Pioneers and Pathfinders Seyfarth Shaw LLP

Our guest today is Jimmy Vestbirk, founder of Legal Geek, an organization that hosts events around the world for the legal tech community. Jimmy started his career in business, owning and operating a number of online dating sites. As he ran into different legal issues in these ventures, his experiences ultimately inspired him to find solutions to these problems. Drawing on his business knowledge, he co-founded the legal startup Flex Legal, where he discovered his passion for events. Jimmy would go on to start Legal Geek with the goal of making legal tech events more fun and engaging—encouraging attendees to dress comfortably, learn from one another, and make friends rather than sell. Since launching in 2015, Legal Geek has reached a total of more than 50,000 attendees from over 150 countries. Legal Geek also organized the world’s first legal tech startup conference in 2016, and will host the brand new Legal Growth Geek conference focusing on legal tech adoption. In April, the Ministry of Justice in the UK awarded £3 million to Legal Geek and its partner CodeBase to accelerate the growth of legal tech through the program LawtechUK.

In today’s discussion, Jimmy tells us about making the leap to the legal industry, hosting events during the pandemic, how Legal Geek has evolved since its first event in San Francisco, and the topics he's excited to hear about at the upcoming Legal Geek North America conference hosted in Chicago.

We’re joined today by John Grant, a legal operations strategist who works with law firms and legal teams to improve their capacity and productivity. A fourth-generation lawyer, John was in the technology industry for nearly a decade before he entered the legal profession. As an attorney, he started in in-house counsel and legal operations roles before founding Agile Professionals LLC in 2014. As a consultant, he helps legal professionals develop legal services that are profitable, scalable, and sustainable for themselves as well as the communities they serve. Additionally, John is board president of The Commons Law Center, a nonprofit law firm providing affordable legal services to those in Oregon who make up to 400% of the federal poverty level. Both Agile Professionals and The Commons Law Center incorporate Kanban, a methodology that aims to improve efficiency and achieve excellent client value in production processes by visualizing workflows.

Today, John talks about what he learned from working in tech, the need for human connection in the A2J space, applying Kanban principles to legal organizations, and how he helps attorneys with overwhelming workloads.

Today we speak with our 100th guest, Catherine Jackson Moynihan, a true pioneer and expert in legal operations—and another great example of an allied professional driving change in the profession.

Catherine is Senior Director of Strategic Intelligence & Advisory at Hyperion Research, an Epiq company. After working in product management roles for several years, she had the opportunity to join the Association of Corporate Counsel, where she started and directed the legal operation section—at a time when legal operations was not the established function that it is today. Among the numerous strategic initiatives Catherine undertook, one of her key accomplishments was developing the ACC Legal Operations Maturity Model, toolkit, and training. With mentorship from then-vice president of the ACC—and friend of the podcast—Susan Hackett, Catherine also led ACC Value Challenge (and its Value Champions awards), a program with the goal of identifying and disseminating leading practices in the industry. Today, Catherine oversees Hyperion Research, Epiq’s legal operations market intelligence program, and she spearheads practical guidance and engagement opportunities for global legal executives advancing their legal transformation efforts.

In our conversation, Catherine discusses how she "wandered" into the legal industry, the importance of data in Epiq’s legal services management framework, training legal professionals on change management, and her research work.

As always, we appreciate your time listening in on these conversations. Now, on to the next 100 guests!

As we’ve discussed many times on the podcast, the access to justice gap is a particularly complex challenge to address, due to its links to systemic issues such as poverty and limited availability to legal resources and technology. Today’s guest, however, is helping people overcome these broader obstacles to legal services. Amanda Brown is the founder and executive director of Lagniappe Law Lab. The organization’s mission is to facilitate access to justice at scale for Louisiana's underprivileged populations through the use of technology, human-centered design, and operations principles. Upon graduating law school, Amanda was a disaster recovery attorney, using technology to assist victims of disasters with accessing public benefits and title clearing. She then worked as a Microsoft NextGen Fellow for the American Bar Association’s Center for Innovation, helping support the design and development of the Legal Services Corporation’s legal navigator program, which connects those in need with legal resources available to them. She went on to serve as a legal technology consultant for the Louisiana Bar Foundation on its statewide triage portal. Drawing on these experiences in legal tech and the A2J space, Amanda founded Lagniappe Law Lab in 2019. She is also co-chair of Louisiana’s Access to Justice Commission’s technology subcommittee, and she is a member of the Legal Services Corporation’s Emerging Leaders Council.

Today, Amanda tells us about Lagniappe Law Lab—and how the team is incorporating human-centered design in its work, the unique challenges that the Lab’s clients face in Louisiana, and how she entered the A2J path.

Today we are joined by Memme Onwudiwe, co-founder and executive vice president of Legal and Business Intelligence at Evisort, a company using AI and advanced contract lifecycle management functions to help companies negotiate, organize, and extract data from their contracts. While still a student at Harvard Law, Memme helped build Evisort with three of his peers, through the school’s innovation lab. Inspired by their experiences doing contract work at legal internships, they developed a software that structures data from contracts so that attorneys don’t have to do so manually. Today, Memme and Evisort CEO Jerry Ting lecture together at Harvard, sharing their experiences as legal tech entrepreneurs, and teaching law students how they can follow a similar path. Memme also has a strong interest in space law, having written the peer-reviewed article "Africa and the Artemis Accords: A Review of Space Regulations and Strategy for African Capacity Building in the New Space Economy," which focuses on the potential impacts of frameworks such as the Artemis Accords on African Union states in their space development efforts. Additionally, Memme is co-owner of the African Museum of the Metaverse, which features some of the largest collections of art from top African and Black artists.

In our wide-ranging discussion, Memme talks about why he made the leap to founding a company, his thoughts on generative AI, teaching a course at Harvard, and his fascination with space law.

Our guest today is Kathryn DeBord, vice president of product strategy at DISCO, a company that utilizes artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and data analytics to automate parts of the legal practice so that lawyers can focus their attention on other important areas. While Kathryn is known today for her work in legal innovation, her career journey actually began in an unexpected place—the Central Intelligence Agency. When Kathryn joined the CIA, she fulfilled a lifelong dream, but after four years as an intelligence analyst, she made a left turn and decided to go to law school. As a summer associate, Kathryn discovered her love for litigation, and went on to have a complex commercial litigation practice for over a decade. She was partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP when she joined the firm’s innovation committee, learning the ins and outs of law firm innovation and change management. Kathryn would go on to apply this knowledge as chief innovation officer, leading the firm’s international cross-disciplinary team to advance the quality of legal services through developing and adopting new technologies. Today, as vice president of product strategy at DISCO, she is helping the company determine what’s next in the litigation technology space.

In today’s discussion, Kathryn tells us about how she started with the moniker “007,” leading to her life in the CIA; making left turns in her career; what litigation and innovation have in common; and working at DISCO.