They are law firm partners, general counsels, and staff attorneys who wish to keep up on the latest legal technology and other innovations. They are chief information officers, IT directors, practice managers, and technical professionals in law firms or in-house legal departments. Yes, legal tech entrepreneurs and global innovation architects, too. For several days each year, more than 8,000 legal professionals and more than 300 speakers from 36 countries get together to discuss all things legal and digital at Legalweek 2020.
Organized by American Lawyer Media, Legalweek is the world’s largest, longest-running conference focused on legal technology. What used to be known simply as Legaltech has become three coinciding conferences – Legaltech, LegalCIO, and Legal Business Strategy – featuring workshops and networking events, as well as hundreds of exhibitors on a tradeshow floor. Here, legal professionals, corporate leaders, and technologists, representing many parts of the legal industry, share their knowledge, experience, and new ideas about the business of law – and the ever-evolving technology that’s used within it. Legalweek 2020 will focus on the theme of “Driving Legal Forward.”
It’s all happening once more at New York City’s Hilton Midtown, between Feb. 3 and Feb. 6. Legalweek 2020 will focus on the thought-provoking theme of “Driving Legal Forward.” And it’s something that shouldn’t be missed, whether you’re looking for a brand-new service provider or the very latest solutions, or interested in expanding your own knowledge base. Either way, there’s plenty of things to do at Legalweek for those keenly interested in legal technology.
Here are a few sessions that ContractPodAi is excited about!
1. LEGALWEEK 2020 KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Legalweek 2020 kicks off with a couple of keynote addresses, including one given by former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (2017 to 2019). After earning a B.S. summa cum laude from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, Rosenstein served as a law clerk to Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He then joined the U.S. Department of Justice in 1990, prosecuting public corruption cases and conducting preliminary Independent Counsel inquiries. That’s before serving as counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno’s deputy at the beginning of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration and supervising all federal criminal tax prosecutions under U.S. President George W. Bush. In a decade-long initiative, Rosenstein also led the federal, state, and local authorities in bringing crime rates in Maryland down to record lows.
2. RUNNING LEGAL OPS LIKE A BUSINESS
These days, utilizing massive amounts of data to drive improvements in legal departments may be the single most untapped opportunity for legal professionals. In “Running Legal Ops like a Business – The Core KPI’s of a Modern Legal Department,” session attendees can listen to Jennifer McCarron, director of Legal Operations and Technology at Netflix and former head of Legal Technology at Spotify. She will be joined by James Michalowicz of TE Connectivity, Steven O’Donnell of Mitratech, and Caitlin Perazzo of AIG, as they review the core KPIs that legal departments are using to track success. More importantly, they will discuss the core KPIs that attendees should consider implementing in the near future, in addition to a legal reporting maturity model that they can use to benchmark their respective departments. Utilizing massive amounts of data to improve legal departments is important for legal professionals.
3. USING ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES TO IMPROVE LEGAL OPERATIONS
In this SuperSession titled “Using Advanced Technologies to Improve Legal Operations – Implementing a Total Spend Management Approach,” hear insights from Wolters Kluwer ELM’s Jeffrey Soloman, senior director of Product Management and Data Analytics, and Alyza Tarmohamed, general manager. The two will explain why today’s legal operations professionals have more responsibility than ever before when it comes to driving business value. They will articulate the importance of reviewing current processes and managing workflow. Additionally, the speakers will reveal how artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies enhance e-billing solutions for greater visibility and cost management.
4. NAVIGATING DATA PROTECTION AND RISK IN THE CLOUD ERA
Sure, digital transformation has led to an explosion of data, which is stored and shared across many platforms and devices. But it’s also resulted in a complex digital environment, complete with new internal or external risks: security breaches and data leakage, whether malicious or accidental. Complicating this environment even more, paradoxically, are regulations and standards that are constantly springing up and changing.
Technology provides opportunities for continuous risk assessment and monitoring. In “Navigating Data Protection and Risk in the Cloud Era Using Intelligent Technology Solutions,” Mara Arenson, a Microsoft attorney, and Aaron Hartwell, Microsoft’s partner program, will discuss the first essential step toward compliance and defensibility in the cloud: knowing all about your data – and protecting it. They will explain a cloud provider’s own liability concerning data protection, and the latest tools helping organizations remediate threats and risks while maintaining their principles around privacy. The bottom line is that technology provides opportunities for continuous risk assessment and monitoring. And it offers a proactive approach to compliance instead of a reactive one.
5.THE NEXT FRONTIER OF LEGAL TECHNOLOGY
In “Analyzing Images with Deep Learning – The Next Frontier of Legal Technology Review,” hear insights from Rish Chhatwal, assistant Vice President and senior legal counsel at AT&T; and Robert Keeling, partner at Sidley Austin; as well as Dr. Jianping Zhang and Nathaniel Huber-Fliflet, senior managing directors at Ankura. Together, they will explain the ins and outs of deep learning technology. They will go over the areas where it benefits lawyers most, such as the identification and analysis of images within their contract reviews. Things like image classification, image clustering, and object detection all help lawyers to mine their own data for handwriting and personal photos, etc. And this goes a long way in assisting with privacy regulations and many other applications.
6.HOW MUCH OF CONTRACTS STILL REQUIRE MANUAL REVIEW?
ContractPodAi, an AI-powered solution for contract lifecycle management, will also be visiting LegalWeek 2020. Using powerful and market-leading cognitive technology, machine learning, and natural language processing, ContractPodAi provides software with AI-powered contract discovery function and contract automation. It can read, interpret, analyze, and report on key contract information; manage full contract workflow and approvals, and automatically set alerts and reminders for important dates.
Indeed, contract review is an essential business function although one that is extremely time-consuming. Today, it can take nearly three-and-half weeks to create and approve a contract manually, according to Forrester. This, even though artificial intelligence has proven to be up to 95 percent accurate in performing the very same function. All of this begs an important question: “how many contracts still require manual review?” The answer is critical to making a contract review as efficient as possible while keeping this function accurate overall.
Today, it can take nearly three-and-a-half weeks to create and approve a contract manually. For this session that ContractPodAi is moderating, I’m thrilled to be joined by Kevin Fumai, senior managing counsel at Oracle, who oversees acquisitions, strategic alliances, partnerships, and technology transactions (i.e. software, hardware, cloud computing, and data licensing, etc.); Kimberly Maney, assistant general counsel and head of global contracting at GlaxoSmithKline, who focuses on strategic business-focused legal counsel across telecom, utilities, and pharmaceuticals; and Oliver Round, managing counsel, and director, and co-head of Legal Data Management & Advisory at BNY Mellon, who advises on leveraging legal technology, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, contract analytics, contract generation, and contract lifecycle management.
We’ll closely look at the state of automation in the legal sector, examining the reliability and accuracy of contract drafting and review tools. Whether we’re talking about the simplest or the most complex provisions, we’ll explore the present-day limitations of machine learning – along with its untapped potential.
7. UNDOING THE PAIN OF CONTRACT REMEDIATION WITH AI
By 2023, contract negotiation and the document completion process will become 30 percent more efficient, according to Gartner. That’s all thanks to artificial intelligence.
In this session titled “Undoing the Pain of Contract Remediation with AI,” Deirdre Leone, ContractPodAi’s Vice President of Sales, will be joined by Rajan Gupta, head of Global Legal Technology for Facebook, who leads operations, and technology and program management across legal and compliance; Justin Hectus, the chief information officer and chief information security officer for Keesal Young & Logan, who develops and executes strategic technology; Oliver Round, director and managing counsel of BNY Mellon, who advises on leveraging legal technology, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, contract analytics, contract generation and contract lifecycle management; and Megan Ryan, executive vice president of Legal Affairs for NuHealth, who oversees all legal, corporate governance, privacy, and ethics functions.
Together, they will provide an overview of the state of today’s AI-powered contract remediation tools. They will show how to use these tools in the management of complex global compliance regulations and events – think GDPR and Brexit, etc. What’s more, panelists will look at how financial institutions leverage these technologies for large-scale banking and compliance projects. All with the help of Big4 and law companies.
8. MONEYBALLING WITH A KILLER CONTRACT ANALYTICS DEPARTMENT
And lastly – but not less importantly – ContractPodAi’s Senior Account Executive, Derek M. Karpel, will lead a discussion around advanced analytics in contract lifecycle management. He’ll be joined by Scott Milner, a partner at Morgan Lewis, who advises companies in the areas of electronic discovery and information governance processes; Daryl Shetterly, a director at Orrick Between 5 and 40 percent of a given deal’s value can be lost due to inefficient contracting. Analytics, who focuses on bringing innovation and business processes to law practices; and Eric Falkenberry, a partner at DLA Piper, who specializes in the assessment and transfer of litigation risk through data mining, litigation analytics, and predictive modeling, and develops tools that utilize machine learning, natural language processing, and data analytics.
Did you know that the average company has 20,000 to 40,000 active contracts? And anywhere between 5 percent and 40 percent of a given deal’s value can be lost because of inefficient contracting, according to the Harvard Business Review. In this revealing session titled “Moneyballing with a Killer Contract Analytics Department,” ContractPodAi and other panelists will go over the KPIs that are needed most in the assessment of contract performance and risk management. Attendees will learn how to get the most out of their contract analytics department by identifying and leveraging core KPIs. Also, they will be shown how to elevate legal’s status from risk managers all the way up to business growth partners.
SEE CONTRACTPODAI AT LEGALWEEK 2020
ContractPodAi will also be an exhibitor at Legalweek 2020. It will allow us to delve more into topics such as artificial intelligence and contract lifecycle management (CLM). So come by our booth to talk one-on-one with our CLM experts about the state of your own digital transformation. Here, you can view demos and case studies, and complete a five-minute interactive questionnaire so that we can score you on different areas of your CLM process. In addition, Deirdre Leone will give a 30-minute, “legal-lite” presentation on Feb. 4. at 11 a.m. She’ll show you exactly how to streamline your legal process using contract lifecycle management.
Of course, we barely scratched the surface of Legalweek 2020 in this blog post. Whatever you decide to do during the event, it’s a prime opportunity to network with other legal and tech professionals. It’s a chance to deep-dive into your own professional development. And it’s a time to explore the issues and strategies of the day while acquiring the tools to do legal business better than ever before.
We, at ContractPodAi, look forward to seeing you there!
Author:
Charles Dimov
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