Kate Tompkins on Being a Practice Group Leader But Not a Lawyer

For those of us in large law firms, we understand that Practice Group Leaders have the following responsibilities:

• Develop a strategy for the Practice Group (PG)
• Advance the business development of the PG
• Ensure equitable distribution of work among the more junior PG attorneys
• Identify attorneys within the practice who are struggling and find mentoring and coaching opportunities for them
• Practice law at the same time

For Lathrop GPM's Intellectual Property Group, Kate Tompkins can do all of these, except practice law. That's because she is not a lawyer. She's a business professional.

We've heard the phrase "law firms should be run more like a business." Well, Lathrop GPM and Kate Tompkins are putting that phrase into action. Kate tells us how she landed this role, and how we may see more business operation professionals stepping up to lead legal practice as other firms look to run more like a business.

Information Inspirations

If you're looking for the future of search, CaseText may have the answer with the help of BERT. In their new WeSearch product, CaseText's Pablo Arredondo says that the conceptual search product will leverage the open-source neural network framework developed by Google called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or simply BERT, to find related results not based on keywords, but through actual concepts. Bob Ambrogi runs through a few examples in his Law Sites Blog.

The patent office in China pulled about half of 2020's applications recently due to irregularities. Many are saying that it is downright fraud, and that it may have a worldwide impact on patents.

Slack rolled out, and then quickly rolled back a new feature that allowed anyone on Slack to DM anyone else on Slack. After a swift public rebuke on the potential harassment issues that this "feature" opens up, especially against women, Slack is rethinking the changes. Perhaps Slack would benefit from listening to lawyers like K&L Gates Partner Elisa D’Amico who specialize in understanding and fighting abuse on the Internet.

Video games are expanding into what is known as Synthetic Economies where gamers' actions have economic effects both within the games and outside the games as well.

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