Tag: Law News

Marvel has the Multiverse – a collection of alternate realities where superheroes interact and exist independently but are sometimes cognizant of their counterparts in other realities. Oddly enough, our world has the Metaverse, which is not fiction. It refers to the world that exists in digital format. Find out how the Metaverse impacts your law firm by reading today’s post.

What is The Metaverse?
Some experts define the Metaverse as a 3D version of the internet. Metaverse users interact within a computer-generated space. It’s not limited to one online location; it includes numerous virtual spaces. Many users have avatars that help them interact with others online. It’s like a virtual reality game and continuously evolves.

How Did The Metaverse Come to Be?
The term, Metaverse, is new to most of us. However, it originated in a 1992 novel entitled Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The Metaverse in his novel was

CASE PREVIEW

A lawyer’s legal advice is privileged. A court cannot order the lawyer or the client to disclose it. But a lawyer’s nonlegal advice is not privileged. What happens when advice is partly legal and partly nonlegal and the two parts cannot be untangled? In such dual-purpose situations, does the privilege protect all the advice or none of it?

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear opposing answers to that question in a case known as In re Grand Jury. A law firm will argue that the privilege should protect all client communications “where obtaining or providing legal advice was one of the significant purposes behind the communication,” even if nonlegal advice predominated. The United States will argue that unless legal advice was the client’s “primary” purpose, none of the dual-purpose communications should be privileged.

The difference between

By Michael McArthur

The final talk of the International Law Libraries Annual Course was another sobering perspective on the U.S. administration, most notably the absence of judicial review under the guise of national security. Stanford’s Professor Shirin Sinnar gave the presentation, titled “National Security and Accountability in the Courts.”

She began with the story of Professor Xiaoxing Xi, whose home was raided by the FBI in 2015 on account of an accusation that he was sharing private scientific technology with China. The news made the headlines and his life was turned upside-down, only to have the charges dropped a few months later. In an attempt to clear his name, he sued the FBI agents and the FBI for malicious prosecution based on his Chinese background. His claim was dismissed, unable to get past the threshold of Bivens action that protects federal agents for constitutional violations. The court went on to

By Allison C. Reeve Davis, Senior Library Manager, Littler Mendelson, P.C. and Caren Luckie, Research Attorney, Jackson Walker LLP

Allison and Caren were both awardees of the PLLIP-SIS grant to attend the course and in this post share their experiences and “a-ha” moments.

On May 16-17, 2022, several legal information professionals gathered in Chicago for an immersive course on Competitive Intelligence (CI) in law firms. The small group of 11 comprised individuals from law firms of various size and included librarians and CI researchers alike. Facilitators Ben Brighoff (Foley & Lardner, L.L.P.) and Lynne Kilgore (Baker Botts, L.L.P.), along with additional speaker Nathalie Noel (Jenner & Block), led the group through several CI strategies, team development, stakeholder buy-in, working collaboratively with other departments, and other considerations. Attendees took away ideas and made connections with each other creating a larger network of colleagues working in this space. We have already seen

Check Also

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

Olga 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 Seat, Fundamentals 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

WHAT WE’RE READING

By SCOTUSblog

on Dec 28, 2022
at 9:41 am

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:

• Migrant Expulsion Policy Must Stay in Place for Now, Supreme Court Says (Adam Liptak, Miriam Jordan, & Eileen Sullivan, The New York Times)
• U.S. Supreme Court rules to keep Title 42, the pandemic-era policy to quickly turn away migrants, for now (Uriel J. García & Alexa Ura, The Texas Tribune)
• Why 2022 is Already a Term Like No Other (Adam Feldman, Empirical SCOTUS)
• 3 big questions the Supreme Court is likely to ask when determining the fate of student loan forgiveness (Annie Nova, CNBC)
• Making sense of the Supreme Court’s historic year (Amanda Hollis-Brusky, The Washington Post)

Recommended Citation:
SCOTUSblog ,

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

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