Know the economics of your law firms when you agree to fee arrangements. Most inhouse counsel have practiced in a law firm before, so they have some understanding of firm dynamics and politics when it comes to client credit, billing revenue, etc. 'Pricing legal work requires much more than proficiency in AFAs. Companies should possess a practical understanding of law firm economics and the related profitability variables, of law firm cultures, and of law firm compensation systems for partners and associates for the firms that they use.' Click here for the full text from Catalyst Legal.

Perhaps some reality about the 'ascendancy' of ALSPs. Contrarian does not mean wrong. 'Over the last few months, the focus has been on Alternative Legal Service Providers, or ALSPs. We're devoting a chunk of Front this issue to explore these unwieldy beasts purportedly eating Big Law's lunch. There's no doubt ALSPs have made progress, but their ascendancy seems overstated.' Click here for the full text from Corporate Counsel Business Journal.

Matter-level diversity metrics from law firms. If a law department relies on diversity metrics beyond firm-wide, it requires more data tracking. 'More legal departments are considering the diversity composition of their teams on a matter-by-matter basis, and at the individual lawyer level as well as understanding attribution credit rules within law firms. This is a different type of data than is currently being routinely provided by firms, which is often firm-wide reporting of a firm's overall composition of diverse partners, counsel and associates.' Click here for the full text from Priori Legal .

Analyzing slavery reports for instances of it. The potential this project reveals is to be able to pore through thousands of reports, perhaps such as Suspicious Activity Reports, and classify them after a period of training. This is machine learning in support of lawyering. 'Project AIMS seeks to eradicate slave labor by developing machine-learning-based analyses of the language companies use in their reporting under UK's Modern Slavery Act, in order to spot companies that use slave labor despite denials in their MSA reporting.' Click here for the full text from Elevate.

An overview of the e-discovery industry. 'Gartner's leaders make five recommendations for teams pursuing improvements to their legal and compliance data center infrastructure, which cover a range of gaps and overlaps that must be addressed, overall visibility of discoverable data, and the complexity of high-stakes cases and how to coordinate efforts across siloed organizational departments. Download the full Gartner E-Discovery Market Guide by clicking on the banner at the top!' Click here for the full text from Exterro .

Elusive goal to convert contract notions to computable elements. This idea has floated around for decades. 'These computational contracts (sometime called smart contracts), according to Stanford University, are a universal Contract Definition Language that will allow terms and conditions to be represented in machine-understandable way. As a result, computers will be able to process and reason over the contracts automatically with a guaranteed degree of accuracy. The Stanford project sees this as not only a significant reduction of legal transaction costs, but it also opens a variety of new options to create better contracts.' Click here for the full text from the Legal Executive Institute.

Half of law departments foresee no medium term effect of AI. Even with all the clamor about contract management and e-discovery being AI enabled, isn't this a shocking finding? 'According to the 2020 Future Ready Lawyer Survey by Wolters Kluwer, 58% of legal departments expect AI to affect their organization over the next three years. Despite this, only 23% say that they understand it very well.' Click here for the full text from Wolters Kluwer.