Unprecedented

Unprecedented

"Unprecedented" is a biweekly podcast hosted by Law.com reporter Ben Hancock about technology, the law, and the future of litigation. Based in San Francisco, Ben writes about third-party litigation finance, legal data analytics, artificial intelligence, privacy, and related issues. Listen to more Law.com podcasts here.

Episodes

March 24, 2026 • 26 secs

Warning: This clip is for a Law.com story.  It is a threat made against a Federal Judge.  It contains extreme harsh explicit language.  Listener discretion is advised.  

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Trump Sentencing Audio

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March 30, 2018 • 1 min

Hello Unprecedented listeners. We've been in the process of transitioning this podcast to a new home and a new format. From here on out, you can find future episodes of Unprecedented over on the Legalspeak podcast, hosted by Law.com's Vanessa Blum and Leigh Jones.

Every three or four weeks, I'll be dropping in with a dispatch from the intersection of technology and the law. Instead of focusing on individua...

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Alexander Urbelis of New York's Blackstone Law Group describes his unusual career path from getting involved with

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Microsoft is going head-to-head with the Department of Justice at the U.S. Supreme Court later this month over law enforcement access to data stored overseas. In this episode, David Howard, a former federal prosecutor who's now the head of litigation at Microsoft Corp., explains what's at stake in the case and why this issue has become a rallying point for the wider tech industry.

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In this special episode of Law.com's Unprecedented podcast, we talk with Aaron Wright, an associate clinical professor at Cardozo Law School in New York City and director of the school's Blockchain Project. Cardozo has been significantly expanding its initiatives with the technology since 2014, helping major blockchain projects like Ethereum and teaching its students how to code smart contracts. Wright talks about his forthcoming b...

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At ALM's upcoming Legalweek conference, one of the major overarching themes is how artificial intelligence will change the practice of law. In this episode of Law.com's "Unprecedented" podcast, we talk with one of the speakers at the event—Scott Reents, the lead attorney for data analytics and e‑discovery at Cravath, Swaine & Moore—about the challenges and advantages to integrating AI with the legal profession. For more info, check...

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Recent months have seen important legal developments in the open source software world. Large organizations including Facebook, Google and the Linux kernel community have adopted new enforcement policies around copyright licenses. And Facebook saw major blowback over patent rules in its open source license. In this episode of "Unprecedented," O'Melveny & Myers partner Heather Meeker explains these trends and what they mean for...
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December 22, 2017 • 39 mins
In the final episode of Unprecedented for 2017, host Ben Hancock talks with Ross Todd, bureau chief of Law.com's California news site The Recorder, about the big legal battles in tech for the coming year. There's the looming trial in Waymo v. Uber, litigation over the Tezos initial coin offering, and of course, the big digital privacy cases pending at the U.S. Supreme Court. 
 
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The chair of the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance Legal Working Group helps interpret the debate over how digital tokens fit into a regulatory framework created in a much different era.

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This week on Law.com's Unpreced...

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This week on Law.com's Unprecedented podcast we talk with Riana Pfefferkorn, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School focusing on cryptography.

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This week on Law.com's Unprecedented podcast we talk to Brynly Llyr, general counsel at Ripple Labs, a blockchain company focused on facilitating cross-border money transfers. Llyr talks about the legal chal...
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This week on the Law.com Unprecedented podcast, we hear from Gillian Hadfield, a professor at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law and author of Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy. 

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Duration: 00:25:36

 

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September 15, 2017 • 44 mins

Duration: 44:45

For an institution that is supposed to appear at all times above the fray, it can get tricky when members of the judiciary decide to accept a Facebook friend request or even just retweet a news article. A set of federal and state appellate court decisions over the summer offered some guidance on what's allowable for judges when it comes to social media, but a lot is still murky. This week...

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Duration: 39:31

When Eric Goldman started practicing law, the Internet was a different place from the one we know today: a world of dial-up bulletin boards and web precursors like "Usenet" and "Gopher." The legal aspects of cyberspace were murky at best. "I joined the Cooley Godward firm in Palo Alto in 1994 and I told them I wanted to do Internet law," recalls Goldman, now a professor at the Santa Clara U...

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Duration: 22:08

The legal profession is hardly immune to the changes being wrought by technology. And Stanford University's CodeX Center—a partnership between its law school and computer science department—has been a significant contributor to those changes in recent years as an incubator for legal tech startups. Among the companies that have roots at CodeX are Bay Area legal analytics firms Lex Machina and Ravel Law.

CodeX also ha...

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Duration: 28:36

Attorneys trying to keep up with the legal landscape surrounding transfers of data between the United States and the European Union have had their work cut out for them the last few years. First, the U.S.-EU "Safe Harbor" framework was scrapped by the EU high court. Just as that was being patched up with the "Privacy Shield," another court action in Ireland has threatened an alternative legal tool permitting transat...

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Duration: 22:50

The Internet of Things has a certain allure. You can set your home at just the right temperature, or ask Alexa about the First Amendment. But if there was one takeaway from the Mirai botnet debacle that weaponized over a million internet cameras, it was this: a lot of these devices have serious security flaws. And those flaws, naturally, have opened the door to lawsuits.

In this episode of Unprecedented, we talk wit...

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