Innovator, Chris Draper, looks at legal issues from a technology perspective

Welcome to Legal Tech Matters, a Litera podcast dedicated to creating conversations about trends, technology, and innovation for modern law firms and companies big and small.

Adriana

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Legal Tech Matters by Litera. I'm Adriana Linares, one of the hosts of the podcast, and I'm pretty excited to be talking to one of my stalking victims, if I could call you that, Chris, on Clubhouse. I found you through there and started—I think I followed you on Twitter, started following you on Clubhouse, and was really fascinated by the things that you were saying, writing about, and doing insofar as legal tech. So, I want you to tell us a little bit about yourself, and we can start with the fact that neither one of us is a lawyer yet is somehow deeply embedded in the legal profession.

Chris

Yeah. And I come at this from a technologist's perspective. So, where my entry into legal tech began was trying to solve the problem of collective bargaining better. So, what we were seeing—the example for us was—I'm in Des Moines, Iowa. In Iowa, we blow basically $30 million a year negotiating teachers' contracts, which you're talking about a teacher and a half per school in every district we have. And as we looked at it, what we found was this isn't an issue of people not knowing the right numbers or not knowing where costs were. It was really just an issue that everyone's just losing paper. Individuals who are sitting on Excel sheets to track agreements within sections that are sent back and forth between 30 different people needing negotiation. As we looked at this, what we saw was the concept of a document in a centralized, highly collaborative environment where you don't necessarily trust all the other parties.

We really had challenges. When you look at Word documents, those are an archiving function; that isn't a collaboration function. You look at email; that's not a collaboration function. And so these open us up to the types of operational challenges and risks that make a collective bargaining situation, or as we start to break it out and get into it, looking at the grievance process, the mediation process. So, where we really lived with respect to Trokt is in that area of the highly legally sensitive, where the communication security—meaning you need the confidentiality, but you need to be communicating effectively and frequently—where those were both very, very important and things were changing significantly. We're making wording and language changes that people have to truly understand, that we need to agree to in small chunks. And from those small chunks that we agreed to, we get to a whole. That was the process of negotiation that we saw—that collective bargaining process that we saw. And so, we start building tools for everything from issue identification through collaborative resolution to data permanence. So, saying, OK, once this document is done, how can I prove this thing remains permanent all the way through?

So, that's where we spent the majority of our time, and the vast majority of my work in the space has been coming at it from, hey, this is what the tech actually can do. This is when we look at your Word documents going back and forth in the email. It's very hard to see through 50,000 shades of fuchsia. It's very easy to send to the wrong place. How do we reverse that model? And how do we say, let's give ourselves better visibility with less access to data release? And now how do we build systems and allow these organizations to actually focus on what is the process we want? And what's a tech-enabled process within this legally sensitive space? That's the majority of where we've spent our time and focused.

Adriana

This is with the company called Trokt that you are with and we're with. And I don't think I told everybody your full name. It's Chris Draper.

Chris

My social media handle is @TheOtherDraper. I get it in every region. They're always like, "Are you that?" "No, no, no. I'm just the other one."

Adriana

Well, I'm pretty sure you're going to be the smartest Draper any of us will ever have heard from or spoken to, because what you've got going on in that head of yours is unbelievable. You have a Ph.D. in engineering. You've written a book on—hold on, I was just looking at... tell me about the book you wrote because I couldn't even understand what it said in the Amazon description.

Chris

I'm on Amazon's "30 under 30 list," which has individuals with books that have less than 30 purchases. You know, we've spent some good time on the legal tech side. I was fortunate just recently to be the author of chapter seven in ODR Theory and Practice, which is really the seminal work on how we do dispute resolution online. And really, chapter seven was born out of this need, that—which ironically, we started writing this before the pandemic—but when everyone got thrown online the state-of-the-art was, OK, who can hit the right Zoom buttons? And when you're really looking at what the problem is, we don't have within the legal community a whole lot of thought on the systems view of these. We don't have a whole lot of thought on what is security, and security is a constant reduction—constant iterative reduction of access to negative consequences. I mean, that's what security should be. It's every day I'm trying to make sure how do I remove access to negative consequences?

But we're still stuck in, oh, well, it's encrypted email to fix this. But it's your whole operation. And it isn't just tech. Tech on its own isn't the point, right? What is that process we need to do? How do we actually integrate our paper with our computer, with our email? Some of our biggest breaches in the negotiation space have been pieces of paper that were taken from the room and shared. It wasn't from a computer.

Adriana

It's amazing, right? And you and I were having a conversation offline just about wet signatures and the way I like to go and stalk an attorney and documents in a court system and go get their wet signature that they think is so secure. Legal is constantly struggling with developing secure processes, workflows, client communications. Well, let me say that again. Secure client communications is one of my absolute biggest soapboxes that I get on when I'm talking to lawyers. And I just feel like, aside from a client portal where there's one way in and one way out, I don't know that we have a lot of solutions that we can offer to the legal community at large because you have so many solo firms and then you've got mid-sized firms. And then, of course, you've got what I call the empires, where there's a team of people managing systems and sometimes one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing. So, it's definitely something that I think we need to keep working on in legal. But let me go back to your dispute resolution because, of course, that's always a topic that fascinates everyone. How do you possibly do that online? I feel like we've been talking about ODR for years, but I've never seen a big giant push and a huge movement. I always feel that there are these pockets of communities that are talking about it. Of course, there are the likes of Colin Rule, who's been around for years trying to get everybody to move and understand. And so, from your perspective in dealing with that, how are we doing in the world of efficient and secure dispute resolution in a modern way?

Chris

I know the timing on this of when this goes out; it won't be today. But this actually, ironically, is the week that we're talking right now—we're talking during Cyberweek out of the National Center for Technology & Dispute Resolution.

Adriana

Oh, good timing.

Chris

Colin and Ethan Katsh, Leah Wing, Dan Rainey—a lot of your individuals who have been attributed with the birth of this understanding of ODR, of what it actually could mean as it really drove out of the e-commerce space, right—a lot of these discussions—and where's that actually going? So, I mean, within NCTDR, which I was fortunate enough to be brought in as a fellow with the likes of Colin, Ethan, Dan, and Susskind—and I'm sorry I will miss a ton of people, so I'll stop naming so I don't offend others—but I mean, it's been exciting and exhilarating to be in this group where there is always this constant question of what even is ODR? That right now is a big question with the bar association within the tech committee, which I'm the co-chair of with Amy.

So, for the last few years, there's been an ODR task force to define what are the standards that we should be working towards. Between the tech community where I'm co-chairing with Amy Schmitz to NCTDR's engagement with Pew, one of the big questions is where are those bounds of ODR? Do we define it based on technology? Do we define it based on a process? Do we define it on that merging the two? There are still a range of different theories on what ODR should be.

A lot of court systems say, OK, hey, we can do a parking ticket. And so that's ODR. I don't know. I guess very liberally, probably, right? We're looking at saying, OK, we look at the original e-commerce platforms associated with ODR early on. Those are filtering-based systems, right? What I mean by that is, you know what a distinct event is. Something happened, right? You have just certain buckets you can go into, right? So, something happened like, I got the wrong package from eBay. There are only four outcomes for that. And the trick of an ODR tool in that regard is to figure out what bucket do you fit in most accurately and quickly. We have this concept of efficiency with justice in that environment being I arrived at a final outcome that was close enough a bucket for me.

But is that really actually appropriate when we look at other processes? I've broken these down in ODR Theory and Practice and in other presentations. We have two types of ODR. We have filtering, which is what we typically know. Hey, I jump on, I answer some questions, and they say here's your outcome.

Adriana

Here are the robots at work telling you your outcome.

Or you have facilitating. If you want the outcome to be, I'm going to get paid in 30 cases of toilet paper, I don't care as long as we securely and fairly arrive at an outcome that we all arrive at—eyes wide open—and understand it. That's a very, very different process where things like AI fit in and where things like automation fit in.

Right now, we're still struggling. If we don't really fully know what exactly the bounds of ODR are, the National Center for Technology & Dispute Resolution's approach, which is one that I fully endorse and adopt, is very broad, saying that any technology that's supporting a dispute resolution function or a dispute resolution process is considered ODR. That's an ODR technology. So, Zoom supporting a mediation? Sure, that's an ODR tool. Zoom in a classroom is not an ODR tool.

If we start looking at it from that perspective, the next big question is, OK, how do we define what level we're at? And actually this week, Leah Wing and I helped put together—and Leah really drove it, and I was just providing support in some ways—on looking at that same approach to automation as helping define that gradient of ODR. So, we have ODR, which is very broad. And then the thing that we believe we should be pushing towards, which is an understanding of what is the level of automation, what level of controllability, what level of human input is required in that system? And so that paper, I believe will be out by the time this is out from the NCTDR, which is ODR.info, which is where that will be found, is trying to start looking at these problems of what level of automation is in the system because the big core meat of all ODR is next going to be where do we automate? What do we automate with? And what are we automating towards? You have two big conflicts right now, which is number one, are we looking when we start applying tools like AI? Is the point of AI to ensure that we have consistency in outcome or consistency in process? If we have consistency in outcome, which is our filtering systems, and our process is unjust, we will just have an acceleration towards injustice. That's a major problem.

Adriana

That is a major problem.

Chris

So, who should be affected by these first? We have this idea of what's a low-value case. That's our second major issue. It's number one, are we optimizing process or outcome? And the next is, who do we test with? And that's really cynically what we're saying is who actually has to jump in? Who's the guinea pig first?

And we always have had this concept of a low-value case. But a parking ticket, if you fill it out wrong in some jurisdictions, they can deport you. And if you're looking at a situation of I had a broken finger a few years ago and was like $500 to repair that. That's someone's rent payment. That's low value when you look at AAA's registration fee. I think it's like $75k. And below that, we're going to put you at a certain level, right?

Five hundred bucks for most people who will be most impacted by these systems that say efficient process is justice: is that ethical? I think that's a real question that we are struggling with in the industry right now in that whole space. And if it's not that, where do you draw that line?

Adriana

And you spend a lot of time talking about and working toward access to justice. So, I'm assuming all of this ties into these things that you're passionate about and this interest that you have in ODR and smart contracts and legal tech and access to justice. And so how do you bring it all together?

Chris

How I guess I bring it together in my head is that we've had a way that we've done business for now decades. It's the growth of what we've done for centuries. We have an environment where those who are in it—like anything, business, legal, anything, as we've talked about before—is a function of trust. Business is the art of earning someone's trust to the point where they give you money. The law is very similar, right? It's this idea that I'm trusting the intentions of the individuals in that process to the point where I'm going to honor that outcome, that trust component. If you believe it's wrapped into your credentials and into your ability to get to the same outcome all the time, your ability to be perceived as just, you aren't going to change your process. If you think this is how I ensure security, you're going to keep doing it that way. I think even just things like what is justice have been exciting to see us pull back that curtain in recent years and have enough people see, oh man, I guess this is really broken. That's the reason I especially, for those who look like me, most of us have never had to actually deal with that or fix those pieces.

The question now becomes we've always thought of justice as a line that I can get over if I do certain things when it isn't. The argument is that it isn't. And the next question is, what is it? And as we bring on more of these technologies, how do we make sure that we're smartly using them to illuminate areas where we, as humans, need to make hard choices? How do we allow it to allow us to see this and not, as we're seeing too often, abdicating our responsibility into the machinery, which is what too often we're doing.

Adriana

When you have conversations like this with people and they ask you about the bias that is baked into technology, what's your response to that? They say, "Well, even the systems are biased because it was designed and developed by humans." So, how do we prevent that or address that? Or how do you speak to that?

Chris

Well, I think the first thing that we need to—the opportunity of the machine is that it can be perfectly unbiased and the fact that it has no preconceived notion of anything, which you can't do with a judge, right? A judge is nothing more than a black box who can process fewer data streams and who we can't understand where his bias comes from. We can just guess.

Adriana

We're supposed to believe they don't have any. Let's start there.

Chris

Yeah. No, I would say those who say we're supposed to believe that—I don't even know if they're even halfway delusional. There's no access to not be influenced by our experience. I think that piece to me—we do have to come to an understanding that some of these truths will— we've gotta open up to it.

Adriana

I mean, even a plant is influenced by its environment and the conditions under which it lives. So, to even try to have that argument is just— Anyway, go ahead.

Chris

I mean, in that regard, I think that first, we need to make sure that we're able to access fairness in the discussion. And part of that is if you don't believe human bias plays a role in the human process, we're out. But the second part is that there's never going to be a perfect outcome, right? I think that's the other challenge. Too often, when we're implementing or introducing technology into the legal space, we're letting perfect be the enemy of good, and we're losing opportunities to improve and iteratively get better because we're saying, "Oh, well, this won't exactly do that." You can't either. As long as we aren't, this is I guess what worries me as we're talking about these things is, what is your access to recourse?

As we talk about, like eBay, there are only four outcomes, right? You're going to be put in that bin and the goal is to be put in that bin as fast as possible. Should that same technology structure be used in family law? I argue it really, really shouldn't. As we go into things like—there's a big discussion like blockchain will solve everything. Blockchain has some benefit within the range of what it can do, but it also has a level of contextual visibility that I would argue is unethical. The vast majority of users were claiming it should do. I can see who is relating with whom, even if I don't know exactly who they are. I'm always going to get through that abstraction. And if I'm an actual divorce attorney who's using this, you can now see my relationships, which is very important. Or if I'm in any other area, we can see those relationships once we know one. We're going to know the others.

Now you can argue it's going to be so hard to get to know that one. You know what? The Enigma code is pretty hard to crack at 1.2. We got there, and the fact is this system that we're using, we're going to constantly have this balance between transparency, auditability, and confidentiality. Those will always be competing items because in order to get into areas where we get away from that human trust—between knowing hey, it's you and me and I trust you, even though every startup is one bad decision away from fraud, right? And so like the question is that other party, we think we trust them. We have all these tells we think say I feel trust in them. Once we get farther away from that human evaluation of them, I'm going to be constantly balancing visibility and confidentiality. And there will always be imperfect outcomes. So, I think we have to accept that bias is going to be one of them. We can't fully get rid of bias because we can't fully see what's going on. We can't fully get rid of injustice. If we believe it's a line, the system is attempting to seek efficiency. And I think once we acknowledge those pieces, maybe we now have an ability to see optimizations better. I personally view justice as an optimization that is minimizing access to downside. Whether it be the wrong person who's in jail, whether it be the ability, the cost of getting someone back to whole, whether it be the education required to help someone. If I'm minimizing that access to downside, no one's ever going to be whole again. That's just impossible. That's not a possible way to think about life. But if I can start looking at it as an optimization, if I can start looking at the process as being the important part, if I can start looking and saying, I need to make sure that I'm provided access to fairness, whatever outcome I feel is appropriate—those are the things I think technology with a slight refocusing can actually tackle. And those are things that I think if we really start bringing those technologies into law and more smartly, we don't need more case management.

Adriana

We don't.

Chris

We don't need more frickin' billing tools, right? The piece we are missing is we don't have enough tools like NextLevel Mediation, which is Bob Bergman. NextLevel Mediation is helping with a tool that allows, based on surveys, to pair up and say, oh, look, your logic here doesn't match. You're in an irrational position right now. Well, that doesn't mean we're going to be able to get by it. But being able to identify this is where, if you want A to be bigger than B, but you want C to be bigger than A, even though if those don't line up, there's an opportunity there to actually seek understanding, to build upon agreements, and to ensure inclusion. That's what we should be wanting all these tools to do. That's what we don't have enough of.

Adriana

How do you bake all of that into a profession that is so broad from practitioners to geography to experience to practice areas?

Chris

I think the first piece is that we need to acknowledge that the law is not so fundamentally unique that it can't learn from other areas. I think that I hear this argument all the time.

Adriana

Well, it's a very special profession.

Chris

Exactly. Lawyers can't learn from anything else. You know what? I don't know. I've been in the technical consulting space from the beginning of my career. I can promise you that I was just as highly specialized in certain areas where trust in my capability was the driver of my value. Same as a lawyer.

Adriana

Same as a lawyer.

Chris

Lawyers—it's just a highly specialized consultant where, depending on certain roles, your outcome could be larger. You know, in this case, you can incarcerate the wrong person if you screw up. You know, in my specialty consulting area, you could kill someone if your machine breaks, right? It isn't that far off. And if we can first get beyond the idea that law is so significantly different from these other industries, we can start seeing where they succeeded and failed.

So, there isn't a great tech for consulting and finding the right consultant either, right? And still a trust activity. Right? You will not know if your lawyer is good for at least five years, just the same way as a professor. Right? I won't know if my professor is any good until five years later. I won't know if my lawyer did a great contract job until I get sued. There's only so much we can do in these environments. So, I'm not entirely sure there is a magic answer. But I do know if we are trying to iteratively chip away at those areas where we truly are hitting the bounds of what we as humans can do, how many pieces of data we actually can process as long as we're getting into those areas. I think we can make some real progress in the overarching problem, which is we cannot see the faults well enough to get agreement that we must solve them. And most of the people impacted only use the system once in a very, very blue moon, so they aren't mad enough to stay in it.

Adriana

Who would want to if you don't have to, other than people like you trying to make the system a better place? Have you felt that because of the pandemic there have been more minds that have been opened up to using technology in a more efficient and effective way in dealing with all this? Or is it the same old, same old? Because I feel like I've witnessed a shift in more minds opening now, not at quite the complex level that you get into in your day to day, but me, you know, dealing with lawyers every day, I have very different conversations today than I had two years ago with lawyers about how they're managing their businesses.

Chris

I think it's interesting because when the pandemic first started, the ABA hosted a dispute resolution tech expo and there's a real need to say what's available, we don't know what to do at all. When you had a lot of classes and even taught ODR, and they're having trouble knowing how to move their class online, which I find ironic.

Adriana

Well, that was my life when this pandemic started. Every deficiency in an attorney who contacted me in the technology world just shone like a freaking beacon. So, I can only imagine what you went through. I said I did a lot of Zoom training. Can you imagine?

Chris

Well, but that's yes.

Adriana

That's what you're saying.

Chris

That's where a lot of it stopped though, right? I remember the very beginning when we had a panel and some of the major arbitration panel organizers were there and one asked, "What do you think when this is all over? Do you think this is going to be here to stay?" "No, we're going to go back." But what's interesting is a lot of those mediators and arbitrators who are flying all around the country are like, you know what, I'm 72. I like sitting at home and watching it on video.

So, I think there's an interest, but it really seems like people are falling into two buckets, which are the ones who are saying, now it's going to go back and we're in the office already and there's no other way to communicate. Then there's the other side, which I think is, in some ways, trying to fight this return to normalcy that doesn't always necessarily make sense.

Adriana

Or need to exist, right? Do you find that when you're interacting with legal professionals, your conversations are different with younger attorneys versus older? Or does it not matter? And this is a trick question because I know what my experiences are like with attorneys, regardless of what age they are.

Chris

We worked with a 26-year-old labor attorney as we were helping launch a new union. And we had everything you needed to negotiate the collective bargaining agreement to sign people on, to digitally sign to get everything finalized. And this 26-year-old was very positive that you needed to have wet signatures on paper.

Adriana

You passed my test.

Chris

As you look at the law schools, I find there's one side of the selection bias piece and then there's that the educational curriculum may not be aligned with change. You go through your whole law school experience and most people never even look at a contract. That blows my mind. If I went through engineering school and didn't even look at an actual plan for an actual designed item, I think that's crazy. We learn how to actually draw the designs. We do one. We're not going to be perfect at it, but I guarantee we looked at a lot. We're going through contracts class without even knowing contracts.

When the legal profession says, hey, we need to shift. I gave a smart contract talk the other day and I said, "I think the big existential question the legal community is going to face is, if we keep optimizing our workflow, if we keep putting in automation here and technology there, and if we also go all the way to what many believe is this panacea of these smart contracts that automatically execute, will the lawyer maintain their role as a bug squisher?" Tiny bugs in the code, which is what they do in a contract—we found the bug in the code—or will they be a strategist?

Adriana

Great analogy.

Chris

Yeah. And now we want to argue and say, "Yeah, we're going to be a strategist. We're going to actually go and give you better advice on how to run your business." What the hell do most lawyers know about my business?

Adriana

Not much.

Chris

I had a discussion with one the other day where we're having a debate over business formation structure and it's like, OK, I'm hearing you explain why it's this or this, but what are the outcomes here? We're so siloed in some of these where the deal folk don't deal with the lawsuit.

So, when you say, OK, I can set this all up to manage and optimize this piece. Well, OK, but of my end outcomes, which one actually addresses that? We have that wall. As Dan Rainey famously said, the point of law school is to define the boxes to put your thoughts in. Right? Well, that is what law school is building: individuals who are supposed to be those tacticians of this is how I should think. That's not strategy. That's not a strategist. So, if, when we look at saying, OK, well, we're a people person. When you see dispute resolution, you see those who are going through law school, those who are going through dispute resolution programs, and there is a fundamental difference in their ability to be human. It is so stark and impressive every time. There's a step-by-step in the legal side that is part selection, but it's also the way we're forcing thoughts into boxes. There is a lack of strategic flexibility when they're negotiating, which is incredibly impressive in its consistency.

So, I think the law school has to determine what we actually think law school is. If what we're saying is law school is where we actually make sure the code is right, which is currently what it is, I think there's going to be a very interesting reckoning of what do you do when the machine actually is able to say, here's all the clauses. What is the value add there? If we're still holding on to this idea that we're going to provide you strategists without a system that trains you to explore your access to strategy, and most importantly, we don't select people who are strategic thinkers—Type A linears are not strategic thinkers, typically.

Adriana

No insult to lawyers that we know and love out there. But not only that, they lack a lot of times the creativity because it's back to the buckets and the boxes, the buckets and the boxes. And I can't imagine not putting something in the bucket or the box. And I feel like, from my end where I do a lot of technical stuff, the problems that I have to solve for people are not very far from just being creative sometimes. So, between not being strategic and not really being creative, I mean, you're right, they're just linear. So, I guess it just comes down to the same old conversation at least that I've been sitting around for 25 years, which is how do we change the law schools?

Chris

We wrote a book called Commoditized, it was about restructuring the labor relations world.

Adriana

Is this your Amazon book?

Chris

This is the one that did not sell a whole ton.

Adriana

I'm going to buy it.

Chris

I'll send you a copy.

Adriana

Even just the caption for it was so interesting. I was like oh man, there's stuff in here that most of us wouldn't even think about when it comes to restructuring the labor force and how labor—the whole thing.

Chris

Well, that's what's— So, Simon Boehme and I are rewriting that book, and we're really doing it in the most collaborative way we possibly can. We're actually about to re-release all of our draft chapters at gigdatabook.com. So, we've thrown it open. We ran a whole bunch of sessions on Clubhouse, ran a bunch of sessions on Zoom in partnership with MDR Lab out of London, and got everyone in to say, "OK, when we're looking at the gig economy, we're looking at this new gig world. How do you rebalance power in that world? When you start looking, where is the access to power?" We're getting caught around this idea that, OK, well, we've got all these underpaid people. And so maybe we need to give them cheaper insurance or give them more bank loans or something.

Adriana

Maybe you should give them smarter jobs.

Chris

Or maybe we need to take it one step back is what we argue and say, well, where's the real power in this environment? The real power in this environment—the only naturally occurring resource that is not being appropriately compensated—is the data that we generate. We are generating data that defines us. These companies are gaining more and more value. We always get wrapped around the axle, the marketing side of it. We're like, oh yeah, well, so if we're looking at the value of data from some sort of Facebook perspective, right? I'm averaging out like $24 of value per year for selling me stuff. If I'm starting to look at highly qualified leads that can cost me up to $180 on average in certain areas—but, more importantly, if I'm looking at now, how do I drive a car? All those data sets are leading into those valuations of whether or not I can actually put autonomous trucks on the road. There are whole ranges of unrefined data that we're just getting extracted at no remuneration for, except the opportunity to get sold better stuff, I guess. That's the first level. But then there are all these levels of data refinement that, within the gig economy, we're not helping to organize ourselves to maximize value on. I think that's the real core of the book, the core of a lot of these pieces that we're getting to, which I think is still the heart of legal tech in a lot of ways. Who owns and how do we allow people to maintain ownership of that one natural resource that is constantly being mined in a fundamentally inequitable manner? And because the only way we achieve value out of it right now is someone else says, "OK, well, I need this data set." So, this high-value individual. Our data sets are all bad because we just assume, we don't need to know about poor people, and we don't really need to know about Black people. I mean, the face stuff can be wrong because the expensive stuff is a badge, and it goes into a high-value workspace. So like, why do I need that? So, I end up with bad data sets and even more biased tools. I end up with fundamentally flawed systems that are providing us access to accelerate efficiency in an unjust environment. I think that all starts from a realization that we must have access to control the wealth generated from the only naturally occurring resource that right now we've not provided ourselves access to own and control. We're not going to put the genie back in the bottle. The data sets are out, and they're not coming back. But in this new world and in this gig economy, you will win by having the better data set and collectively owning it.

We argue that's the root of all of our value that really is going to help fundamentally change the quality of everything from legal tech to legal systems to our socioeconomic interactions, as it is our theory. So, we'll see if we're right.

Adriana

What excites you the most right now that you see or that you're working on or that you see building insofar as addressing all these issues?

Chris

I think the real piece that is the most exciting element that I've been fortunate to have an option to build in pieces over time, but not really have the tools to put all the pieces together, which is what we're getting to, is that ability to fairly discover and transact price of these things that are hard to define. I know that we have what I would say is just this completely overhyped environment for NFTs in the art space.

But what is interesting about NFTs to me is more fundamental in that an NFT really is a method for allowing us to fundamentally rewrite how we think about intellectual property protection. We've always thought of—and if you talk to any lawyer in law school—we talk about these issues of what is confidential information and protected data, and in each of those, there's this idea that when this contract is done, I'm going to destroy everything or give it back. Right?

Most of all, I'm creating these digital environments. Again, the genie is out. It's not going back in the bottle. So, the question is, what do you do with this natural resource that you can't control, right? Once it's created now, it's out there. What the NFT does to me is it really swaps on its head from saying, I'm not worried about controlling this thing that's uncontrollable. I'm worried about ensuring that my ownership in it can't be erased. Because that's what we've always looked at is this idea that, yes, someone's going to steal it and erase me from it so I'm going to protect the thing. I'm going to keep it in this box. Well, now its value comes from being out of the box. Your value comes from ensuring you remain connected to it.

That's a really fundamentally different way to think about what you're trying to protect and how you need to protect it. Thinking about how do you protect that thing that you can't put your hands around but you now can't be separated from. It's massive.

What we're doing, as I mentioned, I've moved into more of an advisory role at Trokt and now I've taken over as CTO of Third Coast Commodities. One of the things that we're starting to focus on is a biodiesel feedstock company. There are all kinds of new pressures in that space on everything from compliance, ensuring what is in our fuels is what we think it is, and ensuring that some of our other commodities that are being traded are what we think they are. Down to this ability to say we don't even know what the value of the actions we're taking today are, but we need to be very clear that we know what actions we're taking.

We need to be able to say, hey, we don't even know what we'll have to comply with in six months, let alone six years. But it's more important for us to actually be able to know, can I actually bundle? And can I actually bundle and deal in that risk? Are my compliance documents within these types of environments—are those like the data streams I'm naturally generating and right now losing? Right now, Apple is saying, hey, I won't let anyone else track me. But they're controlling everything at the device level.

Adriana

Except them. Thanks, Apple. You're the only ones. But there you are.

Chris

But what if we now start to really flip that model and say, we're choosing to own the devices that start defining our oil. We're going to actually be able to go back and retake those pieces that right now we were saying, OK, well, it's not floating all around the internet. Fine. It's just going through this one device that I don't own any equity in and it's going into this one device and it's actually mining me better because it is actually able to control those pieces. We could own that. Why not?

Adriana

Why not? And maybe we should.

Chris

That's a major thesis of big data. It starts with saying we need to provide those technologies that are collectively owned so we can collectively own those things that truly do define us. We need to be able to actually take back ownership of who we are in a way where we can actually find our right value from it. That's all those pieces, to me, do wrap into one fundamental spread there.

Adriana

Well, Chris, I very much appreciate your time and your giant brain and all your accomplishments and everything that you're interested in legal tech. I know that you are contributing very positively to the profession. I appreciate it because I get to live in it too, and I know everyone that you work with appreciates it.

Before I let you go, tell everyone where they can find, friend, or follow you. And tell me, what about your Clubhouse meetings that you have? Or what do we call them on Clubhouse?

Chris

That's a good question. I'm not sure what we do. Hangouts I guess? On social media, my handle is @TheOtherDraper on both Twitter and Instagram and then also in Clubhouse as well. But every Tuesday evening, although now we've gone back to real life, we've actually pushed off a few Tuesdays with having to be places, which is disappointing. Because every Tuesday, what we've been doing for almost a year now is talking through those intersections where, as we bring technology into the legal environment, what are those impacts both intended and unintended on justice. And, especially for those of us who are in the legal tech space, how should we be thinking about it? Since it's always that age-old question of, technology can do anything, but should it? And that's at the heart of what we're saying is, OK, if we did do this, what happens? If we do push around this corner, are we ready to be able to accept the consequences of the unknown over there? And that takes time to sit back and think through what those balances are. Where does this go in step three? Not just hey, we could do this today. Those are usually the beginning of the very bad outcomes.

Adriana

So, I think you've got a pretty good brain trust that gets in there and joins you. You almost have very fascinating conversations. I'm sure my brain would explode there.

Chris

I'll tell you, the Clubhouse is one of the most interesting highlights of the pandemic. The number of people I've connected with, and we've built a very strong network there out of what was really just a conference call. It's actually funny because, Julie Sobowale, for example, who is on there, who always joins every time says, "Hey, I'm Julie, I'm from Canada, which always cracks me up, but is absolutely brilliant in this space.

Ira Rothken within the NFT space is one of the most impressive minds that I've been fortunate to meet in real life as well. I mean, it's been very interesting to be able to push on these topics and have a free flow of discussion of like, OK, well, you say this, but what's next? That's been incredibly rewarding. So that's great.

Adriana

Well, it's been incredibly rewarding getting to talk to you. I appreciate it. I'm one of your biggest fans on the internet. You didn't even know, but I am. So, thank you so much.

Chris

Thank you very much for the opportunity. Great to talk to you.

Adriana

You too.

Thank you for listening to LegalTech Matters. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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