A roundup of the week’s news from the worlds of legal technology and innovation.

Analytics on health care fraud. Bloomberg Law introduced Health Care Fraud Analytics, a tool designed to help legal professionals understand trends in health care fraud enforcement, gain context and mitigate risk. Users can search and filter some 800 settlement agreements by court, entity, allegation and date; view the data in a tabular format; and use visualizations to identify trends.  Bloomberg says it is the largest single database of health care fraud settlement agreements and related corporate integrity agreements in the market. It is available to Bloomberg Law subscribers at no extra cost. Here is Bloomberg’s announcement.

Michael Schwartz

Tracking innovation in legal education. For all the talk about innovation in legal education, what does it really look like? A new blog seeks to help provide the answer. Called What Great Law Schools Do, it is written by Michael Hunter Schwartz, dean of McGeorge School of Law. “This blog,” he says, “is an effort to celebrate extraordinary innovations in legal education; most, but not all, of the innovations are ones that have been implemented during what all agree is a crisis in legal education.”

Cryptocurrency and blockchain resources. The law firm Dechert LLP this week launched the Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Resources Center, a collection of articles and webinars. In an introductory post at the Dechert blog Crunched Credit, lawyers Jonathan Gaynor and Krisia Ildefonso say the resource center will cover legal developments around cryptocurrency and blockchain.

Meet Cooper, the ethics chatbot. Corporate Counsel highlights innovations in ethics and compliance at the company Convercent, spearheaded by Katie Smith, its chief ethics & compliance officer. Notable among them: an interactive compliance website and an ethics chatbot named Cooper. Notably, the ethics website is open to the public — a smart move for a company whose business is ethics and compliance management technology. And it is at that website that you can find Cooper, Anyone can use it anonymously and it will direct them to the proper contact to report or resolve the issue.

Headline of the week: Punk Rock Drummer-Turned-Doctor Performs CPR on Potential Juror in His Med-Mal Trial. Now that’s poetic justice with a punk rock beat.

Worth reading: I’ve been following Washington state’s limited license legal technician program since writing about it for the ABA Journal in 2015. Spokane’s Journal of Business has an update, reporting that some of the program’s first graduates are opening their own practices. … Do Lawyers Have An Ethical Responsibility to Use AI? Laura van Wyngaarden , chief operating officer and co-founder of Diligen Software, reports on a recent panel that considered that question.

And last but not least, perfect lawyers through DNA: The UK legal consultancy Janders Dean launched LegalDNA, a startup to ensure future successful law careers through a donor bank that allows parents to design the perfect lawyer. “This latest startup provides future parents access to eggs, embryo and sperm from law firm donors who have recognised success in the legal industry, thereby removing any element of uncertainty as to the child’s success as a lawyer, or their area of future practice.”

Should we read anything into the fact that LegalDNA was launched on April Fools’ Day?

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.