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

Albany Law program will prepare students for high-tech careers. Three upstate New York educational institutions — Albany Law School, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, and the Research Foundation for SUNY — said this week they are partnering to provide a unique, experiential learning program that will both prepare students for high-tech careers and promote the development of marketable technologies in the region.

Next fall, the institutions will launch what they are calling the Innovation Intensive clinic, through which students from Albany Law and SUNY Poly will gain hands-on experience in technology commercialization by performing work on behalf of the RF. Law, business, and engineering students will work in interdisciplinary teams — under the supervision of RF attorneys — to advance tech-focused projects and facilitate university innovation, from lab to market.

In addition, Albany Law and SUNY Poly will work together to develop a host of collaborative academic programs, pathways for accelerated degrees, and cross-registration opportunities. Working on-site in SUNY Poly’s laboratories, students will be involved in evolving areas of the law involving nanotechnology, nanobioscience, quantum technologies, and artificial intelligence.

New site offers consumers insights on legal costs. The lawyer-referral site Lawyers.com has launched a resource designed to give consumers insights into what their legal case might cost, what the outcome might be, and how long it might take. The Legal Costs & Outcomes Hub

The Legal Costs & Outcomes Hub uses data aggregated from responses to surveys sent to hundreds of thousands of legal consumers who visited the Lawyers.com network of legal websites over the past several years. It reveals, for example, that the average compensation in a personal injury case is $52,900 and that the average duration of a Social Security Disability claim is 27 months.

The resource includes information on bankruptcy, DUI/DWI, divorce, immigration, labor and employment, medical malpractice, personal injury, Social Security Disability, and worker’s compensation.

New blog covers legal ethics. Must a lawyer always encrypt emails? Must you tell a client about a data breach at your firm? These and other questions of legal ethics are answered at a new blog called The Lawyer’s Lawyer, part of a larger site about legal ethics and attorney grievances published by the law firm Kramer & Connolly.

The blog is written by Irwin R. Kramer, the firm’s managing partner. Although the firm’s practice focuses on Maryland and the District of Columbia, the blog is not state-specific in the questions it tackles or answers it provides. Each post is presented in a Q&A format, and answers are generally brief, with links to appropriate rules and ethics opinions.

COLPM announces 2019 inductees. The College of Law Practice Management (of which I am a fellow) has announced the 28 legal professionals who will be inducted as fellows in its class of 2019. The induction ceremony will be held in Nashville in the fall, as part of the COLPM’s 2019 Futures Conference on October 24 and 25. Congratulations to all of this year’s inductees.

Worth reading: Susan Hackett, CEO of Legal Executive Institute and former senior VP and general counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel, takes a deep dive into the potential impact on corporate legal departments of EY’s acquisition of Pangea3. She picks up on a post I wrote about the implications for law firms, but says law departments are also critical constituencies in the conversation. Read it at Corporate Counsel.

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.