Daniel W. Linna Jr.

Daniel W. Linna Jr. Blogs

Latest from Daniel W. Linna Jr.

States need to focus on the benefits of AI, not just the risks when making law and policy. That was my primary message when I gave testimony about AI in the corporate and legal space at a hearing on “Emerging Issues in AI” held by the Illinois House Judiciary – Civil Committee and House Cybersecurity, Data Analytics, and IT Committee
Continue Reading Emerging Issues in AI: Testimony to Illinois House Judiciary (Civil) and Cybersecurity Committees

By Nathan Alamillo, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law third-year law student, and Dan Linna.

The Catalog of Law Firm Innovations identifies innovative tools that law firms have implemented to improve their delivery of legal services to their clients. An updated version of the Catalog, which will be released in early 2023, contains more than 825 entries, including seventeen law
Continue Reading Productizing Legal Services: How Law Firms are Implementing Data Breach Tools 

Guest post by Seung Hoon Park, a 2L at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Seung Hoon was a research assistant for Daniel W. Linna Jr. during the summer of 2020. In this guest post, Seung Hoon examines the current regulation of South Korea’s legal tech industry and emphasizes the need for change. Seung Hoon discusses how updating legal-services regulations
Continue Reading Legal Innovation in South Korea: Lawyer Regulation Stifling Progress

By Mona Kalantar and Dan Linna
On April 14, 2020 seven interdisciplinary teams of 36 Northwestern computer science and law students presented demos of the projects they completed in the 2020 CS+Law Innovation Lab. Each student team worked closely with an external project partner and Professors Kris Hammond and Dan Linna. Nearly 250 people attended the online event,
Continue Reading Innovation Lab Demos: Northwestern Law and Computer Science Students Partner with Organizations to build Legal Technology Solutions

In January 2020, I launched Version 1.03 of the Catalog of Law Firm Innovations, part of the Legal Services Innovation Index. Version 1.03 includes an additional 379 law firm innovations, bringing the total number of entries to 706. Northwestern Law students Alexander Crowley, Lauren Diner, Mona Kalantar, and Yoon Hoo Lee helped conduct the research for
Continue Reading 379 Innovations Added to Law Firm Innovation Catalog Version 1.03

How do we evaluate the quality and value of legal services? For example, if we compare two proposed contacts for a commercial agreement, how do we determine which contract is of higher quality? How do we determine the total value produced by the process of drafting, negotiating, and finalizing each contract? Would our answers change if some or all of
Continue Reading Evaluating Legal Services: The Need for a Quality Movement and Standard Measures of Quality and Value – Chapter in Research Handbook on Big Data Law

Mona Kalantar
Mona Kalantar, a 3L at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, has been a research assistant for Daniel W. Linna Jr. at since May 2019. In this guest post, Mona highlights ways for attorneys to become data-driven. Doing so will add to the general body of knowledge and create industry-standards that could lead to the improvement of legal
Continue Reading Guest Post: Getting Around to the Quality Movement in Law

Guest Post By Alex Crowley and Mona Kalantar
Over 120 attendees engaged in a vibrant discussion about the future of law and technology at Northwestern University’s first public meeting of its Law and Technology Initiative on September 5, 2019. Attendees included academics and students in computer science and law and lawyers and allied professionals from law firms, corporate legal departments, legal
Continue Reading Northwestern Law and Technology Initiative: 120 Attendees Discuss Law and Technology Challenges and Opportunities

This is a draft abstract for a talk that I gave to the Northwestern University Computer Science faculty on April 22, 2019.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence presents many opportunities to improve law and society. At the same time, AI presents risks and potential harms. From a Law and Computational Technologies perspective, these opportunities and challenges can be separated
Continue Reading The Future of Law and Computational Technologies: Two Sides of the Same Coin – Northwestern Computer Science Faculty Talk

This last fall, I began updating the Legal Services Innovation Index, focusing first on the Catalog of Law Firm Innovations. I have had the help of three research assistants, Northwestern second-year law students Lauren Diner, Douglas Lavey, and Yoon Hoo Lee.
We’ve added 112 entries to Version 1.02 of the Law Firm Innovation Catalog, for a total of 334
Continue Reading 112 Additions to the Catalog of Law Firm Innovations, v.1.02 – Legal Services Innovation Index

Last year’s launch of the Legal Services Innovation Index attracted much more attention than I anticipated. I knew that some would find the information useful, having been in the position of trying to gather data about innovation both as a lawyer in a law firm and a professor in a law school. But I underestimated the demand.
To date, there
Continue Reading Law Firms: Submit your Innovations for Version 1.02 of the Legal Services Innovation Index Catalog

Algorithms have a substantial impact on everything happening around us. Most everyone would agree that the impact of algorithms, computational technologies, and artificial intelligence on everyday life, institutions, and society will only grow, and rapidly. Yet most law students and lawyers lack the foundational knowledge to generally explain how these technologies work, much less assess them.
One way to address
Continue Reading Training Lawyers to Assess Artificial Intelligence and Computational Technologies

How can we better train law students and lawyers for the future? Indiana University Law Professor Bill Henderson has been working on this problem for a long time. In 2017, Bill joined forces with Bill Mooz, an experienced lawyer and former general counsel who in 2014 established and led the Tech Lawyer Accelerator (TLA) program at the University of
Continue Reading Hire Tomorrow’s Lawyers Today! Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Hire an Institute for the Future of Law Practice Intern!

In July I had the honor of teaching for the inaugural Legal Technology and Operations summer program at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany. The program attracted 33 students from all over the globe: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Estonia, Egypt, Germany, Honduras, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and Ukraine. About 75% of
Continue Reading Hands-On Learning: Bucerius Law School Computational Law and Rules-Driven Automation Course – #LegalTechBucerius

I am thrilled to share that I’ve joined Northwestern Pritzker School of Law as a Visiting Professor of Law for the 2018-19 academic year. I’m very excited to have this opportunity to contribute to Northwestern Law’s many initiatives to continuously improve the value of the education delivered to its students and prepare its students to have an impact in our
Continue Reading Joining Northwestern Law as a Visiting Professor of Law, 2018-19