Not many people can make the transition from Ph.D. in Genetics and Genomics, and then to the legal analytics field, but Dr. Carla Rydholm is someone who did just that. For nearly the past decade, Dr. Rydholm has been leading the charge of data analytics at Lex Machina. She is charged with not only acquiring the data large amounts of data but also maintaining that data as it is updated. Dr. Rydholm stopped by Greg’s Houston office, along with episode 10’s guest, Kyle Doviken to tell us about transitioning from pure scientist, to her current role, and what drives her passion for data analytics, and how the data is used to tell the story, and help attorney’s understand what’s previously happened, and use that as a guide to better understand where they may be headed. It’s a very insightful conversation.

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Marlene WIns an Award!

The Private Law Librarians and Information Professionals (PLL-IP) of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) is giving Blogger of the Year status to our very own Marlene Gebauer for her outstanding work on this podcast. Congrats Marlene!!

Speaking of AALL, there is a new State of the Profession Survey publication that is of great value to any organization that has legal information professionals. You can find out more, and order your copy at the AALL website.

Information Inspirations:

Marlene points out a recent article called “The Value of Inconvenient Design.” The author uses a case study of assembling IKEA furniture (with that single allen wrench) and how people place value on things where there is a challenge (friction) in producing the end result, versus having something that is just handed to you. There’s a need to solve a problem, in order to earn the reward. She ties this back to the theme in many of our shows centering around design thinking–you have to identify what is actually a problem and work backwards from that. Simply making something easier because we can through improved process or tech may actually de-value the experience and make the people involved more unhappy.

There’s a lot of mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances going on recently in the legal information field. The recent acquisition of Justis by vLex creates a powerful international and foreign law database. The combination of vLex’s Colin Lachance, and Justis’ Masoud Gerami is sure to be a winning combination. Ed Walter’s of Fastcase hinted at more things to come for his legal information service when he talked with us a few weeks ago. Fastcase is collaborating with two expert witness platforms, JurisPro and Courtroom Insight. Fastcase is already punching above its weight class against the big players in the industry. With this latest collaboration, it seems to be punching even harder.

Can art be created from a combination of AI and social media? Marlene has her reservations, but promised to keep an open mind. Time will tell.

With all the discussion of EY’s acquisition of Pangea3 from Thomson Reuters, there’s a interesting book recently published by Thomson Reuters, and written by former EY Global Leader of Legal Services, Trevor Faure. Faure recently talked with TR on their Legal Current podcast to talk about his new book, Smarter Law: transforming busy lawyers into business leaders. There are some potential insights on what it is that EY and others in the Big 4 are looking to do as they move into the US and other legal markets.

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As always, thanks to Jerry David DiCicca for his original music.