Our favourite links from around the web to kick off your weekend.
- Legal Futures Round-Up
"...Our regular round-up of noteworthy developments, opinions and news in the legal futures space as a means of furthering discussion about our changing legal marketplace." (via nationalmagazine.ca)
- More Law Firms Are Accepting Bitcoin Payments
"Technology and startup companies and those in the payments and intellectual property fields have been using bitcoin to pay generally smaller firms for legal services for years. Larger firms more recently have stepped into this space, and a wider variety of law firms are expected to accept bitcoin as clients become more comfortable using the currency." (via bol.bna.com)
- How Law Firms who Pivot will Continue to Profit
"Samuel Williston said that a lawyer, above everything else, is a man who brings things to pass, a man who helps to make things constructively happen.But how to do this, profitably, in an era of upheaval and disruption? With a judicious integration of emerging technology into operations. Historically, technology has been the tool to drive effectiveness in every industry." (via lawtechnologytoday.org)
- Tech Competence a Must
"As technology is increasingly used within law practices to streamline legal processes and more efficiently deliver services to clients, two important questions have come up for lawyers and law schools. Do lawyers and law students have the technical skills to meet the business needs for the current legal market? And with technology now highly integrated into the practice, is there then an ethical imperative for lawyers to be technically competent?" (via canadianlawyermag.com)
- GDPR Will Change Data Protection – Here's What you Need to Know
"General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, will overhaul how businesses process and handle data. Our need-to-know GDPR guide explains what the changes mean for you." (via wired.co.uk)
- Blockchain & Smart Contracts
"The concept of an automated contract is not new. An option to purchase IBM stock at $100 on December 1 will result in an automatic payout on the contract calculated on the actual trading price of the stock on that date, is automated, but not novel. What is new and interesting with smart contracts is the attempt to generalize the concept for a wider class of contracts and to use a newer set of technologies, such as decentralized blockchains and oracles, to strictly enforce the contracts." (via forbes.com)
- An 'Email Jail,' Erroneous Privilege Claims, and Other eDiscovery Follies
"Just as Tom Brady discovered in Deflategate, the Lynyrd Skynyrd defendants learned that if you have a reasonable anticipation of litigation, and your responsive text messages get wiped when you get a new phone, bad things will happen to you." (via blog.kcura.com)
- 3 Ways Companies Are Building a Business Around AI
"Whatever hype businesspeople read around AI — and there is a great deal — the intentions and actions of so many players should alert them to the fundamental importance of this new technology." (via hbr.org)
- The Best Law Books That Aren’t To Kill a Mockingbird
"If you’re about to start a law degree, have legal profession aspirations or are just interested in the subject, you may want to grab yourself a law-themed book. But, aside from To Kill a Mockingbird, and maybe The Rule of Law and Letters to a Law Student, there aren’t all that many famous ones. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of good ones out there." (via legalcheek.com)
