Pros & Cons: Data Privacy’s Role in Advancing Legal Tech

Episode Notes

Transcript

Law Technology Now

Pros and Cons Data Privacy’s Role in Advancing Legal Tech

09/09/2020

 

[Music]

 

Dan Rodriguez: Hello and welcome to another edition of Law Technology Now. My name is Dan Rodriguez and I’ll be the host for today’s show.

 

Before we get into our show today and I introduce our special guest, I want to take a minute to thank our sponsors, Acumass. Thanks to our sponsor, Acumass, patent and trademark renewal payments made easy. Find out how acumass.com can take the stress out of annuities and save you money on European patent validations today. Thanks as well to our sponsor, Logikcull, instant discovery software for modern legal teams. Logikcull offers perfectly predictable pricing at just 250 dollars per matter, per month. Create your free account anytime at logikcull.com/ltn. That’s logikcull.com/ltn.

 

So, I am delighted to be joined today by my friend, Markus Hartung, who joins us from across the pond (00:01:01). He’s in Germany. He is a prominent lawyer and consultant for law firms. He has been a partner at a leading German law firm and at a global firm, and has years of experience as a lawyer in the legal profession. He’s a published author. The number of publications sum with quite arresting titles. One that caught my eye was, “Managing partners is like herding cats – or is it?” and is the co-author of a leading book that came out in 2018, “Legal Tech: A Practitioner’s Guide.”

 

He is the founder of the Bucerius Leadership Programme, Bucerius Law School in Germany, the former director of the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession, and having stepped down from that role is now a senior fellow, and we’ll have the opportunity to talk about the wonderful Bucerius experiment in a little bit but first, let me formally welcome Markus to our show.

 

Markus Hartung: Hey. Thank you, Dan. Thanks for having me.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Well, it’s my pleasure. So, I want to take advantage as it were of expertise in a variety of areas and certainly get a European perspective, if I can call it that and generalize. Before I do that, I want to sort of pull the lens out quite a bit and ask you about legal technology, one are of your expertise, and if I can take a little bit of an arbitrary timeline, that timeline being roughly the last two decades or 25 years, I want I ask you to reflect a bit on what has changed in the space of legal technology. I’ll let you define what you mean by legal tech and sort of how things have changed in the couple of decades, give or take, that you’ve been able to observe with development and the emergence of legal technology.

 

Markus Hartung: That’s an interesting question. Actually, because if you look at a time span of 20 years, so many things have happened in law firms. I mean, that was before the financial crisis and following the financial crisis, and I think from 2008, 2009 on things like legal technology, became part of the real life of law firms and legal service providers for companies. Before 2009 or 2008, of course legal tech was an issue, but only for academics or specialists. It didn’t have any visible market share and it didn’t catch any attention. This is of course different in the United States and in all of Europe. In Europe, I think it all started in 2013 or so, and then these startups streaming of the hockey sticks or at the moment, we are sort of picking up the hockey stick with some tools which may have existed years ago, but the amount of data and the readiness and cloud computing software, which made this technology available all over the place, has all contributed to a certain prominence of that.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Can I just jump in, Markus, and ask what’s magical about 2013? Because I’m struck by that. You’re quite certain about the timeline of when you focus on your–

 

Markus Hartung: When we founded the Center on the Legal Profession, we pretty early on, in 2011, we started to work on innovation in law firms. That was a very hot topic. All the law firms on their home pages claimed themselves and described themselves as being innovative and when we looked at these law firms, we had no idea what they really were talking about, and then we did some research and interviews, and then we realized or we came close to technology, and we realized that innovation on the technology angle is not taking part in law firms. It’s taking part out of law firms, and I think for us in the center, we realized, in Europe, that technology can be a serious game changer.

 

(00:05:02)

 

That was about 2013. And then, 2014, we had one of our yearly conferences where we covered this issue, and people were like seeing a new blockbuster in the movies, and looked at it and realized, “Oh, my god. There is really something happening.” Things which had been described by Richard Susskind years ago, but people had looked at it as a sort of theoretical play, not really important for our daily practice, maybe for some specialist law firms or some legal tech nerds but not in real life, and I–

 

Dan Rodriguez: Then can I just ask a question that’s specific to Europe in that regard, if you don’t mind me interrupting, which is, was the skepticism – I’m asking you to speak generally here. Among European law firms, within European law firms, skepticism about the role of technology in the law firms generally, or was it something skepticism about the impact of technology in European law firms? Do you see where I’m hitting that? They think, “Well, U.S., that’s distinct. That’s different. That’s not what we encounter here.”

 

Markus Hartung: Yeah. In Europe, you have to distinguish between the U.K., which is normally leagues away, and the European continent, and the continent may be, due to the legal system, so not common law jurisdictions, these companies very often look at cases as always being individual cases. There are no standards, there are no patterns, there are no standardized ways of practicing, which is one of the preconditions before you can think about technology. Without standardization, technology doesn’t make any sense.

 

Dan Rodriguez: It’s what Susskind memorably describe as the move from bespoke legal services, right, to more commodified and standardized legal services.

 

Markus Hartung: Yeah. And I mean, it was pretty unclear, and still is today. So, what the role of technology is and what the threat of technology can be, I mean you will have heard that many people if they are confronted with the term AI, they would attribute all the best and the worse they could think of to AI so that AI could do everything, and people completely overestimate the impact of AI software today. I mean, if you still look at all the flaws of what AI software is doing today, be it in the judicial system, be it in face recognition, we are nowhere near that what we think AI could deliver. That might be different in about five to six years, but we look at software and AI in a completely irrational manner.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Do you have the headlines in German – I don’t read or speak German. Do you have the headlines in the German press that sort of versions of what we see in the American press, “Will robots replace lawyers,” or “Robots are going to replace lawyers.”

 

Markus Hartung: Yes. Yeah. We have it in one of the major German newspapers, and they were quoting from an English survey, from the University of Oxford, and this study, that was in 20– may have been in the ‘12 or ‘13. They looked at which jobs could be replaced by technology, and now comes a language thing. The word or the term “job” was translated in German to profession, and whereas the study had looked at jobs by means of tasks which could be replaced by technology, the German translation of the study was talking about software replacing professions and not just individual tasks, and of course that caused a certain stir and this newspaper had a homepage where you could enter your profession, and then you got a percentage how likely would it be that your professions, be it a judge or a lawyer, would be replaced by software, and of course that is not basis to talk about these things. I mean this is serious.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Right.

 

Markus Hartung: Technology is serious. It has serious impact in how we communicate, how we make money, how we interact, how we sell our goods and services, and we look at it like a Hollywood movie, and when we look at the AI, we are not rational.

 

Dan Rodriguez: When you say you look at it like a Hollywood movie there, of course there have been Hollywood movies precisely on those themes and pictures, right, of robots taking over society, and all of that.

 

Markus Hartung: Yes, of course. Yeah, we think there is Arnold Schwarzenegger coming around the corner, wearing a black robe and pretending he is a lawyer, but that is sort of childish of looking at how the world changes and what digitalization would mean to us and to our profession, and that’s a mixture of being anxious and scared and not knowing exactly what is going to happen, and hoping it goes away.

 

(00:10:00)

 

And today, I think in the majority of lawyers in Europe, people have realized how important technology is, but to one extent, technology can really replace that what lawyers do, and to one extent, that what lawyers do today are things which lawyers should do today, or whether or whether other people should do there then lawyers should focus and concentrate on that, what they’re really good at. That is very much up in the air and subject to discussions. It’s interesting, today I sat together with a colleague and we are thinking about a new book project, and it would be called Legal Tech Success Stories, and we have to do some research but we wouldn’t be surprised that the number of success stories of real changes, severe changes in law firms or in-house legal companies, is not that great. Maybe we are surprised and find more good and interesting examples, but I think the legal profession is still more traditional than innovative.

 

Dan Rodriguez: When I had the opportunity back when we could all travel, a year ago last summer and visited the U.K. and London and visited with the number of law firms, I was struck by the emergence of these incubators, all right, inside of law firms, a number of global firms principally, although with offices of course in London, and developed these, which sometimes we would call in the U.S. skunk works.  I don’t know if there’s any analogy in the German language for that, but just think about them as you know about the kind of odds within these firms that were really working on innovative technology and all of that. Is that development more widespread, including kind of on issues on the continent? And do they have any success? I should mention that our mutual friend, Dan Katz, once described this as innovation by press release with respect to a number of these firms.

 

Markus Hartung: I’m afraid that Dan is right. I mean, there are some of the big English firms. One has to say that this is more something of the English firms, like Allen & Overy, Freshfields, with their centers in London, and their very strong offices in Germany. The German offices, if they want or not, they sort of have to comply with the innovative power of the center, and that’s the reason why the English terms and all the firms from the Magic Circle have these incubators, but it all started with a truly international firm, and there was 10 (00:12:39). They sort of paved the way, and then all the English firms followed suit and today, another very innovative international firm would be Baker McKenzie, who do a lot with technology, but it’s very often not to miss a major development.

 

It’s a bit like when the big Magic Circle firms went into startups, when that combo came up, and all these startups of course couldn’t pay the ridiculous bills of billing titles of these were, and then all the English firms would take shares of these companies, hoping that one of these would turn out to be a unicorn.  I think it never happened but still, with incubators, it’s a bit the same. You leave people playing around and you send your associates to be part of that, hoping that they’ll form something from the table which you could use, but it’s not part of a strategic – say a strategic direction of plan to say we are changing our products and our way of delivering services to clients and for that purpose, we have this group of people working on software and processes and workflows.  It’s more of, “Let’s see what gets out of it,” and it’s not very expensive, so you have your room anyway, and your empty spaces, you give it to these people, and that’s it.

 

Dan Rodriguez: If you want to be a little cynical about it too, it’s a playground, as it were for young associates who might want to pursue actual innovation.

 

Markus Hartung: Actually. It looks like a playground.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Right.

 

Markus Hartung: It looks like a playground. If you go to a very prominent U.S. firm in their Frankfurt offices, they have a lounge, what looks like where the – so as if Google and Facebook and Apple would have their German company all put together, and it looks just like people think the Silicon Valley looks like, like lounges like loud.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Ping pong tables.

 

Markus Hartung: Ping pong tables. And it’s a bit of a part of the future, but that is more of a – that’s a pilot thing. It’s not standard. It’s not, so if you would ask lawyers how do you want to work, most of them would say, “I need my individual room.”

 

(00:15:04)

 

“I need my quiet atmosphere to work,” and actually, quietly and looking at the corner room and trying how to move closer to the corner room.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Yeah. So, they share the corner office, the ubiquitous corner office.

 

Markus Hartung: The corner office, yes. It’s an important part in staging your career.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Yeah. So, this is fast and I want to return to this and also talk a bit about Bucerius.

 

[Music]

 

But let’s take a break.

 

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Dan Rodriguez: Welcome back. I’m talking to Markus Hartung, a distinguished lawyer and legal consultant, about innovation and change in law and law firms. I want to focus back on Europe. We’ve been talking about Europe. Markus, I want to ask you about something I observed. Again, this is several months ago and certainly hit the newspapers both in Europe and the United States. This was a decision out of France, again about little over a year ago, in which France – I may get the facts a little off but I think it was the French Constitutional Court had issued a ruling, very, very significant or maybe it was through legislation but basically, to put the hammer down on the use of data analytics and AI to predict decisions of judges. You recall that development in France. So, it caused a bit of a firestorm, as to what’s going on and the French rationale, which you could explain probably better than I did, is that this was looking under the robes as it were of judges in a way that was quite deleterious and problematic, and I wonder now a year or so later how advanced that move has been. Has there been more developments in that regard outside of France and Germany, in other countries, or was that sort of something that was more unique to the French legal system?

 

Markus Hartung: There was something of the French legal system and it was not a verdict handed down by the Constitutional court. It was a new law which had a ban on using AI to analyze verdicts if the names of the judges were visible and the names of the judges would also be subject to this analysis via AI software, and that was to protect the judges. Now, to start with – you have just to realize that the Europeans and data protection, that is an armful. We are so crazy about protecting our data and not using our data. I mean, we are all at Facebook and social media and spread our data around but when it comes to business, we are very strict with regard to data protection, and the protection of individual rights. So, it seems to be in the United States a good and common standard to have transparency in court files and, say, patent office files, so you can do research and use predictive analytics software. In Germany, or in other European countries, other than France, you wouldn’t even have access to all these files and verdicts. France is different and that was the reason why they sort of had to build up a hurdle for those who wanted to use AI software.

 

For us, it shows that we still have a very irrational way of dealing with information and what we could get out of data. So, we don’t leverage from all the richness and wisdom which is in data and which we could leverage with using software, using artificial intelligence, making decisions more predictable which we all would hope for, and not say if you go to court it’s like selling on high C. You’d never know what comes out, but then again we lean back and say, “No. We don’t want to use software.” We sort of limit ourselves to the human capabilities of the brain to understand and systematize and analyze software, only with human power.

 

(00:20:07)

 

There is actually a discussion in Germany whether court rulings should be made accessible to the public, and there is a project of the EU commission pushing European member states to publish their verdicts in a machine-readable format. Of course, every member state could say, “Oh, yes. Great idea. We will do it,” and in the end, it will take many, many years before we really have access to machine-readable verdicts and decisions of the European member states, but this French example is a perfect example of how we Europeans deal with data and why we look at the United States and China, and sort of shrugging, say, “Well, they don’t have any data protection.” So, they may make progress with artificial intelligence software, but we have data protection.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Maybe this is bizarre, this question coming from me, but I focus on your use of the term “irrational” and I’m tempted to ask, but maybe Europe is ahead of the rest of the world because of its value in privacy, in a way that whether you’re talking about China, United States, Russia, or whatever, seemed to put much less of an emphasis on that. So, maybe the Europeans are on to something with the GDPR and those kinds of things.

 

Markus Hartung: I agree. So, if you got the impression that I’m against data protection, then I wouldn’t have made my point correctly. I’m not saying that I would love to live in a state where the government knows everything about me and has access to my privacy – actually, there is no privacy. I don’t want that. What I’m saying in Europe is that by just being so scared when it comes to Artificial Intelligence and the power which is in this software if you combine it with big data and start to search for patterns in these things, we are so scared that we only very slowly start the process of saying, “How can we responsibly make use of artificial intelligence software.”

 

In the judiciary for example, if you talk today about AI in the judiciary, you will get all the typical traditional reactions by, “No, we can’t do that.” The judiciary has to be – verdicts have to be done by people. That is part of the Constitution.

 

Dan Rodriguez: This is coming from judges, those in the judiciary, or society more generally?

 

Markus Hartung: No, no, no. This is coming from judges, and from academics because it’s written in the Constitution that a judiciary is trusted to people, so to the judges, and not to any software. Today, so accepting what software can do and how software could support judges for, say, augmenting for that what they do, of course this has some problems as long as you don’t know how a software comes to a certain result. So, that’s the point of biased algorithm and all these things, but I would be very happy if we would have achieved in Europe the stage of discussing that on that level and find ways how to sort of ring-fence the dangers which are in an uncontrolled use of AI, but at the moment, we are still in the infant stage of saying, “Oh, my god. Look at the United States, what they do with their Compass software, where they jail all the people because they are just Black and living in the wrong street, because just the software decided that they should go to jail, and the others not. Let’s not get close to it.”

 

Dan Rodriguez: Well, this is an observation that’s possible you and I have even had this discussion but one of the things that struck me about the quite useful, important conversation about the biased algorithms and the difficulties, the ProPublica report that you referenced that talks about racial discrimination. The baseline that we compare problems of bias in algorithms to is human decision-making, which we know are filled with biases. Right? And prejudice, right? And it certainly as a black box quality to characteristics though. It’s always compared to what.

 

Markus Hartung: Yeah. And that is, if we would have a tradition that only a certain completely logical and rational procedure would come to a certain judicial decision and now we would propose a reform saying, “Look, we trust it to one single person,” we give our fate in the hands of one individual and he will come down with a fair and just decision. People would say, “You must be mad. How can you do this?” You know that people are so different, whether it’s Monday or Friday. You can’t do that, but we feel more comfortable from a tradition, and I think it’s part of our DNA.

 

(00:25:05)

 

We can accept flaws and mistakes done by people. Done by software, it is a different thing. We have no history and we have no experience in dealing with that.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Right.

 

Markus Hartung: We know only movies where software like 2001 by Stanley Kubrick, and we have this software saying, “This conversation doesn’t have any further purpose.” So, “Goodbye,” and then the human being is in front of the computer and there was no way through. I think that is deeply in our soul if we never want to see it like this, and that is sort of over our discussion on the use of software and that is very much in this example of the French decision.

 

Dan Rodriguez: As I listen to you, Markus, I detect a sense of – I wouldn’t call it necessarily optimism, although there is some optimism in what you say, but almost inevitability, which is to say a confidence that whether you’re talking about big law firms, global law firms, or the judiciary traditional to hold out in this regard, that it’s inevitable that there’ll be a penetration of technology, data analytics, and big data, and the question is how and the question is when, but it’s going to happen. Is that a fair characterization of your position?

 

Markus Hartung: Yeah. It’s not just a question of young and old but I think many young lawyers are more open to technology and what technology can do, and I figured it’s inevitable and we have to do everything to do that, what we humans can do, by looking rationally and intelligent at a certain set of facts and find the right way to deal with these issues, and not to shy away and say, “No, it’s too dangerous”. “We can’t invent cars because they are too dangerous. We can’t invent rockets because they are too dangerous. We can’t make use of software because that’s too dangerous.” That is sort of neglecting reality and what technological development will do, and we can’t just turn away and turn our backs to that and hope that it will pass on. It won’t happen.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Do you think looking over the last ten-ish years, you mentioned the financial crisis or a little ten years past that, and 2013 you also mentioned. Have you seen more collaboration across countries and opinion leaders in different systems, Europe, and beyond? Or less collaboration? What’s the direction look like in terms of the kinds of synergistic initiatives that you and I would agree are necessary to really advance this movement worldwide?

 

Markus Hartung: You mean the technological development in the legal profession?

 

Dan Rodriguez: Right, and its application. So, are we seeing more, European Union as more mature than it was a dozen years ago? And we’re not going talk about foreign policy here so that would be a whole other podcast about U.S. policy.

 

Markus Hartung: Yeah.

 

Dan Rodriguez: I’m asking from the vantage point of – I mean, China of course has emerged as an enormous actor.

 

Markus Hartung: Yeah.

 

Dan Rodriguez: An optimism that we’ll see more collaboration?

 

Markus Hartung: From non-governmental organizations, I see that certain universities start to exchange information programs, people, with regard to the digitalization of the legal profession and how the training and education of students has to change, on a very small scale, but look at Chicago for example. Chicago is highly innovative with that, what they are doing with universities all over the world, including Bucerius for example. On the level of governmental collaboration, I see the European Union as a very good thing because they are applying pressure to major traditional member states, and that is a good thing. What I’m missing is a collaboration on an international or global level, say with the United States, Europe, and China, and Russia as well, that doesn’t happen, which is a pity. I mean, when people get together in G20 or G8, it is about economic things but I don’t remember any summits of all the important states talking about technology and how technology could turn the societies for the better. Maybe I missed something but I don’t recall any of the recent summits.

 

Dan Rodriguez: That’s been my impression as well. Certainly, those of us who are in the ivory tower of academia as it were, are aware of international conferences and some more globally-facing research, but we’re only academics.

 

(00:30:12)

 

Right? And the penetration of that into policies is a different matter. Before we end, I do want to take us back to this invention, if I can call it that way, creation of yours, and that is Bucerius and the program, Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession. So, take us through sort of what was the thinking behind that and now that you are looking back on it, what a decade in, and how that’s going.

 

Markus Hartung: Bucerius is a law school and a law school does what normal law schools do. They train and educate law students, but Bucerius always, it’s the only privately-funded law school in Germany. All other law schools are publicly-funded at the universities, and Bucerius always was aware that they were training and educating people for a time which lies seven or eight years ahead. So, you have to know now what people may need in about five to seven, to six years, but there was no intelligence on legal markets and the development of legal markets, and that was the time Bucerius had introduced a sort of leadership program, a bit of a copycat of the Harvard Business School Leadership Program, and it turned out to be very successful, and then the decision was taken to found this center to have a center which does not just facilitate training sessions, but generates knowledge and does research in order to be the first point to go to for, say, governments, law firms, in-house legal teams, if they want to know something about the development of legal markets and to better design the legal curricular to provide better legal training for the students. So, that was the idea why to have this center, which was not a legal chair. We didn’t teach law. We only dealt with economics. Why Bucerius thought that this center has to be part of the law school, and it’s now – it was founded in 2010 and today it’s, without any saying, integral part of Bucerius’ law school, and everyone looks at Bucerius and says, “Yes, that’s the normal combination which only can help them at a private law school.  It would never help me in a university.”

 

Dan Rodriguez: Please don’t take this the wrong way when I make an observation about German higher education, which is above my pay grade, but it wouldn’t have been expected to emerge from a university or a law school on the continent, right? Just the reasons you say, not a tradition of private education, not known for interdisciplinary work and, actually, that’s not fair, not known for the kind of interdisciplinary work, next academia with the profession but, nonetheless, it happened there.

 

Markus Hartung: Yeah. But you know, I mean, you really have to – you need an institution which has an open mind and then you need individuals who are just crazy and have an idea, and really want to bring it to life. So, it’s not the institution, which is as such so innovative that they would have founded such a center, but it was a great platform and we were surrounded by people with a very open mindset, who didn’t really understand what we were doing there, but the deal of Bucerius at that time, that was higher (00:33:45), a highly innovative guy.  He said, “Let them do.” It was a bit of a playground for us and then professors realized what we were doing and how their students were interested in that, what we were doing and researching, and that was for them the time to see, “Oh, that may be an important part,” and we didn’t – we were not part of their funding. We have always been a self-financing center, so the professors didn’t have to compete with us on any fundings, and that made them probably also welcome.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Now, I know ten years in that it has a very strongly global presence and it’s outward-facing in important ways in terms of the faculty you teach in the program, and all of that. Was that the vision from the very beginning, that is the, let’s say trans-German in its focus?

 

Markus Hartung: That was part of the founding idea of the Bucerius law school, not just to be another law school teaching German law. It was a mandatory part for the students that they have to go abroad, that Bucerius Law School had a network of international universities, that people learned international law, and when the German students are going abroad, international students come on the campus in Bucerius and learn German and European, and international law.

 

(00:35:11)

 

So, it was always looked at being part of a more and more growing global community of people, and Bucerius wanted to be a part of that. They wanted to be in the same league, like the big international names, realizing of course that if you compete about sponsors and brand, and where come the important professors from, you can’t just compete with Munich and Heidelberg, which are very fine universities. You have to start to compete with Chicago, with Harvard, with Stanford. That’s the league you want to be in.

 

Dan Rodriguez: All right. All right, let me ask you one question before I let you go, let us both go, and that is circle out all the way back to what I asked at the beginning about what we’ve seen in the last 20 to 25 years, and at a number of junctures, you’ve pointed out the important role of what I would call the regulatory ecosystem, all right, how accepting or obstacle-creating is the regulatory infrastructure in various countries to these kinds of innovations, and again, I’d ask you to take the lens out a little bit and say from a European perspective in particular, how confident are you that regulatory authorities, especially on the continent, are going to allow, permit, or even facilitate the kinds of developments and emerging developments and use of new technologies, and the like, in order to advance innovation?

 

Markus Hartung: That is hard to say. I mean, what I can say is it is not a very rapid process. Now that the Brittons will leave the EU, one of the major drivers of innovation is no longer part of the European member states. Maybe a sigh of relief for all the continental bars and regional bars, but there are different levels of regulation in the European member states. Some of the member states are more liberal when it comes to unauthorized practice of law, for example. So, Germany is very strict, can be compared with many states in the United States. Other German countries like these, Scandinavian countries, are more liberal, and the train is not going towards more regulation. The train is going to allow more for more liberal forms, more structural reforms, more looking at what is happening in the United States with these reforms in Utah and in Arizona. Of course, this resonates and the German Ministry of Justice is with interest looking what is happening there.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Interesting.

 

Markus Hartung: But in the end, it will be one of the national constitutional courts or the European Court of Justice handing down a verdict that a certain piece of regulation is no longer in line with European law. So, it’s by tradition, it’s the judiciary which drives the liberalization of a legal profession.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Also self-regulation.

 

Markus Hartung: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and that applies to lawyers as well.

 

Dan Rodriguez: That’s great. Well, that’s a great note to end it. I also am impressed. I think we got some news from this podcast as well. Your comment in passing that some German authorities are interested in what’s going on in Utah and Arizona, it will be of great interest to folks in Utah and Arizona in particular, but we had a wonderful and far-reaching discussion. We could talk on and on, but I want to take the opportunity to thank our sponsors certainly, and Legal Talk Network for sponsoring this program, and especially my distinguished guest, Markus Hartung. Thank you very much for joining in this wonderful discussion and I am pleased that we’ve had this show.

 

If listeners have questions or wish to follow up with you, how can they reach you Markus?

 

Markus Hartung: You can reach me via email of course and just visit my homepage. It’s markushartung.com, Markus Hartung in one word, and you’ll find all the information you want to have on that homepage. It’s in German and English. Feel free to visit me and you’ll find my mobile number and my email address. Get in contact with me if there are any questions you might have on this as we have talked about.

 

Dan Rodriguez: Great. Well, I encourage you to do so. Lastly, I want to thank our listeners for tuning in. if you like what you heard, please rate and review us in Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. I’m Dan Rodriguez, signing off for Law Technology Now. Until next time. Thank you for listening.

 

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The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders, and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer.

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