From Bail Hearings to Blockchain Believer and Advocate: DeFi Education Fund's Amanda Tuminelli (CLO)(Replay)
Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
Release Date: 04/17/2025
Descrybe's Quest to Democratize Legal Research (Kara Peterson & Richard DiBona)
Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
Kara Peterson and Richard DiBona, the husband-and-wife co-founding team behind Descrybe, discuss the legal research platform they built designed to "democratize access to the law." The discussion explores the unique dynamics of married cofounders and how they are leveraging Generative AI to disrupt a landscape long dominated by high-cost legacy providers. Richard, a software engineer, and Kara, a marketing expert, share their journey from a personal legal issue to building a platform that processes over 100 billion tokens of legal data. They explain why they chose to build an AI-native system...
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Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
The legal industry is not confronting a single disruption but a redistribution of work, capital, and regulation across a system under stress. The boundaries of Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL) in the near term may be defined more by what regulators must allow than what they restrict. These are just a couple of conclusions from author and legal business strategist Ken Crutchfield in a recent he penned about the pressure artificial intelligence is placing on legal service delivery and regulations barring the unauthorized practice of law. In this episode, Ken is joined by Indiana...
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Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
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Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
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Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
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Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
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Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
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Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
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Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
Avaneesh Marwaha, the CEO of , visits the show to discuss his journey from IP lawyer to becoming a legal tech CEO and investor. He discusses the motivations behind his career pivot, including his desire to be a decision-maker and his passion for the business side of law. The conversation delves into the evolution of Litera, from its origins as a document-focused migration software company to its current role as a comprehensive legal tech ecosystem. Avaneesh highlights the company's strategic shift from acquiring to building new technologies. He also emphasizes the importance of Litera’s...
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Best of 2025 - Benchmarking Legal AI: Measuring the Delta Between Man and Machine (Anna Guo Legalbenchmarks.ai)
Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast
In one of the most popular episodes of the year, Founder discusses her organization's research that tests whether artificial intelligence custom-made for legal tasks better than general AI tools. Anna is a former BigLaw lawyer who left the practice to become an entrepreneur and now focuses her energies on quantifying the utility of AI in the legal industry. Anna's initial anecdotal research for colleagues quickly revealed a strong community interest in a systematic approach to evaluating legal AI tools. This led to the creation of Legalbenchmarks.AI, dedicated to finding out where...
info_outlineAmanda Tuminelli, Chief Legal Officer for the DeFI Education Fund, visited the podcast in September to discuss her crypto journey, her role with the organization and its objectives.
Since then, she was promoted and is now the Executive Director of DEF which is a nonpartisan research and advocacy group working to explain the benefits of DeFi, achieve regulatory clarity for the future of the global digital economy, and help realize the transformative potential of DeFi for everyone.
Amanda goes in depth into the DEF’s areas of focus:
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Research and Advocacy
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Policymaker Education
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Messaging for Crypto Companies
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Research about Blockchain Issues and Regulations
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Providing “Legal Firepower” to Crypto Causes; and
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DeFi Project Best Practices
Amanda also discusses how lawyers can pursue a career in crypto and why that wasn’t the case a few years ago. It’s not only an option now because the industry is more mature, but also because of the openness of those in the crypto world and their desire for passionate individuals to join them. To get a job in crypto law, Amanda emphasizes the importance of understanding the technology and finding projects of interest.
So how did Amanda get to the DEF? She started out as a securities and white collar crime lawyer, but a case came along that would change her career trajectory. She was working for Kobre and Kim, a law firm focused on disputes and investigations, when the firm was hired by a client accused of running an illegal crypto mining scheme. To get up to speed on the case and get her client out of jail, she had to dive deep into learning about blockchain technology and that is when she caught the bug. A few years later, a friend and former college friend contacted her about joining the legal team at the DeFI Education Fund and she took them up on it.
Episode Credits
Editing and Production: Grant Blackstock
Theme Music: Home Base (Instrumental Version) by TA2MI