3 New Technology Positions Finding a Foothold in Modern Legal

Technology's impact on the legal industry is spurring a growing market for new in-house talent — and its not just in e-discovery or cybersecurity. At Legalweek West's “New Roles in IT for Law Firms and Legal Departments,” speakers shed light on several new and less-noticed jobs currently blooming at law firms and legal departments.

Below are three new positions that many may soon see at their offices:

Innovation and Technology Solutions Attorney

As an innovation and technology solutions attorney at Cooley, Brad Newman, the firm's official practice innovation manager, is tasked with directing his firms' technology aspirations and goals.

“I'm constantly evaluating and staying up to speed on emerging technology, obviously with a focus on legal tech, but keeping an eye on technologies outside our bubble to see if they may [be] applicable to legal,” he said.

Through this foresight Newman seeks to position Cooley to better understand and implement new tools ahead of others. “I was fortunate enough to clue into blockchain technology a few year ago now,” he noted. “So it hasn't been much of a shock to my system or anyone at Cooley.”

By his own admission, being an innovation and technology solutions attorney means being fluent in all technology matters— though it doesn't require having a high-level of technical skill. “Having a strong familiarity with the concepts of core technologies is important,” Newman said. “I don't think you need to learn how to code a contract, but understanding code languages at a fundamental level is key.

Innovation and technology solutions attorneys also need “the ability to separate the hype from reality,” he added. “I spend 20 percent of my time now fielding inquiries from AI,” telling interested colleagues, “'Yes it's important— no it's not really there yet.' I almost have a template email for that.”

Yet having technology experience and acumen is only a part of the necessary prerequisites. Newman advised that those applying for such a position would also need “a J.D. with at least two years of law firm practice experience.”

The reason, he explained, is that innovation and technology solutions attorneys need to fundamentally understand how and where technology can fit into attorney's work and expectations. “You have to do more than just empathize or understand that lawyers are busy.  There is a big benefit to understanding what they're busy with, not just on a general level but really putting yourself in their shoes and the best way to do that is having lived in those shoes.”

Data Scientist

For Julian Tsisin, Google's legal technology and systems manager, data scientists are a pivotal part of any modern law firm or legal department. The position is a “hugely popular job today” in the U.S. economy, he said, because of data scientist's ability to interpret and understand data more deeply than analysts and similar information sciences professionals.  

“Data analysts live in the structured world; so all of us from law firms and companies we all live in SQL [ Structured Query Language] and tables,” working with data that is classified and tagged, he explained. But “data scientists are not constrained by structure; they go out and try to figure out what's there in the unstructured world of data.”

Their skill is most helpful within legal, where attorneys regularly intake all types of unstructured data from documents to e-discovery data. But figuring out how to make sense and gain insights from that unorganized data, however, is no easy or exciting task.

“Data scientist's job sounds very cool, but 80 percent of what data scientists do is [called] wrangling data, [which is] looking at how to get data from different sources, how to clean that data, how to get it into formal shape so you can run analysis on it,” Tsisin said.

To be sure, data scientists can do a whole lot more.  Many, who have broad experience in some of the most technical and complex aspects of information sciences, are also reguarly tasked with acting as their law firm or business' oracle.

“Data analysts today, all of us run historical reports and historical analytics looking back and trying to figure out why [an event's] happening or how it happened,” Tsisin said. On the other hand, “What data scientists try to do is predict the future,” he added. “They look at structured and unstructured and predict behavior going forward.”