Project Pericles

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First-gen matrix for evaluating software options. Harvard Law School, circa 1985.

Oh, the Humanity!  We can choose to choose better.

My first serious experience choosing law-related technology was in early 1985. Personal computers had just been introduced in the Harvard Law School clinics (as part of Project Pericles) and we had to decide which software to use for word processing. (WordPerfect was around, but we somehow missed it.) So I typed up a chart on an electric typewriter and added lines by pencil. See above graphic.  We wanted to be sure our choice did things like automatically centering text.

Such charts are familiar to product choosers everywhere. Options on one axis; features or considerations on the other. Ideally incorporating some sense of the relative importance of the latter. (One defect of the above chart is that there’s a “How desirable?” column for each option. Perceived importance of factors may vary across decision-makers, but shouldn’t differ by option.)
Continue Reading The social life of legal tech choices (309)

Legal Evolution is pleased to welcome lawyer and legal technologist Marc Lauritsen as a regular contributor.

For most people working in the legal industry, including many regular LE readers, I suspect that legal technology feels new and potentially disruptive.  But alas, as I have learned the hard way, that feeling is not very reliable.   I met Marc Lauritsen several years ago at a conference at Chicago-Kent organized by Ron Staudt (a law professor who helped launched LexisNexis’s lucrative legal research business), where I began to take in some of the war stories of the early days of law and technology.  Thirty years before the venture capitalists became interested in legal technology as a sector, a small cadre of brilliant and inventive lawyers were learning enough about technology to begin to solve some significant problems in law office practice management and experiment with ways to use technology to improve access to justice.  Others in this group include Richard Granat and Glenn Rawdon.
Continue Reading Introducing regular contributor Marc Lauritsen (300)