.

Join us Dec. 30 at 3 ET to hear our picks and prediction. Attendance is free, but, if you have not already done so, you need to register, which you can do here. Register once and you are signed up for all future sessions.

Our panelist lineup changes from week to week, but our regulars are:

  • Nicole Black, legal technology columnist and legaltech evangelist at MyCase.
  • Stephen Embry, publisher, TechLaw Crossroads.
  • Caroline Hill, editor in chief, Legal IT Insider.
  • Victor Li, assistant managing editor of the ABA Journal.
  • Jean O’Grady, publisher of the
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Dealing with stress


Olga MackOlga V. Mack is the VP at LexisNexis and CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board SeatFundamentals of Smart Contract Security, and  Blockchain Value: Transforming Business Models, Society, and Communities. She is working on Visual IQ for Lawyers, her next book (ABA 2023). You can follow Olga on Twitter

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WHAT WE’RE READING

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles, commentary, and other noteworthy links related to the Supreme Court. To suggest a piece for us to consider, email us at [email protected].

Here’s the Wednesday morning read:

Recommended Citation:
SCOTUSblog ,

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Reposted with permission from AALL Spectrum, Volume 26, Number 6 (July/August 2022), pgs 18-20.

By John DiGilio, Firmwide Director of Library Services, Sidley Austin LLP

Communicate meaningfully, set boundaries, celebrate successes, and be empathetic.

For most of us in the law firm library world, the response to the pandemic felt a like a fire drill that we have been preparing for our entire careers. We have long talked about electronic resources, serving clients at a distance, virtual learning, and so much more. Conference after conference and through innumerable articles, we have been lamenting the slow pace of change among firms when it comes to fully embracing these possibilities. Yet wise was the person who said that necessity is the mother of invention. All that hesitation ended abruptly when the world went into lockdown under the rapid spread of COVID-19. Not only did we successfully make that transition from office to

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For some employees of legal tech companies, the holidays have been far from merry, as their employers have trimmed headcounts and sent out layoff notices.

The exact number of layoffs in legal tech are unknown. It is difficult to track and confirm layoffs, as companies are often secretive about them. Although, in the U.S., the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires employers to report layoffs, it generally applies only to employers of 100 or more employees that layoff 50 or more employees.

So, although this may not be a comprehensive list of recent legal tech layoffs, here are the ones that have been reported.

Contractbook. Two weeks ago, Niels Martin Brochner, founder and CEO of the Danish contract lifecycle management company Contractbook, took to LinkedIn to announce the layoff of 32 employees.

“Like many other companies in our industry, we must reduce our headcount

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Jury duty(1)


Olga MackOlga V. Mack is the VP at LexisNexis and CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board SeatFundamentals of Smart Contract Security, and  Blockchain Value: Transforming Business Models, Society, and Communities. She is working on Visual IQ for Lawyers, her next book (ABA 2023). You can follow Olga on Twitter

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EMERGENCY DOCKET
two men wearing border parol uniforms stand along dirt road with back to the camera. one points into the distance.

Two agents patrol the southern border in Texas in 2021. (Vic Hinterlang via Shutterstock)

Nineteen states came to the Supreme Court on Monday, asking the justices to keep in place a Trump-era policy that allows immigration officials to quickly expel migrants seeking asylum at the U.S. border. The states, led by Arizona, warn the justices that if the court does not block a federal judge’s order that would end the policy on Wednesday, it will “cause a crisis of unprecedented proportions at the border.”

The federal law at the center of the case is known as Title 42 of the Public Health Services Act. It gives the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the power to bar the entry of individuals into the United States to protect the public from contagious diseases. In March 2020, citing the

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By Jonathan Pratter

A classic (no pun intended) bibliography of ancient Greek law is found in the Introduction Bibliographique à l’Histoire du Droit et à l’Ethnologie Juridique, a multi-volume bibliography of legal history published between 1963 and 1988 under the editorship of J. Gilissen by the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Because of its fine-grained organization by subject, this bibliography doubles as a research guide. For example, the section on private law is divided into sub-sections on general works, slavery, family law, property law, obligations, commercial law, and private international law. The reader can learn a lot about the structure of ancient Greek law just by consulting this bibliography. Alas, the section on ancient Greek law in the Introduction Bibliographique was last updated in 1967.

What more current bibliographies of ancient Greek law do we find today? There are some; two of them are online. NOMOI, hosted by Simon

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By Connie Chang, Knowledge Management Research Analyst at Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt

Editor’s Note: We are happy to post two takes on a recent course on “Managing Your Work Environment” offered by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), and facilitated by Judith Millesen, Ph.D.  Both authors were recipients of grants from the Private Law Librarians and Information Professionals (PLLIP) section of AALL.  Thank you to Connie and Janet for taking the time to share their thoughts on their experiences and takeaways from the course.

Thanks to a grant from the Private Law Librarians & Information Professionals Special Interest Section (PLLIP-SIS), I attended the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) course, “Managing Your Work Environment.”  The course focused on team development and interpersonal skills.  It was held over three weeks (Sept. 13 to Oct. 4, 2022).  There was also some pre-course work on the importance of having a growth mindset

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The ABA TechReport combines data from the annual ABA Legal Technology Survey Report with expert analysis, observations, and predictions from leaders in the legal technology field. Every Wednesday, we’ll be posting a new report from one of our experts, so stay tuned!

As the world emerges from a pandemic that forced the world to change, many lawyers are questioning whether the technological changes we have made in our practices will be permanent or revert to past habits. The 2022 ABA Legal Technology Survey Reports provide insights into these questions so that firms can best position themselves for the future.

The research, conducted by the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center is contained in five volumes of organized responses, and the resulting data is helpful to many firms of differing sizes. The published results represent one of the most comprehensive technology surveys of law firms available. The insights contained

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