ABA National Summit: ‘Challenges to Innovation’

In this series of Legal Talk Network interviews, producer Laurence Colletti and CodeX Fellow Monica Bay interview Professor of Law Gillian Hadfield from University of Southern California, Professor Marshall Van Alstyne from Boston University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mark Britton, the founder and CEO of Avvo. Together they talk about about challenges to innovation at the ABA’s National Summit on Innovation in Legal Services.

Tune in as we discuss the merits of 3rd party law firm ownership, suggestions for changing unauthorized practice of law rules, and how lawyers are stuck at floor rate of $200 per hour.

Monica Bay is a Fellow at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and is currently retired from her position as editor-in-chief of ALM’s Law Technology News, where she worked for 30 years.

Gillian Hadfield is the Richard L. and Antoinette Kirtland professor of law and professor of economics at the University of Southern California. She studies the design of legal and dispute resolution systems in advanced and developing market economies, the markets for law, lawyers, and dispute resolution, contract law and theory, economic analysis of law, and regulation of legal markets and legal profession. She is the director of the Southern California Innovation Project and co-director of the Center in Law, Economics, and Organization.

Marshall Van Alstyne is an associate professor at Boston University and a visiting professor at MIT. He is one of the leading experts in network business models. He conducts research on information economics, covering such topics as communications markets, the economics of networks, intellectual property, social effects of technology, and productivity effects of information. As co-developer of the concept of two-sided networks, he has been a major contributor to the theory of network effects, a set of ideas now taught in more than 50 business schools worldwide.

Mark Britton is the founder, CEO, and president of Avvo, an online legal forum and directory. Additionally, he serves on Gonzaga University’s Board of Regents, was Expedia’s first general counsel, and is a frequent commentator on consumer affairs.

Mentioned in This Episode