In September, Sensei’s Sharon Nelson was featured in High Performance Counsel’s #TopOfMind. High Performance Counsel (HPC) is a place to find authentic leadership on a range of issues, including that of leadership itself in a changing industry, a digital workplace and a global economy.

Excerpt (Sharon’s Quote): Bloomberg BNA carried a story entitled “Big 4 Firms Plot Moves Into Global Niche Legal Markets.” The big four accounting firms are moving into the legal sector with increasingly aggression. PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte LLP, Ernst & Young, and KPMG LLP are placing a laser focus on their British-based offices – and their lawyers – to win multinational clients.

While the U.S. has been glacially slow in adopting alternative business structures (ABS), things are moving rapidly in the UK. PwC now has 2,500 attorneys globally, Deloitte has 2,000, EY has 2,100 and KPMG has 1,700.

All four firms have the same strategy – to exploit their international presence to provide a one-stop shop for global deals. A PcW spokesman said that the firm’s 2,500 lawyers makes PwC the sixth or seventh largest global law firm. The integrated services that the big four can offer are an added draw.

Remember the function of canaries in coal mines? I hear a canary singing now.

See more here.

Recently, the Ride the Lightning post “OUCH! One in Every 101 Emails is a Hacking Attempt” was featured in PinHawk’s Law Technology Daily Digest blog/newsletter. Ride the Lightning is an electronic evidence and cybersecurity blog written by Sensei’s President, Sharon Nelson. Pinhawk helps thousands of professionals keep up–to–date through e–mails and web alerts.

See the entire blog post here.

“Running with the Machines: Artificial Intelligence in the Practice of Law” by Sensei’s Sharon Nelson and John Simek was featured in the September 2018 issue of the Texas Bar Journal. The Texas Bar Journal is a publication of the State Bar of Texas.

Excerpt: Back in 2015, we wrote an article entitled “How Will Watson’s Children Impact the Future of Law Practice?” What a lot has happened in two years! The children of Watson and other Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies continue to spawn at an ever-accelerating rate.

Only recently has genuine real-world usage of AI in law firms begun to flourish. Amid the initial hype, about 5% of what was ballyhooed as AI, in our judgment, was not. Even today, there is an astonishing amount of hype – everyone wants to say they’ve boarded the AI train. As we write, an article from InfoWorld was just published entitled, “Artificially Inflated: It’s Time to call BS on AI.” While great ‘clickbait’, we think the title overstates the case. The peaks and troughs of AI are well documented, and as we are now at a peak, the hype factor gets greater, while the reality (often very good) is lost in the noise of the hype.

As large firms, which certainly need to be at the forefront of innovation, begin to invest considerable sums in AI, the landscape is changing. Large law firms simply cannot afford – for monetary and brand reasons – to be left behind. Clients will begin to see the efficiencies of AI and its extraordinary possibilities wherever AI may be found. AI will be a honeypot to clients seeking those efficiencies and possibilities.

A brief note: An article of this length cannot adequately address all the players in the legal AI market and what they can do. We call out a few names simply because we’ve run into these companies through colleagues or our reading.

Read the entire article on page 586 here.