This morning was my 3rd day sitting in on the Clio Conference. In the last 3 days, I have felt a surplus of inspiration from legal innovators, lawyers, non-lawyers, justice seekers, book authors, business CEOs, and more. When choosing which courses to sit in on and which to opt out of, I noticed a common trend. To name a few, the sessions I sat in focused on next-generation leadership, forward thinking, growth through adversity, creating mission-driven firms, and exploring the science of success.

The theme of all these? I see community at the forefront. The core of it all: people inspiring one another, people helping one another, and people growing with/ alongside one another.

I asked myself to return to the foundation of what brought me here. To this industry, sitting in these sessions, with world-changers and passion-invokers. When thinking about growth, mission, purpose, success, leadership – what comes to mind are the people leading the charges. I think about the individuals who decided to share their idea and collaborate with the encouragers as well as the challengers.

I think about how it took one thought leader to sit in a room with their peers and colleagues and say, ‘I don’t see this working. What if we tried this instead?’ Behind them, a group of hands pushing their rock up the mountain. Behind these ideas, I envision countless communities coming alongside one another, and, the bi-product of bravery from person to speak up and look at things differently, a whole room of inspired individuals now more likely to innovate alongside them.Continue Reading The core task of innovation: relationships

I remember first getting approached by LexBlog’s CEO, Kevin, when I was the Community Associate at WeWork. The selling factor being, of course, the way he talked about LexBlog and the work they were doing. Having no experience in the legal industry, nor any interest in the tech industry, I politely told him (in so many words) I was too fond of my current community in my WeWork building to jump ship.

He was persistent. The more I talked to Kevin, however, the more convinced I became about the importance of access to the law. He explained how momentum in blogging and online community building were transforming the way legal services were being accessed. Kevin talked about LexBlog like it was the best possible turnkey solution to expanding and advancing access to the law in order to help those in need – his belief helped me believe it too.

I recently restarted his Common Sense in Legal Blogging series while preparing video clips for our resource center.  One of the things he says a few minutes into the first chapter caught my attention – not because I was surprised by what he said, but because it rekindled my fire to growing this online community of legal bloggers. He states,

When I interviewed Jeff Nowak who writes a blog on FMLA in Chicago in December and I said, ‘What got you into blogging? What makes you blog?’ He goes, ‘My desire to help.’ I said, ‘Come on. At some point in time, you must’ve said I’m doing this for business development, or to make a name for myself.’ He said, “Never.” He goes, “I am always motivated by helping people.

Continue Reading It was never about business

Spending time in our support queue over the past couple months has given me assurance that I could never work in online design or UI.

One of my favorite concepts is the idea of the aggregation of marginal gains, most recently popularized by James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits. He talks about the story of British cycling coach Dave Brailsford, who took the British Cycling team from one of the worst teams in Europe to the dominating team at the Olympic Games in just five years. How? He looked at everything directly and indirectly related to the performance of his athletes, and found a way to make a small, 1% improvement in each facet of performance. Taken individually, each of these improvements had a negligible impact, but taken together, the improvements delivered an outsized impact: the aggregation of marginal gains. You can apply this powerful concept to your law firm.

In the blogging world, I’ve seen people hone in on this 1% more intently than I’ve ever witnessed before. “Can you change the font size of this one sentence in a 15-paragraph post?” “Can you update the photo to match these specific dimensions at the bottom left of the page?” “Can you switch out ‘fast’ for ‘quick’ in the author bio?” Questions like these inundate the support queue of LexBlog constantly. What I have loved most about the blogging community, and the legal blogging community in particular, is how aware of detail people seemingly are.Continue Reading Focus on the 1%

I watched The Social Dilemma documentary on Netflix with some friends last night. I will start out by saying it is absolutely terrifying, disheartening, and eye-opening to say the lease. On a national as well as a global scale, it feels as though our world is falling apart at the seams. Between fake news distribution, social media addiction, unstable leadership, and more – it seems as though truth is something we’re struggling to recognize and hold onto.

Working at LexBlog, I’ve often heard our CEO, Kevin O’Keefe talk about often how the internet can be a powerful tool for building relationships and advancing communities. Paradoxically, watching The Social Dilemma last night, I was shocked but not surprised to learn about the destructive structures the internet has been laying ground work for over the last ten or so years. Primarily set up to target the Gen Z population, companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok and countless others are at each other’s throats, competing to keep users in the rat race we’ve found ourselves in.

This hour and a half long documentary poses the simple question: where did we (designers and engineers of the internet) go wrong, and how do we fix the problem? Because the problem is vastly complex, no one seems to be able to pin point exactly what the issue boils down to, and certainly no one seems to have answers. Users subject to the problem seemingly turn a blind eye and continue buying into the system without questioning its effects on our collective wellbeing. Influencers and engineers and CEO’s alike allegedly recognize a society that’s biting at the poisonous bit, but not a single advocate for change has a clear path for how to restructure the system. Though the current relationship between humanity and the internet appears to be destructive and getting progressively worse, no one knows how to turn off the responders in each of us that gravitate towards the capitalization and obsession of social media.Continue Reading 3 lessons I’ve learned about community and the internet at a legal tech company

I love how certain instances can bring us back to a moment in time that perhaps our memories would otherwise forget to remember. This morning, I woke up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I arrived yesterday morning to pouring rain, walked about 5 miles in the city before tapping out with water-soaked jeans and a head of

When I was a Sophomore in college, I spent a semester abroad in Cape Town, South Africa. I was studying psychology and my school had a campus in Cape Town for psych students to participate in an internship-style learning experience for credits. I will never forget the words of my professor when we began working

I’ve been thinking about the concept of Community as well as the types of communities there are. For example, how the community of a college is by and large, yet there are hundreds of majors to choose from, each with its own community of likeminded people with shared interest in studying the same field. Or

All my life, I’ve leaned heavily on the extrovert side of the scale. My identity has been built up on the communities I’ve found myself in. Whether that be running cross country in high school, leading our tennis team, tutoring ESL students, participating in countless church groups or weaving myself into tight-knit friend packs wherever

What do you do when someone asks you to do something you have no idea how to do? I got a text from the CEO of the company I work for asking me if I had set up a personal blog yet. Two months into a new job (working fully remote, adjusting to a global