Disclosure

I work for Clio, which sells software to lawyers. I write and speak about legal technology — including, sometimes, about the categories Clio competes in. I don't claim to be a disinterested observer, and no one should read me as one.

What I am is someone who has spent a quarter century arguing that public law should be free and open, and I've helped to build an ecosystem of legal tech companies who advance that mission. Fastcase was that argument as a public-spirited, for-profit company. Today that work continues at a larger scale at Clio and in my teaching at Chicago Law and at Georgetown Law.

Where a talk or an article bears on Clio's business, I say so at the time. My teaching at Georgetown and the University of Chicago is my own, and the reading lists are not vetted by anyone at Clio. I hold nine U.S. patents in legal technology, assigned to companies I've worked for. I sit on the boards listed on the about page, some of them nonprofits working on access to justice, and those seats are unpaid.

I speak at a lot of bar association meetings and legal conferences. Some pay an honorarium or cover travel; many don't. None of them buy a conclusion. If I'm recommending a category of tool from a stage, assume I have a view about who builds it well, and discount accordingly.

The broader point is one I'd rather state than have inferred: it is possible to believe something about how the law should work and also to be paid by a company that benefits from that belief. I don't pretend that disclosure makes me unbiased. It just allows readers and listeners to understand where I'm coming from and draw informed conclusions.