Nicola Shaver

LegalTechnology Hub

The definitive resource for legal technology, Legaltech Hub is your one-stop shop for high quality, objective data about the market. Access current market reports, tools and resources to support and improve the procurement process for legal organizations, and search for the right solutions for your firm or department using the most comprehensive directory of global legal technology. With practical guidance for all sectors of the market and better information on what's happening in legaltech, generative AI, and legal innovation across the world, hundreds of legal organizations subscribe to LTH Premium. The LTH team of experts provides advisory services and support to law firms on topics ranging from AI strategy to legaltech selection, and to legaltech companies globally, from pre-seed start-ups all the way through to mature companies seeking exit.

Access the Legaltech Hub directory here: https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/, and contact info@legaltechnologyhub.com for information about LTH Premium or advisory services.

CEO, Co-Founder

Cardozo School of Law

Developed curriculum for inaugural course on legal technology, generative AI, and the business of law, delivered annually during the fall semester.

Adjunct Professor

Globe Law and Business Ltd

As innovation and legal operations functions proliferate globally, Nicola Shaver has written the first definitive book to guide legal professionals through setting up an effective innovation function and driving successful culture change and initiatives across a legal organization.

In The Handbook for Legal Innovation, Shaver outlines how to set up an effective strategy for innovation, provides practical guides for conducting current-state audits, establishes frameworks to help identify project priorities, and outlines how to build and grow the right team. In addition to strategy suggestions, the Handbook delves deeply into methodologies for change. Shaver provides an overview of effective methods drawn from other industries that can be leveraged within legal to support and supercharge innovation efforts, equipping lawyers and legal innovation leaders with tools that will help them drive real change within their organizations.

Link to purchase: https://www.globelawandbusiness.com/books/the-handbook-for-legal-innovation

Author - The Handbook for Legal Innovation

Paul Hastings

Successfully drove strategy and led global innovation, technology solutions, KM and research services teams across all 21 offices of the firm. Developed client facing solutions and services. Responsible for driving firm-wide innovation strategy and initiatives.

Managing Director of Innovation and Knowledge (Global)

Global Director of Innovation and Knowledge

In this role, led global teams responsible for legal innovation, process improvement, alternative timekeepers and low cost solutions, knowledge management, research services, and substantive legal training. Focus on enabling practice excellence and optimizing client value through streamlining processes, curating and improving accessibility to critical legal content, implementing and leveraging the right tools and staffing models in support of all timekeepers at the firm.

Global Director of Knowledge Management

Stikeman Elliott LLP

Oversight of KM, Innovation and Research Services. Led the planning, development and execution of process improvement efforts including knowledge management systems and innovation initiatives. Facilitated collaboration between practicing lawyers, business services, and technology to identify and implement innovative processes and products that improve efficiency and productivity. Led major projects across the firm, balancing stakeholder relationships and driving change to drive client value.

Enterprise Search project shortlisted as one of three finalists for ILTA'S 2016 Project of the Year Award.

Director of Knowledge Management and Innovation

Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP

Drove the strategic direction of the firm's knowledge management, practice support and innovation initiatives. Led the firm's enterprise search upgrade. Developed and spearheaded a firm-wide Knowledge Drive aimed at capturing the firm’s intellectual capital through competitive gaming. Utilized innovative benchmarking software to enhance the firm's precedent development.

Assistant Director of Innovation and Practice Support

Network 10

Provided network-wide pre-broadcast advice to news and programming departments across Australia and general commercial legal advice to all departments. Program managed the network's legal approach to its London 2012 Olympic coverage, preventing IOC breaches and providing live 24/7 advice to journalists overseas. Pioneered the development of a legal newsletter to be distributed across the network. Trained all network staff on legal issues. Managed complaints relating to broadcast, including regular liaison with C-level network executives. Managed all broadcast-related litigation suits, and drove the Network's legal strategy during injunctions and other applications. Facilitated a new relationship between the legal department and the social media department to mitigate risk arising out of emerging social media trends. Negotiated, drafted and reviewed commercial and entertainment contracts.

Senior Network Legal Counsel

News Corp

Provided daily and 24/7 pre-publication legal advice for three major newspapers, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Telegraph. Managed complaints relating to publication and advertising, including drafting submissions to Government departments. Managed and drove legal strategy for publication-related litigation suits. Trained staff across the organisation on legal issues.

Editorial Legal Counsel

Johnson Winter & Slattery

Litigator with Australia's pre-eminent media group, running media and large-scale commercial litigation cases and advising major media companies. Six month secondment in-house to Unilever.

Associate

Minter Ellison

As a litigation associate, worked on high-profile commercial and telecommunications cases and became part of a niche media law litigation group. Provided pro-bono legal services to a number of not-for-profit organizations.

Lawyer 

CEO and Co-founder, Legaltech Hub | Author | Innovation, AI, Legaltech Leader, Advisor, Investor | LLB, MBA | Fastcase 50, 2021 & 2024, ABA Women of Legaltech, 2022 | Adjunct Professor

I’m an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor, working at the intersection of law and technology to help drive innovation in the legal industry. As the CEO and co-founder of Legaltech Hub, I lead a team that’s dedicated to providing the most comprehensive, high-quality data and insights on legal technology and generative AI globally. Our platform helps law firms, corporate legal departments, and vendors make informed decisions with market reports, tools, and resources they can trust.

In addition to running Legaltech Hub, I serve as an advisor to law firms, guiding them through the complexities of AI adoption, legal technology evaluation, and strategic decision-making. I also work with legaltech companies of all sizes—from scrappy startups to well-established players—offering guidance on strategy, product development, and how to succeed in selling to law firms. I’ve had the honor of sitting on the boards of several innovative legaltech companies and investing in others.

I’m passionate about sharing knowledge and inspiring change, which is why I teach a class on AI and legal technology as an adjunct professor at Cardozo Law School and frequently take the stage as a keynote speaker at conferences across the US, Europe, and beyond. I’m also a prolific writer on generative AI, legaltech, and innovation in law, with my book, THE HANDBOOK FOR LEGAL INNOVATION, published in 2023.

A former practicing lawyer and innovation leader at top-tier firms and Fortune 500 companies, I know firsthand the challenges and opportunities facing the legal industry today. My mission? To help the system of law work better for everyone, whether through advising, educating, mentoring, or connecting people across the industry.

The definitive resource for legal technology - access the most comprehensive directory of commercial global legal technology with a powerful search allowing both law firms and legal departments to easily find the tools they need to support their practice. In 2022, Legaltech Hub is evolving into a full insights and analysis platform for legal technology, with practical guidance for all sectors of the market.

Access Legaltech Hub here: https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/

Choosing to spend your birthday at a conference might sound sad to some - but not to anyone who’s been to the #TLTF summit.

Imagine an event where every single conversation you have is valuable. Where every person you run into in the hallway, on the elevator, in line for coffee is like-minded, working on something interesting, and a potential collaborator in the work we all collectively do to make law better. The opportunities for great discussions this week were limited only by time and energy, both of which, it turns out, are finite (though I tried my very best to stretch them to the limit while in Austin).

Most conferences, much as I enjoy them, leave me feeling exhausted and depleted. But I’m leaving TLTF feeling inspired and invigorated. Thanks to Zach Posner and Rebecca Engel, MBA for creating this rich environment for all of us. And thanks to the many, many people I met and spoke with this week - each of you has left me thinking about new possibilities.

What a great week - and lovely to spend my birthday with so many old and new friends! 

#TLTFsummit2025 #legaltech TLTF Summit  

Ilona Logvinova Darren Cox Carla Swansburg Stephanie Wilkins Jeroen Plink Cheryl Wilson Griffin Lewis Bretts John Haddock Winston Weinberg Scott Mozarsky Matthew Sunderman Oz Benamram Tim Follett Fiona McClune Jenn McCarron Laina Chan John Tertan Josh Lokko Nam Nguyen Anh (Alex) Mac Patrick DiDomenico Maged Helmy, PhD Malin Männikkö Nicole Bradick Varun Mehta Alex Morrall Haley Altman Wendy Chow Mike Haven Sara Miro Christian Lang Yannic Kilcher Jacob Weiner John Scrudato Wendy Butler Curtis D. Casey Flaherty Ben Stoneham and so many more (ran out of tags!)

Nicola (Nikki) Shaver

Legal AI & Innovation Executive | CEO, Legaltech Hub | Former Global Managing Director of Knowledge & Innovation (Paul Hastings) | Adjunct Professor | Advisor & Investor to Legal Tech

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If you think your AI deployment keeps confidential information protected because prompts aren't shared beyond your firm, that may no longer be enough. A surprising security risk has come up in recent AI research, and it has major implications for law firms using generative AI.

During contract negotiations, law firms will typically ensure that:
- User prompts are not stored or used for model training, and 
- “No-retention” policies are in place with the provider. 

At the same time, it has been widely believed that it's safe for the provider to store the model’s numerical vectors or embeddings, a byproduct of the way the model processes queries, because these numbers were thought to be abstract representations that could not be traced back to the original text. 

Now researchers have shown that it’s possible to reverse-engineer hidden prompts and internal system instructions from the numeric activations inside an LLM.

 In other words:
➡️ If your prompts or internal reasoning traces are logged,
➡️and those logs are not sufficiently safeguarded,
➡️ an attacker can reconstruct the instructions your firm provided to the model.

Why does this matter?

Because in legal work, prompts are (or can be) confidential information. They often encode:
- client fact patterns
- legal strategies
- negotiation positions
- privileged instructions
- proprietary workflows
- internal playbooks and drafting logic

These traces are not “just numbers” (as previously assumed by most of us). It's clear now that they represent recoverable data.

This means firms should be updating vendor questionnaires to ask:
 1️⃣ How are prompts and activations stored?
 2️⃣ Who has access to them?
 3️⃣ Are they encrypted both at rest and in transit?
 4️⃣ Are they ever used for product improvement?
 5️⃣ Can they be fully deleted on request?

As we move towards 2026, understanding how your AI vendor handles activations - not just outputs - will become a core part of AI governance and vendor due diligence.

Full article in comments.

#AI #security #legaltech #riskmanagement #law

From advising #legaltech and AI founders, I’ve seen a lot of pitches land, and a lot of good ideas stall. The difference is rarely the technology.

A few critical things I wish more founders understood about law firms:

➡️ You’re not just selling a product; you’re selling a change in workflow.
Partners don’t wake up wanting another platform to work in. They want:
- Faster turnaround for high-volume work
- Better margins on fixed-fee matters
- Happier associates and fewer mistakes
- Higher quality outputs and better outcomes
If your demo doesn’t clearly map to a specific workflow and outcome, it will struggle.

➡️ Governance and implementation support are features, not after-thoughts
 Firms are not just comparing feature lists; they’re asking:
- “Will this pass internal InfoSec reviews?”
- “How much change fatigue will this create?”
- “Who will own this day-to-day?”
- "What governance will this product require?"
- "Does this product respect ethical walls and permissioning?"
Having a credible story around implementation, training, and governance is a competitive advantage.

➡️ Proof of value beats proof of concept
Pilots that live in a sandbox and never hit real matters tend to die quietly, unless the product being piloted is expressly for the purpose of R&D.
The strongest vendors:
- Co-design a pilot around a real matter type
- Define success metrics upfront
- Share learnings transparently with stakeholders

If you're building AI for legal, your real product is trust + outcomes, packaged inside software.

For those on the vendor or firm side: curious to know what’s the best (or worst) experience you’ve had with an AI pilot so far?

#legaltech #legal #law #changemanagement

Annual head-to-toe TLTF swag airport shot… this time in the United Lounge. Flight’s delayed, but that’s ok because I’m comfy in my TLTF sweats, t-shirt, socks, sweatshirt, and hat.

Zach Posner next year I’m going to need gloves, shoes - and maybe a scarf?

#TLTFsummit2025

Let’s do some good in the legal ecosystem today. 💫

Someone at TLTF last week called me a "super-connector" - I'm not sure about that, but it is true that one of my favourite parts of working at the intersection of law and technology is connecting people who should know each other, but don’t yet. Over the weekend it occurred to me: if that's something I can do at events, why not continue it online?

So, I’d like to turn this post into a tiny marketplace of opportunity for anyone in my network (and beyond):

🔎 What are you looking for right now?
 – A new role?
 – Great candidates for your team?
 – A mentor or advisor?
 – A developer or data scientist?
 – A partner for a product or research project?

🎁 And what can you offer?
 – Your expertise?
 – A job opening?
 – Time for a mentoring coffee?
 – Collaboration on a paper, product, or event?

I’ll start in the comments so you can see the format.

 👉 Comment using this structure:
 L: what you’re looking for
 O: what you’re offering

Feel free to tag others who might benefit from seeing this. Let’s help some serendipity along.

#legaltech #ConnectingLegal #law

I just became aware of a new setting in Gmail that was switched on by default without informing users - and I thought all of you should know too, since it creates a data privacy risk many of us may not find acceptable.

Gmail's new "Smart Features" setting gives Google's Gemini Deep Research access to your Gmail, Drive, Docs, and Chat when it's enabled. The setting is intended to provide in-app functionality and improved search, but it also means Gemini has access to any financial records, passwords, private conversations, work materials and other private data that sits in your email - including archives.

I learned how to find the setting and sure enough - it was switched to on. 

I had no idea.

I've had Gmail since the early days, so that is literally two decades of my personal email records I have been unwittingly allowing Gemini AI to access since this setting was switched on.

Google has been adamant that Gmail content is not being used to train Gemini AI models, so what is the risk here?

1. If smart features are on, Google can process your workspace content “to improve these features,” and these learnings may persist after you turn them off - which is essentially model training for those built-in features. 

2. If you use Gemini within Gmail, the risk equation changes: asking it to summarize or draft from an email effectively moves parts of that email into your Gemini conversation, where it’s treated as training/feedback data unless you change settings. That means some of your data could be reviewed by human annotators and used to improve the model. De-identification helps, but there’s no guarantee the content is fully irrecoverable.

3. For lawyers, feeding privileged or sensitive client material into a system that may store, review, or learn from it could conflict with confidentiality duties, client contracts, or outside counsel guidelines.

Personally, I don't like the fact that this was enabled automatically. Google's policy and data handling may change over time and the risk isn't worth it if you're using Gmail for anything sensitive. 

Instructions below on how to turn it off. If you have kids with Gmail accounts, you may want to do the same for them.

#AI #AIrisk

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