Updated to include link to Julia Shapiro’s essay at Bloomberg Big Law Business.

Catching up with news from the CodeX community…

• CodeX Fellow Tony Lai‘s article, “Opinion and Perspective: The Place for LRIS is the Legal Technology Revolution,” has been published in the fall edition of the American Bar Association’s Dialogue: News and Perspectives from the ABA Division for Legal Services (Vol. 19, No. 4).  [LRIS = Lawyer Referral and Information Service.] Lai is the CEO (and co-founder) of Legal.io.

Writes Lai: “Big data, marketplace infrastructure, machine learning, blockchain, and other disruptive innovations offer tremendous promise to scale the delivery of legal services to a greater number of people at a lower cost, and will redefine how consumers and businesses everywhere use, understand, and shape the legal system. Yet, how do we ensure these technologies are built with regard to the professional standards and public interest ethic of the legal profession, so that those in the greatest need are not unwittingly guided by entities less concerned—or not concerned at all—with consumer protection? This is where the LRIS community can shine.”

• Julia Shapiro, founder and CEO of Hire an Esquire, has announced that Nextlaw Labs (a legal tech venture development company launched by global law firm Dentons), has invested in her company. Nextlaw has also invested in ROSS Intelligence; Apperio (streaming matter management); Clause (addressing the Internet of Things), among other startups, since its launch 18 months ago.

Read more: Startup Snapshot: Julia Shapiro.

“Diversity’s Death by a Million Little Paper Cuts (Perspective),” by Julia Shapiro, Dec. 2, 2016, Bloomberg Law Big Law Business.

Monica Bay is a Fellow at CodeX and a freelance journalist and analyst. Email: mbay@codex.stanford.edu. Twitter: @MonicaBay.

Cover image: Clipart.com