Episode 24 – How Lawyers Can Use Technology to Improve Their Practices, with Nicole Black | LaFleur Marketing

Episode 24 of Legal Marketing Radio, “How Lawyers Can Use Technology to Improve Their Practices, with Nicole Black” is out now and available via SoundCloud and iTunes! You can use the player below to listen here, or you can visit our SoundCloud page or the iTunes store to download and subscribe to the podcast.

Legal Marketing Radio is a podcast that covers legal marketing tips and strategies (courtesy of the team at LaFleur and special guests) as well as news, trends, and cutting-edge innovations in the overlapping worlds of legal, digital, and content marketing.

Our guest in this month’s episode is Nicole Black. As the legal technology evangelist for the case management software company MyCase, Nicole helps lawyers understand how to use technology in their practices. Nicole is a Rochester, New York-based attorney who’s been practicing since 1995 and pursuing her passion for technology since she started dabbling in BASIC at age 12. She started blogging about the law and technology 10 years ago, and since then she’s written about the intersection between law and tech for a wide range of publications and spoken at events and seminars across the country. She’s written two books on the topic, Cloud Computing for Lawyers and Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier with co-author Carolyn Elefant, and she also co-authored the 4th edition of Criminal Law in New York in 2012.

Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing, and Artificial Intelligence Are All Changing the Way Forward-Thinking Law Firms Do Business

According to Nicole, new technologies like mobile computing and cloud computing are leveling the playing field for law firms, and small to medium-sized firms stand to benefit the most — as long as they implement solutions thoughtfully. Thoughtful implementation means:

• Determining what your goals are
• Finding which tools are available to help you accomplish those goals in an efficient and cost-effective manner
• Identifying pain points and finding a single solution or a suite of solutions to address them (for example, do you need a client portal or is streamlining and automating payments enough?)
• Understanding the solutions you choose and vetting the providers to ensure your sensitive information stays secure

AI is another exciting area that’s already making an impact and will continue to change the way many lawyers practice in the coming years. Some of the ways that innovative attorneys are using AI include:

• Data analytics: Allows lawyers to use collected data about cases to get valuable insights about judges, venues, expert witnesses, and other firms
• Legal research: Streamlines the research process and provides additional tools to help lawyers connect with the research they need; some newer tools even let lawyers upload briefs so AI-based software can analyze the brief and provide suggestions for relevant research
• Contract analytics: Attorneys can upload a contract for comparison to an existing database of similar contracts and receive analysis of outlier sections and suggestions for improvement

Enjoy the show, and don’t forget to check back next month for another new episode!